Death in the Streets, Blood on Your Hands: Chocolate Babies and the End of AIDS

This article considers Stephen Winter's Chocolate Babies (1996), a low-budget feature made amid, and in response to, the ravages of AIDS in New York City. Paying close attention to the film's conjunctural cinematic syntax, I argue that Winter here critiques a once-prominent consensus that rapid biomedical advancements were bringing about the epidemic's "end." Throughout, I put Chocolate Babies in dialogue with numerous critics who refused to accept the politically vacant terms of biomedicine as a neat conclusion to the decades-long struggle against AIDS. Winter's film, I ultimately suggest, extends such antagonisms, affirming the necessity of an enduring state of emergency.