Angels in America (2003)
“When I started to write these plays,” comments Tony Kushner of Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, the two mammoth parts of his epic Angels in America (1993), “I wanted to attempt something of ambition and size even if that meant I might be accused of straying too close to ambition’s ugly twin, pretentiousness.”1 He wrote the play in the last years of the 1980s, a time of seismic change in world history. “‘I think the play is about what was happening, about the end of containment as an ideology,’” he told Susan Cheever just before its debut on Broadway. “‘Containment is the idea that there is some sort of viral presence in the body or the body politic that has to be proscribed or isolated or crushed. Containment demonizes the other, whether it’s Communism or AIDS or Jews. It’s a politics that comes completely out of fear as opposed to out of hope.’”2 In adapting Kushner’s play into a six-part mini-series for HBO, Mike Nichols necessarily reduces some of the grand, spectacular artifice of the staged performance, replacing it with the special effects with which the modern cinematic audience has been spoiled; as Ken Nielsen, Daniel Mendelsohn, and others have pointed out, there is a majesty to the live illusion of an angel’s appearance and levitating flight that the computer-aided effects available to the filmmakers can’t quite duplicate, even as they seem to create more persuasive illusions.3 Nichols and Kushner (who adapted his own work for the screen) also reduce the original play’s political dimensions to a more human scale. Although the second half of Angels still references the political evolution of the Soviet Union in the title Perestroika, the first scene of that play, featuring “the World’s Oldest Bolshevik,” Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov, is one of the few complete excisions of Kushner’s adapted screen version. This is consistent with Nichols’ sensibility as a filmmaker. His early counter-cultural touchstones, The Graduate and Catch-22, collectively make zero direct references to the seismic revolutionary dissent around them. While more overt in their political posturing, films like Carnal Knowledge, on the sexual revolution; Day of the Dolphin, on environmental exploitation (also a sub-theme of Angels); Silkwood, on the risks of nuclear power; and Primary Colors, on the problems of the democratic process itself, do not suffer from a reduction of their op-ed functionality. Rather, all these films (including Angels) dramatize the continued veracity of the 1960s insight that the personal is the political. Kushner says that his initial impulse in writing Angels was as a “‘response to the Reagan counterrevolution, which began in response to the great cultural revolution of the 1960’s.’”4 Despite its enormous scope, Angels on stage and on screen is about individuals under pressure, accepting or resisting transformation. Nichols told Kushner, “‘As far as I’m concerned, this is a story about intimate human relationships, and that’s what I’m going after.’”5 Three decades after the play’s first public performances, John Lahr concludes, “The genius of the play lies in the marriage of Kushner’s informed mind with his informed heart.”6 Such is the quality of Nichols’ own genius, which made for a rare and potent pairing as they collaborated. The film ultimately broke the record, held since the 1970s by Roots, for the most Emmys awarded to a program in a single year. It won 11 of the 21 categories in which it had been nominated, including all the major awards. Meryl Streep said, “I think it’s the crowning achievement of Mike’s career.”7
Nichols’ career has been dominated by the power of the performances he commands. He has always attracted great actors, who have returned to him because of the work he coaxes from them (Streep’s appearance in Angels, for instance, was her fourth with Nichols). His films are about people, not politics, aiming for the heart first to reach the head. Ironically, considering the size of the project, Nichols identifies his motivation in adapting Angels as a desire to do the “smaller things” that Edson’s and Kushner’s plays represent, narratives “you really can’t expect to be blockbuster hits in theaters. Nobody is going to see Angels in America if it’s six hours long, and it should be six hours long. And nobody’s going to pile in to see Wit and watch this woman die. It’s great to have an intelligent, if you will, elegant place to help you. I love television.”8 Kushner’s first draft of the screenplay for Nichols attempted to open out the action to a cinematic mise-en-scène: “I added things in, trying to be responsible—opening it up and moving it around, and cars, and this and that. Mike pretty systematically went though all of that and said, ‘I’m not really interested in this. Let’s go back to the play and look at how you did it in the play.’”9 As a six-episode film in Nichols’ hands for HBO, Angels is an epic chamber study of three characters in advanced stages of illness—Prior Walter (Justin Kirk) and Roy Cohn (Al Pacino), who have AIDS, and Harper Pitt (Mary-Louise Parker), who has debilitating depression—all of whom become visionary seers as a consequence of their suffering; it’s also a study of three characters in advances stages of denial (in addition, of course, to Roy and Harper)—Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson), who is in the closet where his politics and religion have kept him; Louis Ironson (Ben Shenkman), who is out of the closet but unable to commit to the hard work of love; and Hannah Pitt (Meryl Streep), who may be as unwilling to consider the realities of her own sexuality as she is her son Joe’s. This list of characters excludes one remaining major character, Belize (Jeffrey Wright), and one remaining major screen force, the Angel (Emma Thompson), the two most obvious angels of Angels. Belize is the registered nurse who cares for both Prior (out of love) and Roy (out of duty), “the story’s earthbound ministering angel.”10 Thompson, like Streep, plays three roles in the Nichols production, but unlike Streep, who embodies Hannah as she labors towards enlightenment, Thompson’s roles are static, secondary to the characters emerging around her. She plays the most obvious manifestation of the title, and yet her winged, celestial Angel is, though attention-grabbing,11 decidedly an observer of the “great Work” which she heralds. The angels, Nichols and Kushner fervently argue, are not only among us, but in some cases are us, thanks to the redemption inherent in reified wisdom.
Indeed, each of Nichols’ two celebrated films for HBO is, in addition to being an adaptation of a successful stage drama about death, an examination of how mercy is the most potent therapy available in situations of literal and existential life and death (“where love and justice finally meet,” as Belize says, in “forgiveness”), and both offer extended scrutiny of health care on its front lines, among the nurses who tend the dying on their passage to the next world (or their return to this one). In Wit, Susie (Audra McDonald) is as mild and unprepossessing as her name, submissive to the systemic powers that be, until she finds the tension between caring compassionately for the patient while also following the dictates of her superiors too great. At such times, she counsels Vivian (Thompson) against the wisdom of an eminence like Dr. Kelekian (Christopher Lloyd), or reprimands a pompous Kelekian-in-training like Jason (Jonathan M. Woodward), whose bedside manner is held in store for the funding representatives—the people with whom he has a commodified future. In Angels, Belize is prepared to risk his professional reputation for the larger principle—affirming life—he has felt himself called to serve. This means he is prepared to claim and distribute illegally obtained drugs for dying friends; it also means that he dispenses mercy rather than justice to Roy, a man whose life is a violation of all Belize’s own personal principles. Wit and Angels offer a vision of human redemption much broader than the health-care industry yet given metaphoric power within the aptly named confines of “intensive care.”
As a stage play, Angels in America’s construction is remarkably cinematic, particularly adapting the “split scene” technique of two simultaneous or comparative actions (which happens in nearly every Act of the original play). “Some aspects are written so they’re partly movie to begin with,” says Nichols. “For instance, the two couples breaking up at the end of the second hour of the first half. These were already intercut [in the stage version]. But on the stage, the couple that didn’t have the lights on them had to freeze and wait. Well, cutting back and forth is a little more suited to that kind of going back and forth.”12 Kushner was also influenced in his ensemble storytelling by the group narratives of Robert Altman, the first director with whom Kushner discussed a possible adaptation.13 The most important formal convention of the play that Nichols and Kushner are careful to carry over into the filmed adaptation is the shape-shifting quality of certain performers. This convention is a much more routinely accepted practice of the stage than of cinema, and Nichols predictably reduces some of the double-duty of the actors to the overlaps that carry the most symbolic heft. (The one such instance of an actor’s double-duty in the stage play of Edson’s Wit, the roles of Dr. Kelekian and Vivian’s father played by a single actor, are assigned to two men in Nichols’ film version.14) Yet for Kushner, Nichols’ insistence that the doubling (or tripling) of actor’s roles needed to remain a sensational part of the film was the clearest indication that Nichols was the right person to work with: “It never occurred to me that [a film director] would do that. And I immediately thought, ‘OK, this is the person that should make this.’ It’s celebrating the artificiality of the event.”15 The “artificiality” thus foregrounds the empathic “Great Work” of human imagination in understanding human suffering and creating a compassionate response.
In the stage play of Angels, for instance, the same actor who portrays Prior’s hospital nurse, Emily, plays the Angel, and Nichols is right to hold onto this double-duty for Thompson. There is an inherent narrative logic to this versatility: Emily is, prior to Hannah Pitt’s entrance into Prior Walter’s life of affliction and abandonment, one of only two steadying, caring presences (the other, Belize, is so dourly opposed to Prior’s visionary episodes that Prior unconsciously could not project Belize into such an image). His first visions of the Angel (before this there is only a Voice) come after his first emergency admission to the hospital, where Emily serves as his on-call caregiver (Louis has absconded and Belize must depart for the night); later, she is the one seeing to Prior’s out-patient examinations (and speaking in tongues), and she is on call when Hannah brings him back to the hospital with his relapse. As in Nichols’ preceding HBO film, Wit, there is no more crucial avatar of human mercy than the floor nurse of an ICU. In Wit, Susie is the sole of compassionate competence, her only agenda to care for her patient. It is, in the best sense, a vocation. Emily, like Susie, is doing her job—“doing good,” with intelligence and grace in equal measure. It is little wonder, then, that when an Angel appears to Prior Walter in unconsciousness, she should appear in a hyper-glamorized variation (like Prior’s projection of his own Norma Desmond queendom in his shared vision with Harper) of Emily’s sensibly restrained handsomeness. Where Emily is crisply business-like in her conduct and no-nonsense in her self-presentation (no makeup, hair tied back neatly), the Angel is a Vogue magazine representation of female erotic power in sheer, clinging white gown and long, curled, windblown tresses. She is a vision at once terrible and desirable, and as she could not be Belize (who dismisses such visions out of hand), she also could not be, for instance, an eroticized version of Louis. Louis is anything but a ministering angel; the one time Louis appears in one of Prior’s visions, he descends a Busby Berkeley stairway from the stars to dance with Prior, but the vision literally evaporates, leaving Prior in a post-hallucinatory heap on his apartment floor. Emily’s persistence of caring makes her the steady image of the Angel.16
Similarly, Harper Pitt remains so besotted by Joe that, even after confronting the specter of his closeted gayness in the narrative’s first dream sequence (the shared vision with Prior, who appears as nothing less than her post–Salt Lake stereotype of flaming homosexuality), Harper is unable to imagine herself out of the closet where Joe has hidden himself for so long. Mr. Lies (Jeffrey Wright, doing his own bit of virtuoso double-duty), her narcotic “travel agent,” quarrels with her about the illogic of her Antarctic dream: “This is a retreat, a vacuum; its virtue is that it lacks everything: deep-freeze for feelings. You can be numb and safe here; that’s what you came for. Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.” She circumvents his literal (no Eskimos in Antarctica) and emotional (no self-defeating, pain-inducing attachments, please) logic by imagining an Eskimo into the Antarctic whiteness—but the Eskimo she conjures is still Joe, played by Patrick Wilson wearing a billowing, Harper-stereotyped parka. Later, when she shelters with Hannah and is induced to tag along under Mother Pitt’s watchful eye at the Mormon Visitors Center in Midtown, even (or perhaps especially) the “dummy” in the pioneer diorama has been manufactured by Nichols’ production designers to look exactly like Joe. And as Harper is incapable of escaping Joe, Louis is incapable of escaping Prior; after abandoning his ailing partner at the hospital, he adjourns to Central Park’s “Ramble” hoping for some eroticized punishment, which he encounters in the form of a leather-clad, bearded Justin Kirk, eager to dole out some role-played abuse.
The premises of Angels are largely based in such shape shifting, and thus there is a formal elegance to the functional flourishes of actors’ multiple roles. The purest metaphorical association to be made in relation to the characters’ shape shifting is to the homosexual closet. Early on, sitting together in a tony straight bar while Roy tries to woo Joe to Washington (and thus, inevitably, also to bed), Joe confesses how difficult it was for him in Salt Lake “[t]o pass.” Roy’s radar is instantly alerted to this coded language, and he repeats the word with sensual delicacy before asking, “Pass as what?” Joe, defaulting to cover, weighs his words carefully before replying, “As someone cheerful and strong.” As he comes closer to approaching and even opening the closet door, Joe remains all but paralyzed by the consequences of such self-revelation. His Mormon upbringing has taught him this is a path to damnation; his father, now deceased, was incapable of loving him, we understand, because of his tendencies. Most immediately, such a revelation will explode Joe’s illusion of a heterosexual marriage and jeopardize his bright political future in the Reaganized right. Louis Ironson has distanced himself from his Jewish family, as presumably (since we see or hear no reference to them) Prior Walter has distanced himself from the Mayflower Walters. Neither Prior nor Louis hides his sexual identity, but both live the ostracizing consequences of this identity, just as Joe fears he would have to if he stops trying to “pass.”
If Kushner’s gay characters constitute a continuum of Prior’s prophecy of progress, or ineluctable human “motion,” Roy Cohn is of course the reactionary throwback, willing to lecture his long-time physician about why, despite serial treatment for homosexually-transmitted diseases, “Roy Cohn is not a homosexual.” His speech at the end of episode one of Nichols’ film (right down to the self-objectifying use of the third-person) is as baldly revealing a statement of the corrosive devastation of unredeemed reification as Nichols has ever recorded in a film. Joe comes next in the continuum: to Roy’s death-bed horror, which becomes a literal horror scene of infected blood spurting onto the floor and Joe’s shirt, Joe is able to speak his identity aloud, but is sent reeling back towards the closet by the confused ideology he and Roy share, the result of being mentored in intolerant fascism. Xenophopia is as rampant an infection in this scene as AIDS itself. When last glimpsed in Nichols’ film, Joe is headed down into the subways of Moloch, in the shaming grip of what he still sees as his affliction. Though liberated, Louis remains trapped between great gusts of political abstraction and a desire to evade words entirely: “Words are the worst things,” he says, seducing Joe. “Breathe. Smell. […] Let’s stop talking. Or if you have to talk, talk dirty.” This is, decidedly, not a paraphrase of the Angel to both Prior and Hannah: “The Body is the Garden of the Soul.” Implicit in Louis’ urging is a desire to ignore, to not know; this is why, despite the floods of information and opinion he can pour forth at will, he can remain so uninformed, so ignorant of even those closest to him. He has no clue about Belize’s romantic life, and no inkling that Joe has attached himself to Roy Cohn, Louis’ self-described idea of “the worst human being who ever lived.” He has no idea that his lover is directly responsible for writing “an important bit of legal fag-bashing” in a military case. Louis remains afraid of much lived truth, content to assemble what Belize calls his “Big Ideas” as a safely abstracted version of reality. Unlike Roy, Joe and Louis remain works very much in “progress,” though in Kushner’s lexicography, such a term is not without “hope,” another of Kushner’s most cherished words.
Infections, only some of which are biological, run rampant in Angels in America, set during the mid–1980s, the darkest days of the AIDS crisis. Roy Cohn (Al Pacino, center) is dying of AIDS, though his high-profile status as conservative ideologue and one-time consort of Joseph McCarthy makes this impossible for him to admit. In a scene of gothic horror, Roy’s protégé, Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson, left), comes to Roy to report the end of his own long campaign against his nature; Roy reacts so violently to Joe’s coming out that he jerks the I.V. from his arm, spraying Joe and his nurse Belize (Jeffrey Wright) with infected blood.
The continuum of reified “progress” thus yields Belize and Prior, the former lovers and forever friends, as the prototypes for the future of human tolerance. Belize is, in this context, the Realist and Prior the visionary Idealist. To Louis, Belize unwinds the synopsis of an imaginary “bestselling paperback novel” about American racism, In Love with the Night Mysterious, a condemnation of all the patronizing platitudes of the white hegemony. Belize is unconvinced by the prospect of systemic change. He anticipates no revolutions. Caught up in the pragmatism of his profession, he knows Louis can only love “America” from a distance, “too far off the earth to pick out the details,” while he hates America: “It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. […] I live in America, Louis; that’s hard enough. I don’t have to love it. You do that.” No one is more engaged in the hard work of day-to-day living than Belize, working his hospital shifts and then, in his down time, nursing his sick friends like Prior. Despite his apparent political despair, Belize evinces a love and compassion that exceeds the capacities of anyone but, perhaps, Hannah—and no one has sustained this fully realized life longer. Unlike Belize, Prior is given to prophetic optimism, born in defiance but borne forward in what he perceives by the film’s epilogue to be both personal and systemic progress: “[W]e are not going away,” he says of the AIDS generation at the narrative’s coda by Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain. “We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.”
Of the two women Kushner includes among his seven major characters, both bear the patriarchal name of Pitt, an immediate mark of the objectified shape shifting imposed upon them by hegemonic dictates, yet both women by narrative’s end have found reinvention easier than Joe, heir to Pitt patriarchy and, at least demographically, the most privileged of the three (via gender and education). Harper has tried to medicate herself into inner peace with her life: young, upwardly mobile, free of the rules of Salt Lake expectation (if not of its inculcation), but married to a gay man. Joe admires her for how “she was always wrong, always doing something wrong, like one step out of step. In Salt Lake City that stands out.” One may infer that each was the other’s ticket out of the stultification they’d inherited. Harper is content at first to live in the same profound denial as Joe, but she becomes increasingly convinced of the necessity of Truth, eventually stripping herself before Joe and demanding that he confess what she has always, instinctively known: that he sees (and thus feels) “nothing” when he looks at her. Compared to Joe’s equally dramatic but ultimately empty episode at Jones Beach when he strips off his Mormon underwear (his protective “second skin” prophylaxis against the corrupting influences of the world) to proclaim his possessive love for Louis, Harper’s act of stripping is a re-assumption of her true and best shape, while Joe’s is an unmasking of his failure to commit to any identity unmediated by the desires and defaults of others. He can never quite glimpse himself in a mirror for all his anxious, restless searching for what others want to see and what he wants for them to see in him. (And when, fleetingly, he does truly see himself, most often with Harper or his mother, he is shamed into silence and recession.) Nichols and Kushner give us a final monologue with Harper on a journey, up near her beloved, endangered ozone, buoyant with hope and, for the first time, self-possession rather than possession by others.
Angels in America’s most striking single transformation, however, in a narrative rife with shape-shifting metamorphoses, belongs to Nichols’ favorite actress, Meryl Streep. If Thompson, so moving in Wit’s lead, is given the flashy pyrotechnics of the Angel, the steady empathy of nurse Emily, and the comic grotesquery of playing a homeless Bronx street person straight out of Beckett, Streep nonetheless does the heavier lifting. In embodying Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz and Roy Cohn’s nightmare of Ethel Rosenberg, she is nothing less than the voice of history, another harbinger, like the Angel, of Walter Benjamin’s image of modernity as a “storm” of catastrophic “progress”17; but among the six significant characters the two women portray, none is more vital to the function of Angels in America’s drama than Hannah Pitt, who moves, by the accidents of grace and serendipitous duty, from dowdy prairie stolidity to stylish Manhattan sophistication and, more important, from cold alienation to warm compassion (and even, with the Angel, hot passion). As Nichols and Kushner are at pains to make clear, she always had these qualities within her. In essence, she becomes Meryl Streep before our eyes, the very best gift Nichols could imagine for a character.
Fisher argues that “Angels in America is most often identified as a gay play, and it is indeed a reflection of reinvigorated homosexual activism of the early AIDS era, but Kushner moves beyond the political liberation of gays and the crisis of AIDS toward an exploration of the boundaries of gender (one of the play’s conceits is that all of its characters are acted by a corps of eight actors, with men playing women and women playing men in some cases).”18 What Nichols sees beneath all this shape shifting in Kushner’s script, what remained consistent from the gendered dilemmas to the ethnic, political, religious, and materialist anxieties of the stage play, is the consistent problem of objectified, categorical assignment of identity and subsequent behavior. Hegemonic control, labeled “power” by ideologies as polar in opposition as those of Roy Cohn and Louis Ironson, sets “the limits of tolerance” and thus assigns proscribed identities to those who acquiesce and those who rebel. The only effective recourse against such ingrained, systemic practice is the redemptive “hope” (as Prior terms it on several occasions) of the Truth, not Joe’s shamed capitulation to a secret life like his mentor Roy, nor Hannah’s old, pre-transformation philosophy: “with faith and time and hard work you do get to a point where the disappointment doesn’t hurt so much, and it gets actually easier to live with. Quite easy. Which is, in its own way, a disappointment.”
There is another way to transformation, Angels argues, difficult but not fraught with the mutilating violence of Harper’s vision, talking with the Mormon mother of the diorama (in which the “something for real” she sees in how people change is “Just mangled guts, pretending”). There is a transformative power latent within the imagination, which, especially through the visions of Roy, Harper and Prior, takes on increasingly prophetic properties as the narrative unfolds. At first, as in Prior’s and Harper’s shared hallucinatory dream, imagination is simply a function of grasping what is; later, as their visions evolve, the imagination becomes the conduit of what can—perhaps even will—be. And so Prior, whose imagination has summoned an Angel to call him to the “Great Work,” ends with both a benediction (“More Life”) and an invocation (“The Great Work Begins”), directed not at any other character in the narrative but, via direct Brechtian address, to the camera and thus the audience, the film’s mute, passive witnesses, asked now to forsake our muteness and passivity and to carry forward the “Great Work” of redemptive imagination into the real world in which we must, like Belize, live. The film thus stands as a grand, non-ironic answer to the rhetorical ironies of Nichols’ most famous film, The Graduate, which offered no positive alternative to Benjamin and Elaine, its hapless hero and heroine, just a forlorn passivity and the director’s prophetic pronouncement upon their inevitable surrender to commodified identity. Angels finds Nichols happily attuned to Kushner’s evangelistic fervor, content to leave his trademark concluding narrative ironies embodied in the “works in progress” of Kushner’s characters alone, not his point of view on them. What ambiguity remains is left to whether Harper and Prior, the film’s two seers who address the camera, are reaching the reified but as-yet unredeemed, or ecstatically preaching to the choir.
* * *
The plot of Angels in America is so large and multi-layered that it ought to be unfolded and followed like a map, using character arcs as various routes. For the purposes of this study, the three visionaries (Prior, Harper, and Roy) will receive primary examination; Joe, Louis, Hannah, and Belize all merit substantial consideration as well. As in Catch-22, where much of what we see is Yossarian’s fever-dream of an already absurd military system, the value of reviewing plot in Angels is to establish a baseline for understanding and interpreting what we see and hear.
In Kushner’s original creation for the stage, Angels in America is a cycle of two sprawling, full-length, multi-narrative plays, the first of which, Millennium Approaches, unfolds in three acts whose internal scenic ordering Nichols and Kushner adhere to with few deviations in creating the first three of the six episodes of the filmed version, “organized around a series of abandonments and escapes.”19 The second play of the cycle, Perestroika, is comparatively much altered, with major scenes excised or revised, scenes re-sequenced, and some of the play’s geopolitical resonances (as the second play’s title had heralded) reduced or omitted.20 Perestroika, unlike Millennium Approaches, was less neatly constructed into relatively equal Act-length units, and this necessitated many of the adjustments the filmmakers faced in attempting to render as literally faithful an adaptation as transtextuality permits, ultimately whittling the second play’s five acts to three episodes, “organized around a series of unexpected scenes of forgiveness […] meant to make us think about change and redemption.”21 Mendelsohn argues that the flaws of Angels are located in the second play, Perestroika, “because it has the much trickier job of putting something in the place of what ‘Millennium Approaches’ has swept away.”22 As we have seen in discussing the breadth of Nichols’ career, his first phase was apt simply to demonstrate the failures of culture in negative satires that did not propose alternatives; as he became more desirous of proposing those alternatives (compassionate understanding and commitment to community and personal relationships in place of the consolations of material accumulation and the exercise of power) during his second phase, he became more and more susceptible to accusations of sentimentality (as Mendelsohn accuses Kushner23). James Fisher argues that, in fact, “Kushner darkens the tone in Perestroika,”24 yet the ultimate intent is, as Kushner himself has labeled the play, comic: “Perestroika is essentially a comedy, in that issues are resolved, mostly peaceably; growth takes place and loss is, to a certain degree, countenanced.”25 Fisher concludes, “[A]t least some of its characters offer hope, imagining redemption through courage to abandon the cold comfort of familiar pain and outmoded beliefs, to cultivate forgiveness, to feel for fellow sufferers, and to develop a personal code of behavior based on compassion and a will to function in a strange new world.”26 Discussing what attracted him to the play, Nichols told Interview, “This was one of the rare plays, maybe the only play I’ve ever seen, in which acts of kindness were such a major event.”27 The idea was no doubt much on his mind because of his recent work with Wit, in which Vivian Bearing, stripped of her wit’s defenses, says from the depths of her harrowing, “Now is a time for simplicity. Now is a time for, dare I say it, kindness.”
Kushner was concerned that Angels retain its relevance despite the ten-year lapse between the original stage productions and the screen adaptation, given the changes in social fabric: “AIDS treatment became more efficient, the Cold War faded into memory and though often demonized during election campaigns in America gay men and lesbians slowly gained visibility in the legal system.”28 He needn’t have worried. The play works as bracing recent history, “a searing indictment,” according to Frank Rich, “of how the Reagan administration’s long silence stoked the plague of AIDS in the 1980’s,”29 when 24,000 people died prior to Reagan’s first public reference to the epidemic in 1987, six years into his presidency: Kushner’s “message” was “that what the AIDS crisis was revealing wasn’t a moral flaw on the part of gay men, as the conservatives running the country would have it, but rather a moral failing in America itself.”30 Yet the play also remains regrettably evergreen in dramatizing ongoing objectifying persecutions: “The category of the sodomite is still a social necessity,” writes Richard Goldstein, “as the ferocious battle over gay marriage attests.”31 “[T]he millennium has come and the rights of gay citizens are still a work in progress,” wrote John Lahr in 2010, during the Broadway revival of Angels.32 Kushner himself has said, “‘We have this idea that we cycle through political moments very rapidly […] We’re still living in the late ’80s.”33 At bottom, the timelessness of the work is located in the primacy it places upon mercy over power: “It uses the basic tool of drama,” says Kushner, “which is empathy and compassion, and says, ‘This kind of suffering was the consequence of this kind of oppression.’ After all, you can immediately sympathize with what Nora is going through in [Ibsen’s] ‘A Doll’s House.’ You don’t need to be in a pre-feminist era. You get it because the play makes you get it.”34
Prior Walter. The first of the narrative’s characters to whom we’re introduced in Nichols’ film are Prior Walter and Louis Ironson, who have been romantic partners for several years when two seismic events trigger the characters’ initial reactions and thus, the plot. Louis, a well-informed but professionally undistinguished aide in the district court house, comes from a very traditional Jewish family whose matriarch, Louis’ grandmother, has just died. Fisher presents “Sarah Ironson’s passing as a representation of the death of the modern American past”; he argues that the main subtext of the rabbi’s eulogy is “[c]hastising his listeners for ignoring the lessons of the past,”35 the first of many demonstrations of the futility of failing to heed reified wisdom. By dint of his sexual orientation, Louis has long been estranged from his family, including his grandmother, and at her funeral sits with Prior apart from the other mourners. (One gets the sense that, while his father shows an uneasy reticence around his son, Louis is largely responsible for his estrangement: the women of the family, presumably his mother and sisters, implore him after the memorial service to proceed with them to the interment.) Prior is the estranged scion of a venerable northeastern family, subsisting on a small family trust.36 He injudiciously (but with maximum drama) chooses the moments after Louis’ grandmother’s funeral service to tell Louis he has begun to manifest Karposi’s sarcoma, or K.S., lesions associated with the AIDS virus (and which, in the heightened emotional urgency of Prior’s references may be misheard, appropriately enough, as the word “chaos”). “I’m going to die,” he tells Louis, while all around them, New York at the edge of Central Park teems with life. Alarmed, Louis wants to know why Prior hasn’t told him sooner, and Prior explains that he was afraid Louis would leave him, a well-grounded fear. For now, Louis only leaves him to run for the bus that will take him to the cemetery.
Prior has a battery of medicines, both to promote health and decrease pain, and this potent cocktail begins to brew a sequence of increasingly grandiose visions in his head, the first of which is visited upon him alone in his apartment, presumably while Louis is still away with his family. In his dream/hallucination, he is far more stereotypically a “queen” than he presents in his waking life (we learn that he and a former lover, Belize, were drag queens, but while neither is in the least apologetic about lifestyle, neither is quite so flamboyant either). In the dream, Prior is at a cosmetic vanity suite worthy of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950), and indeed, the sequence, rendered in luminous black-and-white on an expressionistically gothic set, plays as Prior’s self-projection into Wilder’s world of gothic silent-movie phantasms. Prior is interrupted at his primping by the arrival of Harper Pitt. It’s important to recognize that both participants are at their most glamorous in this scene, and that the shared episode is a “shared vision.” Harper has already been introduced to us as the unhappy wife of a closeted gay man climbing the ladder of American influence; she is nearing a crisis point as momentous as Prior’s, and like Prior, ingests significant quantities of pharmaceuticals—in her case, psychotropic therapy for her depression.
An important point to establish in reading any Mike Nichols narrative is the point of view that controls our access to information about the characters and their reality. As we have seen in The Graduate, for instance, point of view promotes the prejudices and distortions implicit in Benjamin’s perspective while also ironizing that perspective, so that we see Benjamin as self-serving, self-pitying, and largely passive. Similarly, in Postcards from the Edge, Suzanne’s personal collapse leaves her—and us—struggling to distinguish among on-screen performance, off-screen social performativity, and more dramatic bursts of drug-addled psychosis. There are good reasons to understand Angels as “belonging,” first and foremost, to Prior Walter. His character is on screen in the film’s opening and closing scenes, and at the closing, he appears to be orchestrating the concluding action by coaxing other characters to speak, as he does, to the camera, to us. He literally has the film’s last word. Yet Harper should not be ignored as a second primary perspective in the film, as she is the other character who initiates substantial direct address to the camera; indeed, the harmonic optimism Harper and Prior both give voice to in their respective final scenes addressed to the audience counterbalances the sense of alienated devastation each feels in the film’s opening scenes, and which precipitates their joint hallucination. (Roy, the film’s third prophet, also briefly—obscenely—addresses the camera.) Yet the very artificiality of a joint hallucination shared by two central characters who have never met and who will never meet (in the original play, they meet twice more in shared hallucinations, once at the Mormon Visitors Center and once in heaven) asserts an omniscient other whom we can characterize as authorial. This dream meeting between the two central characters who don’t have any plot-based contact with each other is a confection of Kushner’s, and it suggests that, beyond the surrealism the narrative routinely inserts within its realistic slice-of-life rendering of America in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, Kushner comments on his own work: the surreal joint hallucination is the film’s earliest “threshold of revelation,” in which what is revealed is the alliance of the two most important characters who never otherwise overlap, an alliance less about their connection to each other than about their connection to the authorial point of view in Angels.
Actually, each initially rejects the other’s “revelation”: Harper’s hallucination reveals to her, through “Prior,” that her husband Joe (Patrick Wilson) is gay, while Prior’s hallucination reveals, through “Harper,” that, “deep inside you, there’s a part of you, the most inner part, entirely free of disease.” This is a message he will need to cling to as he descends, since Louis continues to recoil from his illness. As the second episode opens, Prior has a physical crisis that lands him in the hospital, and Louis finally abandons him to the care of paid professionals like Emily (Thompson’s first appearance), so crisply efficient and so thoroughly unimpressed by his genealogical bona fides. To Emily, Prior is just another dying man—nothing more, but more important, nothing less. Belize comes to visit and to assume the role of primary emotional support that Louis has vacated, and Prior confesses that the drugs have him hearing voices that he won’t have Belize report, since “It’s all that’s keeping me alive.” After Belize leaves, we hear the voice as well, promising further revelations of “A marvelous work and a wonder we undertake.” His condition stabilized, Prior returns home, where he dumps Louis’ photo and is visited by the ghosts of two “prior” Walters, ancient ancestors each of whom has died of his own era’s plague, though they distinguish Prior’s plague as the consequence of “venery.” At this point in the narrative, Prior rarely has a scene unpunctuated by surreal vision; on his next routine check-up as Emily’s outpatient, she lays her hands on him and he gazes up at her, absorbing her cool manner and handsome features, then she begins to speak in tongues, and the floor of the examination room splits open to reveal a celestial book, flaming on a pedestal. This moment is Prior’s first equation of his muse with his vision. Back at home as Millennium Approaches ends in the third episode of Nichols’ film, Prior climbs into bed, exhausted by the hospital visit but even more by the weight of his visions, which culminate in the scene in which, as he throbs under the effects of the medicine, the Angel (Emma Thompson) first appears, descending through the ceiling that has burst open, proclaiming him a “Prophet” and announcing, “The Great Work begins.”
As Perestroika opens, Prior awakens from this extended vision, physically, emotionally, even sexually spent (he’s had a nocturnal emission, tactile evidence for Prior of the vision’s “reality”). The next time he is with Belize (at a drag queen’s funeral, presumably from AIDS), he confesses to Belize his conviction that his dream “really happened.” He unfolds the tale in the manner of an ancient mariner, and Belize, listening empathically but incredulously, attempts a medical explanation. “This is just you, Prior, afraid of what’s coming, afraid of time. You want to go backwards so bad you call down ‘an angel.’ […] There’s no angel.” Prior has described to Belize the visitation of an angel who refers to herself in quadruplicate as “I I I I,” an allusion to the multiple, shape-shifting identities Angels offers the audience diegetically in, for instance, Prior imaginatively transforming his hyper-competent nurse, Emily, into a celestial herald of the truths about himself and his culture he knows, underneath all, to be self-evident (like Harper’s acknowledgment that, in his “most inner part,” he is entirely whole). In addition, the Angel’s multiplied identity suggests the dynamic nature of drama itself, as Kushner’s characters morph in unpredictable ways that surprise them (as in, particularly, the alchemical transformations in both characters after Prior first encounters Hannah Pitt at the Mormon Visitors Center). In Prior’s dream, he wrestles philosophically with the Angel, refusing to “submit to the will of heaven,” instead causing “revision in the text” through exercise of his will. The Angel and Prior are joined in the air in an ecstatic revelation (the climactic moment in Prior’s wet dream) that the Angel sums as, “The Body is the Garden of the Soul.” The Angel commands Prior as Prophet to urge the human race to “stop moving,” her allusion to “Sleeping Creation’s Potential for Change,” again foregrounding the prominence of human plasticity. As Prior ends his recounting to Belize, he describes a last tender exchange with the Angel, in which she refers to him as “Jonah,” the most unwilling of the Hebrew prophets, and promises to remain constant even if that involves flexibility of her own: “Hiding from me one place you will find me in another.” (This is a fair paraphrase of the plot of Margaret Wise Brown’s children’s book, The Runaway Bunny, which Margaret Edson works into the last moments of Vivian Bearing’s life in Wit, and which Vivian’s vision of her professor deems “A little allegory of the soul.” Like Vivian, Prior is near death’s door and doing soul-work.) The Angel equates Prior’s imagination with empathy, a central characteristic of Kushner’s vision of full humanity: “You know Me, Prophet: Your battered heart, bleeding life in the universe of wounds.” In essence, she has identified herself as the manifestation of his “most inner part,” which Harper has already assured him remains pure of disease, and this is why we must sympathize with Prior when he rejects Belize’s perfectly accurate but non-visionary interpretation of the “Angel”: This is indeed “just” Prior, but it is Prior’s full flowering from the understandable terror and self-pity of an AIDS death-sentence to a prophetic vision of an enlightened culture where disease is treatable and difference not merely tolerated but accepted.
Prior takes to dressing in a monk’s cowl, his “Prophet” garb. Louis asks to meet, and in Washington Square, confesses he’s seeing Joe, a “sensitive gay Republican lawyer,” for “companionship.” Prior tells him not to come back until he has “visible” evidence of suffering—otherwise it’s just “the idea of crying [… o]r the idea of love.” Prior begins stalking Joe, and confronts him incoherently in Joe’s office in the courthouse. His venting fails to cure his obsession, however, and he tails Joe to the Mormon Visitors Center where Joe checks in with his mother, Hannah, who has been volunteering there after her arrival from Utah. Once Joe leaves, Prior accosts him in much the same manner as he’d attacked Joe, but his diminished physical strength coincides with his lost appetite for “haunting” the Pitts. He collapses, feverish, in Hannah’s arms, and she gets him into a taxi and back to Emily at the hospital. He finds himself talking to Hannah about his vision of the Angel, and she relates it to her Mormon knowledge of biblical visions and the experience of Joseph Smith, whose “great need of understanding” created the vision of the angel, which, she adds, “was real.” Like Belize, she seeks a conclusion about the Angel that accords with lived experience: An angel is just a belief, with wings and arms that can carry you. It’s naught to be afraid of. And if it can’t hold you up, seek for something new.”
Prior asks Hannah to stay, surprising them both, and so she is there in his hospital room when the Angel pierces the ceiling, no longer clad in her customary white. As Prior had once shared an hallucination with Harper Pitt, he now shares one with Hannah, who shrieks in terror at the Angel’s entrance; her only advice for Prior is from Genesis 32:26: he should demand, while wrestling with the Angel, “I will not let thee go except thou bless me.’” Wrestled to a draw, the Angel produces a celestial ladder, which Prior climbs to heaven, leaving Hannah alone with the Angel and her own threshold of revelation. Heaven, as Prior and Belize (summarizing it for Roy Cohn) have both imagined it, shares characteristics with San Francisco (the Golden Gate Bridge is prominent), though filming at Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli, Italy, creates an impression of ruined classical grandeur, and the surcease of time—the Angels of the Council of Continental Principalities suggest that Prior rest in “the Tome of immobility, of respite, of cessation.” Their siren song, in other words, is the end of a struggle: Death. Prior rejects the temptations of their counsel and instead, knowing the consequences of his choice, demands “more life.”
In one of the most ingenious visual moments in the film, Prior wades through the iconic long pool at Hadrian’s Villa, near one end of which awaits his hospital bed. When he stretches himself upon it, the non-diegetic soundtrack music is replaced by diegetic labored breathing and the beeps and whirs of medical equipment. He awakes, having survived his infection’s worst night, bathed in sweat, his fever broken. Belize dozes in the chair beside the bed; Hannah has taken a bathroom break; Emily is delighted by his recovery; Louis arrives, visibly bruised by a contentious breakup with Joe, and asks to be taken back. While Prior embraces him in forgiveness, he simultaneously refuses Louis’ entreaty. When last we see Prior, it is four years later, in 1990, and he is with his friends Belize, Hannah, and Louis on his birthday; they have agreed to meet at his “favorite place in New York City—no, in the whole universe, the parts I’ve seen”: the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, overseen by the Angel that has featured prominently in the titles sequence to each of the film’s six episodes. Prior clings stubbornly, reverently to life, though hobbled to dependence on a cane and eyeglasses. His final prophecy is Kushner’s: “We will be citizens,” followed by a final benediction upon us, “More Life,” capped by an exhortation: “The Great Work begins.”
Harper Pitt. Harper Pitt also has the opportunity to prophesy as the result of her visions. Her journey is, if anything, more dramatic than Prior’s. A wayward Mormon, Harper has presumably married as a means of escape from the stultifying legalism and insularity of devout Mormon life. She and Joe have an apartment in Brooklyn, in which she hides all day in a tranquilized haze, fearing men with knives in the bedroom and waiting for Joe to come home and grant her a “buddy kiss,” their non-erotic method of greeting each other within the role-play of husband and wife. Alone, she gets tips on pleasing her man from Dr. Ruth’s syndicated sex-talk radio show and talks to Mr. Lies, a smooth-operating “travel agent” who disappears whenever Joe arrives home from one of his “long walks.” Joe has been the recipient of a job offer to work in the Justice Department, made in proxy by Roy Cohn, which would necessitate a move to Washington, but Harper balks, claiming they’re “happy enough. Pretend-happy.” They bicker about who’s to blame for their obvious unhappiness, and Joe is unreceptive when she attempts to apply her newfound knowledge from Dr. Ruth; they settle for a “buddy kiss.” This latest unhappiness leads to Harper’s increased pill popping, and thus to her shared hallucination with Prior in which she first confronts the specter that her husband is a “homo” (less Prior’s default diction than Harper’s). When next we see her with Joe, he’s been “out” again until late, and she has purposely burnt his dinner in reprisal. She badgers him but can’t quite confront him until he badgers her: “Are you a homo?” she says, using the same word she’d imagined Prior using in their shared hallucination; Joe half-heartedly continues to observe the formalities of denying the truth and urges that they pray for strength. He accuses her of speaking the truth as the agent of his destruction; she claims to be pregnant, which Joe grasps at hopefully as an emblem of his “normalcy,” and she descends a spiral into an increasingly disorienting altered state. She wants Joe to leave, and when he insists he won’t, because he believes remaining with her is the key to retaining the appearance of normalcy, Harper calls for Mr. Lies and disappears, via the refrigerator, into the surreal hallucinatory wastes of “Antarctica.”
As presented in the film, Antarctica is an obviously unreal location, a barely disguised stage set filled with half-digested stereotypes of what Antarctica might be. Mr. Lies explains her current circumstance as “a retreat, a vacuum; its virtue is that it lacks everything: deep-freeze for feelings.” Yet against all the protestations of his logic, she makes an Eskimo appear beyond his indigenous territory to be her mate and make babies. The Eskimo is Joe, and she wanders off after him, much to Mr. Lies’ exasperation. Later, she returns to Mr. Lies with a blue spruce tree she has gnawed down “like a beaver” and wants to burn for warmth; Joe the Eskimo returns to tell her he’s having a “scary-fun […] adventure” that he doesn’t want her to see. We discover the literal depths of Harper’s delusion when she’s arrested in Brooklyn with a tree stolen from the Botanical Gardens Arboretum. Her mother-in-law Hannah, who has just arrived in New York to confront her son about his drunken admission that he is gay, collects her at the precinct and brings her home to the apartment in Brooklyn. After she begins volunteering at the Mormon Visitors Center, Hannah brings Harper with her to work, where Harper sits in the empty auditorium eating junk food and contemplating the next objects of her hallucinatory imagination: the diorama of the Mormon pioneers. An exhibit of dressed dummies grouped as a family in a covered wagon serves as the visual aid to the center’s dramatization of the arduous journey west towards freedom. She notes an “incredible resemblance” between Joe and the “husband dummy” in the diorama and waits for the “mute wife” to speak; when the wife finally does, she dismisses Harper’s polite cliché of a question and demands to know what truly preoccupies Harper, leading to a purposeful discussion of how people change. The wife describes a horrific divine intervention by a “huge filthy hand” that splits people open and yanks out innards, after which “[i]t’s up to you to do the stitching.” Harper nods and finishes for the wife: “And then get up and walk around. Just mangled guts, pretending.”37
Harper becomes increasingly self-possessed and lucid from this point forward: no more over-reliance on pharmaceutical escape (thus no more Mr. Lies, Eskimos, or psychotic incidents with coniferous trees). Hannah tries to give her a pep talk about resignation to “disappointment” that undercuts itself, leaving Harper to conclude “[a]nything can happen. Any awful thing.” Joe finds her up on the roof of their apartment. The inference is available that she has been contemplating “the end of the world” as represented by an end to her life, via a single step out into the air. She intones a doomsday litany to Joe, who takes her home to bed for make-up sex that, for the last time, goes disastrously wrong and becomes break-up sex. He announces he’s going out, “to get some stuff I left behind”—still talking in code about who he is. She confronts him as he dresses, dropping the bed sheet and demanding he look at her and say what he sees. Badgered into a response, he finally admits, carelessly, “Nothing,” and, then, seeing its truth, says with greater conviction, “Nothing. I see nothing.” This finally cures Harper. She thanks him “finally,” for “the truth.” Good to his word, he goes “out,” and when he returns after the devastating break-up with Louis, she hands him her pill bottle and demands his credit card until she’s established herself elsewhere. When last we see her, she’s flying to San Francisco and relating a dream in which the ruined ozone layer she’s been fretting about throughout the film has been repaired by the bond of “a great net of souls” rising from the earth, who share in common their deaths after outrageous suffering. She pronounces life to be “a kind of painful progress.”
Roy Cohn. The third in Angels in America’s troika of visionaries is Roy Cohn, described by Kushner in his notes for the original play as “a New York lawyer and unofficial power broker”38 whose depiction, while based in “the historical record,” is nonetheless an act of Kushner’s imagination. Kushner’s Roy Cohn is a volcanic presence in the film. As the film opens, Roy is intent on luring Joe, a bright, handsome, malleable, closeted attorney, to Washington to be his man in the Justice Department, part of Roy’s unofficial right-wing insurgency abetted by the Reagan administration. All his wheedling of Joe has an overt object (a Machiavellian strategy to control Joe so that Joe can influence Roy’s jeopardized standing with the New York Bar Association), but it also has a subtextual goal (homosexual procurement). Joe is so deeply in the closet that he attaches an avuncular care to Roy’s ardency. Roy is frustrated that Joe hesitates; Joe’s wife, Harper, must be consulted before he makes any decision. Joe, as a committed Mormon, is also made uncomfortable by Roy’s manner, which is pyrotechnical in its foul-mouthed blasphemy while working the touchpad of his office telephone, greasing the political skids. When next we see him, Roy is in consultation with his long-time personal physician, Henry (James Cromwell). Like Prior, Roy manifests the K.S. lesions, prophets of the AIDS virus. While Henry attempts to address possible therapeutic steps with Roy, Roy lectures Henry about “clout,” which Roy possesses—only because he has never permitted his social identification as a gay man. He insists on a label as a man suffering from “liver cancer,” not AIDS, and threatens to ruin Henry unless he accepts this as the official diagnosis. “Kushner’s conception of Roy as the symbol of bad faith at the top of the American power structure suggests that his corruption and hypocrisy ultimately infect society as a whole, as AIDS infects him.”39
Roy continues his wooing of Joe, encouraging him to turn his marriage over to Roy, “ the best divorce lawyer in the business,” and playing his “cancer” card as a means of eliciting a deal-sealing sympathy. After learning of Joe’s vulnerability as a result of an unloving military father, Roy unleashes his philosophy of life as “full of horror” and urges Joe to “let nothing stand in your way,” citing his own mentors, “powerful, powerful men. Walter Winchell, Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy most of all.” (Working for McCarthy, Roy was instrumental in the deaths of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; he admits to Joe that he tampered with the trial judge via ex parte communication every night on the telephone.) Continuing his recruitment, Roy takes Joe to dinner with Martin Heller (Brian Markinson, in his fourth of five small character parts played for Nichols), another eager conservative bureaucrat Roy has anointed while he was on the way up. Roy’s commanding relationship to Martin (he receives a back rub from Martin in a crowded Manhattan restaurant) forecasts Joe’s own future role. The conversation reveals Martin’s willingness to perform dirty legal tricks for Ed Meese in the Justice Department; dismissing Martin, Roy makes explicit his political interest in Joe: he expects Joe to perform dirty legal tricks for Roy, specifically tampering with and fixing the investigation leading towards Roy’s disbarment.
After time to think it over, Joe comes to Roy’s brownstone to turn down the job offer to work for the Justice Department. Roy, by now a very sick man on the precipice of his final hospital stay, summons all his vitriol to insult Joe, nearly goading Joe into hitting him before Joe runs away. Collapsed in professional and physical ruin, Roy is visited for the first time in the film (though his familiarity suggests it is not the first time in his life) by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (also played by Streep), who passes through a solid door to sit in a living-room chair. Her death is on his hands; it has also made his name, given him “clout.” He is defiant. To Ethel, to the camera, hence to the world, he assumes a posture of adversarial confrontation, flipping us the bird and insisting he is “not afraid.” Ethel delivers to Roy the same message Prior’s Angel delivered: “History is about to crack wide open. Millennium approaches.”
Roy has been hospitalized by the beginning of Part Two of the film, Perestroika, and Belize is doing the thankless work of caring for him. Roy has pulled strings to get in on an experimental drug trial (AZT), and he introduces himself to Belize with an extraordinary string of racial invective calculated to show Belize “who’s boss.” Yet, perhaps because he understands Roy’s fear as a gay man entering the final battle with AIDS, Belize offers Roy two crucial pieces of advice about his treatment: to forego radiation therapy to maintain his T-cell count, and to pull any further strings he has to get the “real drug,” not the placebo, in the study’s “double blind” methodology. Roy recognizes Belize’s disdain, but takes the advice, calls Martin, and gets his own private stash of AZT, which he keeps locked in a refrigerator in his room (wearing the key on a necklace). Ethel makes frequent visits to this room, to update Roy on the “disbarment committee meetings” convening in Yonkers (without Joe Pitt to fix things).
Ethel’s presence is directly correlated to Roy’s lucidity: like Prior and Harper, Roy is the other character in Angels on a heavy pharmaceutical regimen, one that, for Roy, eventually is dominated by morphine. In Roy’s last days, Ethel is an avenging dark angel, while Belize is a reluctant angel of solace and mercy, even if Roy refers to him as his “negation.” Roy’s death scene begins with Ethel announcing Roy has been disbarred; he had hoped to die still a member of “the only club I ever wanted to belong to.” Ethel (Roy’s hallucination) confesses to vacillating between forgiveness and vengeance, though she appears to “take pleasure” in Roy’s “misery.” Roy feigns—in his delirium—a disoriented confusion of Ethel with his mother, and coaxes a sympathetic Yiddish lullaby from her before claiming in triumph that he has finally made “Ethel Rosenberg sing.” His punning allusion to confession is his final burst of energy before he dies. After his death, Belize steals the key from around Roy’s neck and asks Louis to mule the drugs out of the hospital for dissemination to Belize’s less-fortunate friends, like Prior, who are not part of the tiny AZT trial. But he also has Louis pray the Kaddish for Roy; the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, and of the past that lingers in Louis via women like his dead grandmother, is so palpable a presence in the room that it helps Louis, the most secular of Jews, to recall the words.
Joe Pitt. Each of the three non-visionary primary characters—Joe, Louis, and Hannah—is offered the opportunity to grow during the course of the film; the fact that Louis and Hannah appear as part of Prior’s inner circle of friends in the film’s epilogue indicates that they have responded positively to what life has offered them, while Joe remains lost. Joe begins the narrative as a swirl of contradictions: a married man in the closet; a deeply religious Mormon convinced by the conflict between his beliefs and desires that he is outside God’s will; a fervid conservative who persecutes the poor and disenfranchised via the law, even as he himself feels increasingly alienated from the platform of his political party because of his sexual orientation. Offered a job by Roy, a right-wing icon of Joe’s, he finds himself unable to accept the position because of his wife’s depressive dysfunction and his dawning sense of Roy’s spiritual bankruptcy. As his marriage crumbles, Joe has a chance meeting in a courthouse men’s room with Louis, who is weeping for Prior’s illness and his own weakness as a supporting partner. The two are immediately attracted to each other, though Joe can’t fully understand the attraction, and Louis toys with him in the guise of political banter. Joe has taken to Central Park’s “Ramble,” a gay stroll-zone, though as yet only to window-shop. On one such late-night cruise, he drunkenly calls his mother Hannah in Utah to confess he’s gay. Kushner plumbed his own past for the emotional extremities of this scene:
After four years in the closet as an undergraduate and another three years of hiding a secret sex life, Mr. Kushner went to a phone booth at the corner of Seventh Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan to call his mother and tell her he was gay. Mr. Kushner’s mother burst into tears. “I told her to stop,” he remembers, “and I wrote them the angry letter that you write.” Eventually his parents came to terms with his sexual orientation, leaving him to wrestle with what it means to be gay in America.40
Hannah coldly refuses to hear what Joe is trying to tell her from his great geographical and psychosexual remove; she instead condemns his drinking. She also vows to come east immediately. When Louis and Joe next chance to meet, on a bench outside the courthouse at lunchtime, each has been further reduced by his personal failure in commitment to a love relationship, and they warily begin to express themselves to one another. Joe is eating piles of vendor food and chugging antacid liquid for what will become his bleeding ulcer. Learning of Roy’s hopes that Joe can be his political fixer and that Roy illegally influenced the Rosenberg trial, Joe declines the job offer from Roy. Roy taunts Joe nearly to violence. He runs off, stalks Louis to the Ramble, and allows himself to be picked up.
The two begin a purely carnal relationship without delving for an instant beneath the skin, into each other’s inner lives, which is how Louis is unaware of the reactionary conservatism of Joe’s politics. Joe comes to believe he is passionately in love with Louis, which Louis dismisses as “the gay-virgin thing,” until Joe, on a wintry day at Jones Beach, uses the object lesson of stripping himself naked—even his “Mormon underwear”—to demonstrate he is “flayed” of his past. He espouses a philosophy much like Roy’s, urging Louis to get out from under the weight of Prior’s illness and pursue his own desires. Just as the philosophy, in its naked self-interest, drove Joe away from Roy, so it does to Louis, who has already decided he must see Prior again. Joe, convinced he’s finally found himself, goes to see Roy in the hospital, knowing Roy will understand, since he now understands that Roy, too, is gay. He tells Roy he has left Harper and is living with a man, and Roy in disgust commands him to resume his marriage, extricate himself from his other entanglements, and never “talk to me about it. Ever again.” It is Joe’s last communication with Roy in the film (the play allows a final haunting of Joe by Roy, in which Roy leaves Joe with the thought, “You’ll find, my friend, that what you love will take you places you never dreamed you’d go”41). Joe spends the last episode of Angels wandering the poles—innate and constructed—of his sexual identity. Harper frankly confronts him, stripping herself before him the same way he laid himself bare for Louis. She recognizes in his recoil from her naked beauty “The Truth” of their illusory marriage, and Joe leaves, “to get some stuff I left behind.” (There is no sense by the film’s end that he has found what he went out to retrieve.) He attempts to return to Louis, who has finally done his research on Joe, and who provokes Joe into beating him up as Louis banishes him forever. Joe does in fact return again to Harper, his “good heart.” While he has “changed,” he doesn’t yet understand how, and he begs her not to leave him. “Only you love me,” he tells her, “out of everyone in the world.” But Harper is finally past Joe; she takes his credit card and leaves him her pills. We glimpse one last time, with Hannah, a chance meeting on a Brooklyn street corner where a chorus sings “Shall We Gather at the River?” and it appears Hannah is trying to prove him wrong, to show that someone still loves him; but it also appears Joe in his shame may not be ready yet to acknowledge this.
Louis Ironson. Louis, unlike Joe, is not ambivalent about his orientation, only about commitment. He rejects Prior because the work of supporting a dying loved one is too immersed in the real—the sights and smells of AIDS. When he leaves Prior at the hospital, he goes to the Ramble and picks up a leather-clad man who looks, despite his rough-trade ensemble, like Prior. Louis can’t fail to see his lover’s face as he betrays him, and he demands to be punished. He moves out of Prior’s apartment and into a small hole in the wall, all he can afford on his menial salary, and when Joe follows him onto the Ramble, Louis takes him home and seduces him with patter about smell and taste as the most erotic senses (the very ones he could no longer bear to direct at Prior). Louis meets several times with Belize during his estrangement from Prior to try to work through what’s happening to him and to find out how Prior is doing, but these meetings go poorly for Louis: Belize dislikes Louis because he’s a pompous windbag, an unintentional racist, and a traitor to Belize’s dear friend, and he subjects Louis to withering critiques that Louis accepts as his due. Louis eventually coaxes Prior into meeting him in Washington Square, but Prior only flagellates him, challenging Louis not to return without evidence of his suffering. Louis’ policy of not talking with Joe about who they are and what they want from their relationship backfires: after Belize discovers Joe visiting Roy and identifies him as the man who stole Louis from Prior, Belize tells Louis who Joe really is, his final and most devastating critique. In denial because Joe seems so “nice,” Louis nonetheless researches Joe and discovers he has legally defended the exploitation or persecution of the vulnerable (children, gays), and that he is, at the very least, the political bedfellow of Roy Cohn. He goads Joe not only into a breakup but into a beating he can take back to Prior as literal evidence of his suffering. Significantly, Prior embraces and forgives him while also, careful of his heart, refusing to forget what Louis has done. (Something similarly complex happens between Louis over Roy’s dead body: Louis aids in stealing all the AZT Roy will no longer need, but also performs the Kaddish for the man he has called “the polestar of human evil.”) The last image of Louis is in the Park four years later, with three friends—Hannah, Belize, and Prior—all of whom could bear a grudge but don’t, instead good-naturedly accepting what appear to be his overbearingly permanent yet forgivable faults.
Hannah Pitt. Neither Hannah nor Belize enters the film until the second episode (though we have of course seen both actors in episode one: Streep is the aged rabbi at the funeral, and Wright is Mr. Lies). They enter the film from vastly different ideological, demographic, and personality types, but what drives them into the narrative is the same: each has responded to the call of a desperate loved one. Joe has drunkenly called his mother from Central Park to confess his feared sexual orientation, while Prior has called Belize from the hospital because Louis has abandoned him there. Hannah arrives in New York from Salt Lake City with unwieldy baggage—two enormous suitcases—and promptly takes the wrong bus, all the way to the Bronx, where she must coax sense from a crazed street person (Thompson) in a vacant lot to tell her where she is and give her directions to the Mormon Visitors Center, since the vagrant has no idea how to reach Brooklyn. She finds her family’s life in shambles, her son disappearing for days at a time, her daughter-in-law dazed and confused by depression and medication. Hannah is hopeless at ministering to either of them and also pronounces herself “useless” to the Visitors Center, where she volunteers. However, when Prior stalks Joe to Hannah and then bursts in to rant at her about her son, she finds, of all things, that she is a source of solace and strength to this angry, sick man. Together they endure the terrible, wonderful visitation of the Angel to Prior’s hospital room, where she is not simply a passive witness to Prior’s vision; the Angel is also there to address her. After Prior ascends the celestial ladder, the Angel remains behind, an ultra-glamorous vision that enchants Hannah and induces an orgasmic embrace. As with Prior, the Angel reminds Hannah “[t]he Body is the Garden of the Soul.” When Prior recovers from his fever, Hannah is there with Belize. She excuses herself, confessing to having had “the most peculiar dream,” but promises to return; she becomes one of Prior’s best friends, one of the three people with whom he wants to spend his birthdays. She has blossomed from dowdy Utahn to stylish Manhattanite.
Norman Arriaga, aka Belize. Belize does not embark on as traditional a trajectory of character development as any of the preceding six; “he has already arrived at his full humanity,” writes Nancy Franklin.42 The dilemmas with which Belize is faced, particularly as a health-care professional who must balance his personal feelings with nursing care of Roy (a man to whose life and politics he bitterly objects), make Belize’s choices the most crucial of the narrative. Belize has two main objects of animus in the action of Angels: Roy, a patient to whom he’s assigned, and Louis, the man who broke the heart of Belize’s good friend (thus also making Belize’s own life harder, since Belize must step into the void left by Louis). Belize makes no pretense that he’s anything but antagonistic in his dealings with Roy and Louis, yet he rolls up his sleeves and deals with them both as honestly as he can. Despite his feelings about Roy, further enflamed by Roy’s racial stereotyping and imperious demands from his hospital bed, Belize nonetheless offers him insider wisdom about the therapeutic regimen he’s about to undergo. Later, he reluctantly holds Roy in the worst of his pain and delirium. With Louis, barely reining in his hostility, he endures Louis’ rants and tries to reason with him about Louis’ unreasonableness. He enlightens Louis about Joe’s full story (even if he clearly enjoys battering Louis with the word “buttboy”). And in Roy’s death, Belize connects the two people to whom he’s most opposed when he summons Louis to the hospital to steal Roy’s drugs and, at the same time, pray the Kaddish over Roy. After his ordeal in attending Roy’s entrance into eternity and welcoming Prior “back to the world” (as fair a trade as Belize is ever likely to see in his life), Belize excuses himself to “go home and nurse my grudges.” This is what makes Belize so ideologically alive as a character: he tends with equal care to ideas and the real world. Thompson recalls mulling the question of the play’s meaning with Nichols for “months,” and she recalls the conclusion Nichols drew: “‘It’s about citizenship,’ which is a concept that I think we’re losing fast. The notion of moral responsibility and living in a society to which and for whom you are responsible. The effects of our daily actions are no longer credited with the power to form our character. What’s credited are possessions and status and acquisition.”43 Despite all the pyrotechnical fireworks of the Angel and the visions of Prior, Harper, and Roy, this moment, of Belize’s sublimation of his own impulses to the needs even of those he most reviles in his community, is the inmost beating heart of Nichols’ and Kushner’s Angels in America. Prior’s “Great Work” is the promotion of “More Life”; Belize is the lived reality of that philosophy.
* * *
Angels in America is unmatched in Mike Nichols’ oeuvre in capacity and complexity. Critics routinely declare Kushner’s play to be among the most important of the American 20th century; “Angels in America is clearly the most important American play since Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”44 The two plays psychologically form a mighty set of bookends on Nichols’ filmography. The bitter comedy of Kushner’s drama is the tone with which Nichols made his name as a filmmaker, but there is extraordinarily heartfelt sentiment in Angels as well, and this characteristic, which became ascendant only in Nichols’ second phase as a filmmaker, gives Angels a compassionate dimensionality it would otherwise have lacked had it devolved toward ideological screed or dyspeptic lamentation. It’s where the film might have ended up had Robert Altman made it, as he was in talks with Kushner to do.45 Joe’s politics are as egregious to Kushner (and Nichols) as they are to Louis (once he’s made to look squarely at them by Belize); yet the difference is that Louis only wants to be cleansed of the stain of his involvement with Joe, while Kushner and Nichols can’t dismiss Joe so easily. And Pacino’s figure of Roy Cohn in all his charismatic, malevolent energy fascinates precisely because we glimpse the mortal terror beneath his vehemence. He’s the narrative’s most notorious victimizer and most pathetic victim. As such, Angels in America’s most essential scenes do not involve either of its visionary prophets, Prior or Harper, as compelling as their stories certainly are. The narrative’s most essential scenes pit Roy against Belize, since these are the two “professionals” whose philosophical convictions are at stake in fiercely performed vocation, one as dead wrong as the other is right.
Kushner says, “I wanted [Belize] to be the ideological counterweight to Roy, that there were two people in the play who were not lost and inert and swimming around deeply confused. I wanted there to be two people, one of the Left and one of the Right, who had a very clear moral compass and knew exactly where they were in the universe at all times.”46 Despite their vast ideological and moral differences, Roy and Belize share a similar assessment of the modern world, though their crucial divergence comes in how each responds to his dim view of our experience. For both, existence is filled with suffering. But while Roy counsels manipulation, centered first and only on self, Belize devotes his life to service. Belize wants to make the inevitable suffering easier to bear; Roy wants to commodify even suffering’s inevitability, to use it to his advantage. And each has a hapless mentee to whom he espouses these principles: Roy has Joe; Belize has Louis.
To Joe, his latest protégé, Roy becomes increasingly direct in his depiction of existence: “I’m not afraid of death. What can death bring that I haven’t faced? I’ve lived. Life is the worst. Listen to me—I’m a philosopher. […] Love: that’s a trap. Responsibility: that’s a trap, too. Like a father to a son I tell you this: Life is full of horror. Nobody escapes, nobody. Save yourself. Whatever pulls on you, whatever needs from you, threatens you. […] Let nothing stand in your way.” If such a speech weren’t dark enough, its cynical subtext reveals a bottomless swamp of predation. Roy delivers this speech to a young, impressionable man Roy hopes to use and discard not once but twice: as his “buttboy” (in Belize’s deliberately indelicate diction) and as his dirty-tricks appointee to the Justice Department to become Roy’s kept guardian angel. One need look no further than Martin Heller, a former protégé/buttboy of Roy’s, for a foreshadowed glimpse of the objectified system of relationship-barter that Roy practices. After Roy has summarily excused Martin from the table (“Take a walk, Martin. For real”), Joe voices his heartfelt, principled objection to the obstruction of justice Roy has attached to the plum appointment he’s offering. Joe asks why Martin isn’t able to perform this service for Roy (an ethical slippery slope of a question), but Roy waves away the idea like a bad smell: “Grow up, Joe. The administration can’t get involved.” Joe, still obtuse about the nature of the political quicksand he’s edged near, posits, “But I’d be part of the administration. The same as him.” Impatiently, because of his irritation at saying what ought best to remain unsaid, Roy lectures him, “Not the same. Martin’s Ed [Meese]’s man. And Ed’s Reagan’s man. So Martin’s Reagan’s man. And you’re mine.”
Thus is made concrete one half of the Faustian bargain that sits on the table between Roy and Joe from their opening scene in the film, when Roy punctuates the offer with a gay-subtext sweetener that, on a sub-committee’s transcript or in a tabloid quote, could be reasonably interpreted as “fatherly” warmth: “It’s a great time to be in Washington, Joe. […] And it would mean something to me. You understand?” Joe’s hesitation is the caution of a man in the closet, who does indeed understand, at some level he does not allow out into the daylight, who already knows instinctively what Roy is trying to teach him, that relationships are just another of life’s “traps.” Joe’s legal instincts parse every potential response before floating a tentative, generic expression of appreciation while working in an allusion to his wife. At the dinner with Martin, just after Roy extracts Martin’s humiliation by commissioning a public backrub and just before he tells Martin to disappear, Roy describes Joe’s role as a well-placed friend,” a purveyor of “clout” who could provoke “fear” in the “genteel gentleman Brahmin lawyers” of his disbarment committee. Joe counters with the politically expedient feint, “I don’t understand.” Ignorance has been Joe’s ally in his war against himself (as he prays “for God to crush me, break me up into little pieces and start all over again”); he has hoped to ignore his instincts and pretend his way into conformity with the majority values of hegemony his mentor appears to uphold. To Joe’s careful admission of ignorance, Roy counters, simply, “You do.” Roy knows Joe has always understood; Joe seems genuinely astonished when people like Roy and Louis (and, when she can finally admit it to herself, Harper) can so easily and accurately identify what he has desperately thought he could conceal. (Joe’s greatest disappointment is that he hasn’t been more successful at negating his identity; his mother Hannah’s greatest “disappointment,” as she tells Harper, is not “how disappointing life is,” but that “it gets actually easier to live with. Quite easy. Which is, in it own way, a disappointment.” That she can express this is a redemptive key to her reified awareness; it makes it possible for her to advance to her own “threshold of revelation.” Joe can’t quite bring himself to acceptance of what he has grudgingly admitted about his identity at the end of the narrative, which is why he remains lost, while Hannah finds herself.)
What Roy Cohn articulates in Angels and, for all his closeted hypocrisy, lives out in his professional vocation, is an expression of pure power. In muscling his long-time doctor, Henry, into a public misdiagnosis of his illness, Roy reveals his reified understanding of the hegemonic world within which Roy has ascended to a position of influence. Discoursing on the function of “labels” in social practice in what Alessandra Stanley calls “one of the most richly imagined meditations on power ever shown on television,”47 Roy provides a concise semiotic analysis: “[Labels] tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order?” In both the familiar metaphors Roy uses, he has implied a social Darwinist’s perspective on human relationships. He answers his rhetorical question with a summation of a worldview: “Not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout.” Inserting himself as an object lesson into this philosophical formula, he says, “Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry?”
Henry must of course concede that, within this pretzel logic, Roy most assuredly cannot be labeled a homosexual, though Henry holds the trump card: Roy’s disease, which can be re-labeled but not willed away. The body, both for good or (literally) ill, possesses a reality that Roy and Joe can’t deny, despite their insistence (Roy via semantics, Joe via prayer and marriage); and that Harper can’t deny either, despite her desire to be freed of desire for Joe; and that Hannah can’t deny with the Angel, despite her resignation to the “disappointment” of the culturally bound, legalistic teachings of her church; and that Prior can’t deny, as his physical disintegration begins to entice him with a longing for death. As the Angel verbally instructs both Prior and Hannah, “The Body is the Garden of the Soul.” The Body is a threshold of revelation, and to deny its truths is to invite ruin. The Body is the reason why three characters routinely experience visions: each is under the influence of narcotic therapies that reach the mind via the body. To deny the Body is to deny reality. No one is as honest about denying reality as Roy: “I want you to understand,” Roy tells Henry, using the threat of his career-destroying influence to buy Henry’s cooperation with his ruse. “This is not sophistry. And this is not hypocrisy. This is reality. […] Because what I am is defined entirely by who I am.” It is a profound assessment of reification, but in its absolute capitulation to the powers that be, it is both a statement about social reality and a complete inversion of the reality that social objectification has sought to manipulate.
In Roy’s argument is a life’s work—Kushner’s, but also Nichols.’ It is a clear, coherent, unblinking identification of the systemic operations of objectification. Roy’s statement is profoundly accurate. “Who I am” is, indeed, a signifier of identity. The problem comes in looking at his statement in the larger context of an argument that surrenders autonomous self-definition to definition by cultural decree. Brought to his knees by illness and Joe’s failure to comply with the rules as Roy has made them up, Roy challenges Joe with the realities of power: “You want to be nice, or you want to be effective? Make the law, or subject to it. Choose.” In a narrative immersed in irony, this is a deep-water marker: Roy himself has tried his whole life to have it both ways, to rule and to be ruled. Ethel Rosenberg, the figment his sub-conscious summons to pronounce judgment not just on his disbarment but on history itself, concludes, “Better he had never lived at all.” The final irony of Roy’s tormenting, tormented life is that, even in delirium, his default remains self-deception. Ethel is his sub-conscious projection of his legacy: the man who killed Ethel Rosenberg. His dying act is to feign vulnerability and contrition (repeating the word “sorry” three times after confessing, in apparent contradiction to his defiant claims of fearlessness throughout the narrative, that he is “scared”) before sitting bolt upright, with Belize looking on, as he taunts Ethel for having “fooled” her. Nichols has carefully cut to medium shots in every one of Ethel’s appearances, to reveal that Roy is talking to empty chairs, to the air, to himself. Roy Cohn has spent a lifetime fooling no one but Roy Cohn.
While Belize has a similar understanding of the debilitating effects of objectification in the world, what he does with this knowledge makes him Roy’s antithesis in the film. No one is as honest about affirming reality as Norman Arriaga, which extends to his having renamed himself during his drag days, a moniker he retains now that he is, mostly, post-drag. The assumed name is for Belize an assumption of a dimension of his reality, not a distancing layer of artificiality. (Nevertheless, the two names are a reflection of how he relates to the world; paraphrasing the old joke, he is Belize to his friends, so Roy can call him Norman Arriaga.) Insisting, in the face of Louis’ gassy essaying about race in America, that the problem is far worse than Louis can know, Belize says, “I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me.” Belize, although clearly well read and intellectually sophisticated, is often contemptuous of the abstracting tendencies of intellectualism, as embodied in Louis Ironson. Kushner gives Louis long, tiresome speeches filled with qualifiers and sidebars that Nichols allows to balloon the air of a close-up take until Belize, in a cutaway from Louis, deflates his disquisitions with a needle-sharp critique. As Belize insists upon airing his own perspective with Louis and then, later, also with Roy, rather than simply deferring to the “awesome spectacle” of Louis’ opinions or the corrosive deluge of Roy’s taunting hatreds, Belize’s anger and his distrust of definitive “answers” from any point on the ideological spectrum become increasingly apparent. He finds the hypocrisies and cant in both Louis’ earnest, bookish liberalism and Roy’s misanthropic fascism. Asked by Louis to tell Prior, from whom Louis remains estranged, that he loves him, Belize says, “I’ve thought about it for a very long time, and I still don’t understand what love is. Justice is simple. Democracy is simple. Those things are unambivalent. But love is very hard. And it goes bad for you if you violate the hard law of love.”
Ambiguity, then, and human ambivalence in response to it, is the defining characteristic of reality for the most realistic character in Angels, created by a writer who defines himself as a “narrative realist.”48 The labeling of reality, as Roy Cohn explains it in hamstringing his own physician, necessitates the taming of reality into neat, confining cages. Labels as Roy understands them defeat reality, make it subject to hegemonic control. At some level, below the virile defiance masking his deeper denial, Roy knows this to be true. The last time he sees Joe, for instance, when Joe comes to visit his hospital room, Roy persists in his paternal pretense with Joe, laying his hands on him to bestow a blessing, like blind Isaac hoodwinked by Jacob. Roy even acknowledges the deliberateness of his gesture as biblical allusion, characterizing Joe/Jacob as “ruthless […], some bald runt, but he laid hold of his birthright with his claws and his teeth.” Just after this impromptu ceremony, however, Joe feels compelled to speak the truth of what they have always “understood” about each other. (Indeed, it is ultimately easier for Roy and Joe to speak of the conspiracy to obstruct justice than it is for them to speak of their sexual orientation.) Joe announces, as much with relief as triumph, that he has left Harper to live with a man. Roy’s reaction is cataclysmic, scarring. Up out of bed, he pulls free of his IV, spraying his diseased blood all over Joe, the room, eventually Belize. He rails at Joe, “I want you home. With your wife. Whatever else you got going, cut it dead. […] Do what I say, or you will regret it. And don’t talk to me about it. Ever again.” As a curse, this response far outweighs whatever “blessing” Roy might have intended upon Joe. Roy has labored to instruct his protégé, and the ambiguity of his hard-won wisdom is both to “let nothing stand in your way,” to be fearless, and conversely to fear any false step that could provoke a damaging enculturated label. Roy’s reified fear is an even more deadly contagion than his infected blood.
Louis has personality correspondences to both Roy and Joe, the two men in the narrative who most horrify him, and Belize has called him out on the salient characteristics in each case. Roy, Joe, and Louis are all members of the legal profession (Louis in a much lowlier caste, which Joe cruelly acknowledges as their relationship is ending), and all carry from their profession as much as their orientation a wary mistrust of words. For Roy, words are misleading, and power comes in being the one to choose and label words rather than having them assigned to one: “Make the law, or subject to it.” One of Roy’s cardinal laws is never to be associated with homosexuality, synonymous with enculturated disenfranchisement. But when Joe speaks the love that ought not speak its name, Roy’s motives in stifling him are as much to censor the label that will attach to Roy, a known associate of Joe’s, as to his protégé. Joe has practiced this linguistic caution until now, but ironically, his effusion over discovering his sexual identity has led him to “flaying” away his masks to stand naked in his identity. Of all people, it’s Louis, compulsive opinion-spouter, who counsels Joe on their first night together to “stop talking.” The moment is soused in physical desire, but the effect is as disastrous in its revelation of spiritual vacancy as that crucial moment in The Graduate when, at the end of the long, futile attempt at a “conversation,” Benjamin asks Mrs. Robinson that they “not talk at all.” Louis, like Roy and Joe, desires to avoid the realities he fears or finds inconvenient. This, too, distorts reality; to avoid all pretense of labels is in its own way as self-deceptive as Roy’s semantic gymnastics. And when Louis tries to talk with Joe, what spills out are the abundant labels that spring readily to mind in relation to Joe (“married probably bisexual Mormon Republican closet case”), a veritable labeling lampoon that can’t do anything but discourage Joe from attempting disclosure.
Like Joe, Louis takes comfort in abstraction and blanches when confronted with reality. Joe is able to write legal arguments for Justice Theodore Wilson of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals siding with a corporation that has endangered the health of children and, even closer to home, with the military against a gay soldier, because of an ideological orientation to the law. As if this might serve as a defense, he counters Louis’ accusations with, “It’s law, not justice; it’s power, not the merits of its exercise.” This is the gospel of hegemony, whose chief evangelist in Angels is Roy Cohn, who is on record as having told us all (directly to the camera) to “go jump in the lake,” among less polite imperatives. In fact, Roy is nothing less than an ideology of one, as he tells Joe: “save yourself.” Joe’s horror of Roy deepens the more he listens to his mentor talk, and yet he internalizes every word and can fluently paraphrase when it comes time for him to attempt some manipulation of his own. Roy has said, “[D]on’t be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone.” Standing on Jones Beach with Louis in winter, stripped naked, contemplating Louis’ news that he has to see Prior again, Joe assumes the wheedling role with which Roy once plied him: “Sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be. […] You ought to think about […] what you’re doing to me. No, I mean … what you need. Think about what you need. Be brave.” Nichols treats the ending of this scene from a helicopter, zooming away from Joe, whose adoptive ideology of one has left him a small, solitary figure, alone and shivering at the end of the land.49
The two dramatic forces at work on Louis in the film are Roy’s law of one (from which Louis recoils in bleeding-heart guilt even as he is powerless not to exercise it in abdicating his responsibilities to Prior) and Belize’s ideology of “love and justice.” If Roy and Belize represent the “polestars” of human response to the dehumanizing effects of the modern world, Louis is the character who struggles most consciously with where he fits on this continuum. At his grandmother’s funeral, he’s already anxiously attempting to confess sins of self-interest he has yet to commit; “Worse luck for you, bubbulah,” Rabbi Chemelwitz tells him: “Catholics believe in forgiveness. Jew believe in guilt.” This remains Louis’ pattern in the narrative: helpless captivity to self-interest followed by reckless surrender to self-punishment. When the condom used in the rough-trade assignation on the Ramble after he leaves Prior breaks, Louis insists they continue and expresses a wish to be infected. His most notorious self-inflicted punishment is when he tears down Joe’s veneer of responsibility in this violence. Before Louis inflames Joe to violence, Belize inflames Louis. The repetition of the derogatory “buttboy” to describe Joe, for whom Belize has no specifically personal feeling, is instead a label Belize intends to defame Louis, reminding Louis of a hierarchy in which Roy is more important than Joe and Joe is more important than Louis, even though Louis considers himself morally superior to Roy and thus, after Belize’s revelation, to Joe. Belize is harder on Louis than on Roy, because he knows Roy is a lost cause, and because he believes Louis can do better. The time Belize spends with Roy is the generosity of vocation; the time he spends with Louis is the generosity of friendship, however adversarial. “You come with me to room 1013 over at the hospital,” he says to Louis, even before he hatches the specific plot that calls Louis there. Belize is being rhetorical about Louis’ penchant for abstractions like “love” and “America.” He says, “I’ll show you America,” meaning Roy Cohn: “Terminal, crazy, and mean. […] I live in America, Louis; that’s hard enough. I don’t have to love it.” The characterization of Belize’s relationship to the world may also stand as a description of his relationship to Louis: lived, not merely spoken, commitment. Earlier he’s told Louis, “I’ve thought about it a very long time, and I still don’t understand what love is.” Actually, Belize does understand—he’s just uncomfortable with the abstracting label. With Roy even more than with Louis, Belize meets his greatest test as an agent of love in the world, but it’s an act of Belize’s creative imagination that transforms death into multiplied life, forgiveness, love.
The seeds of this imaginative work on Belize’s part are a long time in gestation. His first meeting with Roy goes about as anyone might reasonably predict. Roy asserts a label-based hegemonic assumption of superiority over a mere servant (in a later conversation, declaring he is “not moved by an unequal distribution of goods on this earth,” he identifies himself as worthy of a “footnote” in “history,” while reminding Belize, “you are a nurse, so minister and skedaddle”). At first blush, when Roy tells Belize during their initial dialogue that he is “not a prejudiced man,” it seems pure self-delusion. Yet he goes on to explain, “These racist guys, simpletons, I never had any use for them—too rigid. You want to keep your eye on where the most powerful enemy really is. I save my hate for what counts.” Roy is too reactionary to be “rigid”—what has given him “clout” is his ability to remain attuned to hegemony’s shifting shape and to conform himself to those values. There is nothing extraordinary about any of this. What is extraordinary is Belize’s response to Roy’s aesthetic of “hate,” which Jeffrey Wright delivers with little of Belize’s campy drawl: “I think that’s a good idea, a good thing to do, probably.” In the pause that follows, Nichols and Kushner allow us more than adequate time to reflect that Roy is Belize’s natural, cultural-bound enemy, and that Belize is in a unique position to deliver his hate to “what counts.” (Belize reminds Roy—and us—of this fact when inserting the I.V. in Roy’s arm, warning that there are two ways he can administer the needle, one merciful, the other bringing torment.) The hiatus in their dialogue appears to be a moment when Belize can calculate a suitable revenge against this powerfully antagonistic force, this traitor who hates traitors. And then Belize delivers his medical tips to Roy on how to stay alive. What we realize is that, beyond the theatrical fanfare of narcotics-based visions of Angels or ghosts or Eskimos, beyond the magnetism of Roy Cohn’s evil, we’ve been watching a very human struggle between the polestars within one man, Belize. The forces of “more life” win. What Belize has saved his hate for is “what counts”: death, not labels or ideologies. It is the triumph that foreshadows all the small, seemingly insignificant triumphs over which Belize will preside in the future.
Belize is not beyond making deals with the devil in the name of life. When he tells Roy about the methodology of the “double blind” trial, it’s possible that his imaginative calculus has reached beyond Roy to other victims that might conceivably benefit down the road from Roy’s influence and successful score of a private stash of AZT. Even if this isn’t something Belize concretely imagines as he tips Roy, it’s something he’s begun actively negotiating after the stash arrives. Roy blackmails Martin Heller with what he knows about Iran-Contragate; Belize dares Roy to blow the whistle when Belize demands a cut of the drugs for his ailing friends. They exchange the most colorful litany of derogatory labels to be found anywhere in the six-plus hours of Angels, their hate simmering into an understanding that ends in a deal being struck. Such a deal is beneath the ethics of Belize’s profession, but in the situational ethics of Belize’s life as a gay health-care worker surrounded by dying friends (like Prior), Belize weighs the balance and takes his illicit cut from Roy’s illicit windfall. Later, Roy descends into a morphine twilight in which Belize is the “bogeyman, [… t]he Negro night nurse, my negation […], come to escort me to the underworld.” Belize, we understand, is not quite Belize in this scene; he’s become partly Roy’s vision of encroaching Death. Roy grabs Belize in an embrace that is ambiguously both contact between health-care worker and dying patient and a sexualized solicitation, demanding to know about the afterlife. Belize unfolds a vision of San Francisco in romanticized ruin, characterized by “racial impurity and gender confusion. […] Race, taste, and history finally overcome. And you ain’t there.” Belize is Roy’s “negation” in this vision because Roy feels the weight of an imminent judgment embodied in Belize’s unhidden animus. As this scene ends, with another nurse walking the wandering, addled Roy back to his bed, Ethel has joined Belize in the hallway, two angels of death (from Roy’s point of view) keeping watch over their charge by night. After Roy has his sensational reaction to Joe’s coming out, Belize is left to mop up the physical and psychological mess. “Mocked and reviled all my life,” Roy mutters, and Belize, cleaning Roy’s toxic spill, says, “Join the club.” Roy predictably turns on him: “I don’t belong to any club you could get through the front door of. You watch yourself—you take too many liberties.” In the next moment, wracked by a spasm, he is clinging like a child to Belize, who immediately recoils but, again, in reluctant default compassion, allows himself to be held.
Belize, who sees the world more clearly than any other character in Angels, has no “visions.” He isn’t loaded up on drugs like Prior, Harper, or Roy, but in the most practical terms of the drama, he has less need to see the extraordinary to apprehend the real, since he has already been apprehending the real for some time. In his dialogues with both his nemeses, Roy and Louis, his race is a common subject. Elsewhere in the film, Hannah scolds her son, assuring him “[b]eing a woman is harder,” but the film suggests Belize’s status as a black man may be harder still, and a source of the unblinkered realism with which he views the world (he mocks white perspectives of both genders in his imaginary synopsis of the “bestselling paperback novel, In Love with the Night Mysterious”). He is the only one with Roy as this infamous, reviled man draws his last fearful, fearsome breath, though in Roy’s dying vision, he’s accompanied by Ethel, who “came to forgive” him but, a product of his fevered brain, can only enjoy vengeance. Over Roy’s dead body, Belize is a mass of contradictory impulses, gently closing Roy’s eyelids and folding Roy’s hands to the chest, then ruthlessly snapping the drug key from the dead man’s neck. Summoned by Belize to stand before Roy’s corpse, Louis wonders why Belize would choose him (“Why me? You hate me”—to which Belize does not protest). But this is how Belize’s imagination works. As a good nurse, his work is healing. He doesn’t call forth elaborate prophetic or paranoiac visions but instead reconciles. He has brought together the two men who best recognize Belize’s animus so that he may join them to one another in an act of mercy and forgiveness.
Louis, predictably, balks: his principles won’t let him recite words of a tradition he’s long since left behind, especially for an arch-enemy like Roy Cohn. “Louis,” says Belize, “I’d even pray for you.” And so, finally, Louis understands Belize’s hierarchy of “grudges,” in which the abstracted, second-hand evils of a Roy Cohn, which may hardly be overlooked, must always come second to the real evil done to a loved one. Belize hates Louis most. Yet he hasn’t called Louis to this room to condemn him or to coerce him to serve Roy’s soul. Belize has brought Louis to a “peace” summit. Of Roy, Belize says, “He was a terrible person. He died a hard death. So maybe [… a] queen can forgive her vanquished foe. It isn’t easy; it doesn’t count if it’s easy. It’s the hardest thing: Forgiveness. Which is maybe where love and justice finally meet. Peace, at last. Isn’t that what the Kaddish asks for?”
Louis attempts a few last excuses, but Belize wills him into this imaginative act he’s devised, this peacemaking: “Do the best you can.” A facial tissue draped over his skull, Louis falters his way into the first lines, and Ethel’s ghost, in the manner of the ghost of Louis’ dead grandmother, miraculously feeds him the rest. To this point in the film, Nichols has been artful in intercutting Ethel’s subjective reality for Roy with objective shots of empty rooms. Now, Roy is gone; so, then, Ethel should be gone. There can be only one explanation for this persistence of vision, the same explanation that brought Prior and Harper to their shared hallucination, even though they never meet beyond it: we are in the imaginations of Mike Nichols and Tony Kushner, willing Louis toward the “threshold of revelation” we desire for all protagonists and, vicariously, for ourselves. This is the “Great Work” which has begun. Belize nurses his grudges with the therapeutic intervention of his imagination’s capacity to forgive; Kushner and Nichols do the same. Nor does the “Great Work” end: a change Kushner and Nichols make to the original stage play for the film indicates this, after Belize thanks and even mildly praises Louis while loading his backpack with the looted drug hoard. In the play, Louis’ parting punch line, good for comic relief after the scene’s climactic intensity, is to correct Belize: “Fine? What are you talking about, fine? That was fucking miraculous.”50 Indeed, Ethel’s apparition and intervention is miraculous, every bit as much a deus ex machina as an Angel that can summon the Continental Principalities for Council with the Prophet. They are miracles of the imagination. But in the film, the word “That” becomes “I.” Louis walks away impressed with himself rather than his momentous participation in unmerited mercy (both as bestower and recipient). Louis remains a work in “progress”—as do we all: the true subject of Kushner’s “Great Work.”
Nichols and Kushner introduce the vitality of imagination’s humanizing power early in Angels, and it gradually builds to become the central, transforming force of the project, the source of prophetic vision and truth. The film begins with a funeral homily, and unless we’ve read the press about the production, we are likely to miss the fact that the gnarled rabbi delivering the words is the first screen persona of Nichols’ favorite actress, Meryl Streep.51 Those who have carped that a cinematic rendering of Angels will, inherently, be less “magical” in its performance of, for instance, the Angel’s appearances, because we are conditioned to expect cinema’s “magical” properties, miss the point that Nichols and Kushner have retained safeguards against our jaded expectation of cinematic illusion. It’s less important that the “miracles” be rendered realistically in the film (as indeed they are not: for example, while Thompson’s wires are not perceptible, as Kushner instructed the Angel’s wires should be on stage,52 neither does her flight have the naturalistic fluidity of blockbuster CGI; and Harper’s “Antarctica” is the stagiest artificial set in the entire production, one of the most awkward of Nichols’ entire career—but purposefully so, since it is a product of Harper’s parochial experience). What is of central importance for Nichols’ televised cinema, ironically, is retaining the artificiality of the play, its imagined-ness. The preeminent quality of the cinematic production that retains and thus promotes this artificiality is the multiple-role casting of Streep, Thompson, Wright, and, in smaller scenes that correspond to the fraying logic of Louis and Harper in their emotional extremity, Kirk (as the rough-trade pick-up in the Park) and Wilson (as the first Mormon Eskimo in Antarctica).
From the perspective of confecting a believable cinematic illusion, it is not only unnecessary but counterintuitive to place Streep in the opening scene with a long monologue’s time to scrutinize her in her get-up as the octogenarian rabbi presiding over Louis’ grandmother’s funeral. Better that Nichols and Kushner should cast a seasoned older Hollywood man in the role than any actress, let alone one of the most legendary actresses of her era, especially if she’s already got a sizable part to play later on. It would be far more believable, if the object is illusory cinematic “magic,” to cast an 80-year-old man from Actor’s Equity. Likewise, even if it makes “sense” that whatever actress plays the relatively small role of Prior’s nurse, Emily, would also play his immense, imaginative projection of her in his drug-induced visions, it makes no sense for that same actress to play an entirely unrelated cameo as a psychotic Bronx street person.53 Streep should, by the sensibility of Hollywood illusion, play one role; Thompson arguably should play two; in no case should either woman play three—but both do precisely this in Nichols’ film. While there is publicity to be mined in such stunts of casting (only if the acting is up to the challenge—and it is), what makes the task worth taking on is the formal emphasis it places on transformative shape shifting and imaginative mutation, a “Great Work” shared by Nichols, Kushner, the actors, and us. “Angels was one of the first popular plays to draw a connection between race, gender, and sexuality,” observes Richard Goldstein. “It took the new identity politics incubating in the academy and brought it to Broadway. At the same time, it performed a critique of identity politics by portraying the complexities and multiplicities that come with simply existing.”54 We are asked, with plenty of thespian chops and film craft brought to bear, to imagine Streep as an 80-year-old Yiddish man, a middle-aged Mormon matriarch, and a notorious American traitor executed half a century ago. Streep’s shape-shifting presence is an invocation to what Kushner calls “empathic imagination,”55 whose “Great Work” is the object of this play, as its subjects are “love and justice.”
Kushner has argued that his idea of narrative “requires an essential gullibility that you can’t get through life without having.” And yet we must be simultaneously susceptible and discerning. Citing Brecht (and Marx), Kushner contends “we have to learn how to look beneath […] surface effects [in culture] to locate and understand the sources of their […] power.”56 The ultimate goal of theater in the Brechtian (and Shakespearean) tradition, Kushner asserts, is “to enable you to see the familiar as strange and the strange as familiar, so that you greet reality with an appetite to interpret it.”57 Interpretation is thus also an act of imagination. Angels is an exercise in this essential looking, in which we both believe all that we see (and are thus made to feel) even as we see through the cinematic illusions. Kushner has Prior make an extended allusion to the 1939 Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz at the end of the film, after his long night’s wrestle with death: “I’ve had a remarkable dream. And you were there, and you, and you! […] And some of it was terrible, and some of it was wonderful, but all the same I kept saying, ‘I want to go home,’ and they sent me home.” The Wizard of Oz creates a tension between reality and illusion that clearly has warmed Kushner’s heart. His narrative asks us always to pay attention to the “man behind the curtain,” or the mask, or the posed identity. Nichols and Kushner implore us to continue the “Great Work” of understanding illusion and choosing reality; of understanding power and choosing justice, mercy, peace.
Roy’s imaginative work is undone by the reified defaults he has set up even in his sub-conscious mind. Not even delirium on the threshold of death permits Roy access to the threshold of revelation. He can imagine heaven, but he must also imagine a “negation” that not only bars him from it but also does not appeal to his conformist instincts; he mistakes for hell the vision of San Francisco as heaven that Belize unfolds. He can imagine forgiveness, too, but he must also imagine having “fooled” mercy as a means of maintaining the illusion of power. Despite the redemptive possibilities inherent within reification’s self-knowledge, Roy never stands a chance; he is forever too occupied by his desire to remain a member of hegemony’s “club.” He is his own imaginative negation. The comparatively less-flashy and deliberate imaginative work undertaken by Belize in Roy’s hospital room, “where love and justice finally meet,” is at the deepest heart of the play, yet this does not mean that the more eye-catching, sub-conscious imaginative work of Harper and Prior can be neglected. Angels moves from bed to bed in a succession that is never lascivious. The truth Harper literally uncovers with Joe in their bed the final time they try and fail to make love is vital to her future. The truth Roy refuses to see on his deathbed, within his own delirious unconscious, is his commitment to remaining undone to the last. And the truth that Prior discovers as death’s “cessation” tempts him during his darkest night abed in the hospital is that “desire” is “what living things do. […] I’ve lived through such terrible times, and there are people who have lived through much worse, but … You see them living anyway. […] Death usually has to take life away. I don’t know if that’s just the animal. I don’t know if it’s not braver to die. But I recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive. We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do. It’s so much not enough, so inadequate, but still … Bless me anyway. I want more life.” Prior’s imaginative visions transform him from an angry, self-pitying victim into a man of purpose, who moves from wanting to die to resisting the Angel’s offer of death’s “respite.” Harper’s imaginative visions transform her from a craven, pill-popping victim into a woman of purpose, who moves from wanting to hide in her room and lie about her “buddy” to resisting the narcotic “deep-freeze for feelings” and choosing instead the “painful progress” of “[l]onging for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.” Their imaginative work would be valuable if all it had accomplished was their own personal transformation, but as with Belize, whose imaginative work reaches beyond himself to spread therapeutic mercy even to those whom he hates, Prior and Harper are directly responsible for the reified redemption of Hannah Pitt.
The two central women in Angels are the two characters most dramatically transformed by their experience, which is consistent not only with Kushner’s assertion, via Hannah, that modern life is “harder” for women, but reflects a long line of transformed women in Nichols’ film career, beginning with Streep in Silkwood right through Thompson in Wit (and whose progenitor in Nichols’ cinematic imagination is Maggie Terrell in The Day of the Dolphin). Harper begins the film as a housewife crouching in her Brooklyn apartment, incapable of making jello. She’s terrified of “men with knives” and the rending of the ozone layer. When she hears sex tips on the radio, she memorizes them like a recipe, but she has as much trouble pleasing Joe as she does trying to firm up her gelatin. In her shared hallucination with Prior, she reveals her parochial understanding of sexuality: “In my church we don’t believe in homosexuals.” (She’s also said she doesn’t believe in addiction, for what that’s worth.) Prior’s response, “In my church we don’t believe in Mormons,” has Harper going for a moment before she laughs and says, “Oh—I get it.” What comes next is the crux of this theatrically expressionist scene, which Nichols has formally gone to great pains (monochromatic photography, non-realistic dream space, flickering candles, eroticized presentation of Prior and Harper as queens in their distinct keys) to project as artificial, a beautiful series of visual clichés. Harper identifies what we’re watching as a “hallucination,” and she begins to question the limitations of her imagination:
I don’t understand this. If I didn’t ever see you before (and I don’t think I did), then I don’t think you should be here, in this hallucination, because in my experience the mind, which is where hallucinations come from, shouldn’t be able to make up anything that wasn’t there to start with, that didn’t enter it from experience, from the real world. Imagination can’t create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions. […] So when we think we’ve escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it’s really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable.
This is an enormously rich series of despairing observations, relevant not only to rendering the poverty of a fundamentalist life but also illuminating the experience of most of the other major characters in the film. Harper enters into the monologue with the assumption that, because she does not “believe” in (read: approve of or condone) certain phenomena (addiction, homosexuality), these phenomena have no relevance to her understanding—indeed, do not exist, at least in her world. Yet as she goes on, she acknowledges “untruthfulness” and the desire for “escape” as commonalities of experience, and concludes that such defaults make truth untenable. Ironically, articulating this truth—that we harbor the instinct to distort reality for our own purposes—makes other truths possible. It’s not coincidence that Prior and Harper reach the “threshold of revelation” immediately after she’s put these “depressing” truths about “falseness” into words. Prior, her projection of stereotypical homosexuality, reveals to her what she knows and has refused, in the “untruthfulness” of her marriage, to “believe”: that Joe is in the closet and her marriage, her life, a lie. She in turn imparts to Prior, in his own dream-vision, the assurance that, despite the contamination of his body (and Louis’ recoiling from its unpleasant reality), “there’s a part of you, the most inner part, entirely free of disease.” Each of them will take this essential kernel of revelation and, not without struggle (which is narrative, which is life), grow a new existence from it.
When Harper begins challenging the version of reality she has assembled (with the collusion of her closeted husband and the Mormon church), everything and everyone is suddenly up for her scrutiny. Joe is the most immediate target of her scrutiny, though her recognition that it’s her “buddy” of whom she’s been terrified (he’s “the man with the knives”) sends her reeling into the deep-freeze of her narcotic escape. Her sojourn with Mr. Lies, however, ends in frustration for them both. Harper’s delusions, like Roy’s, reflect both her true desires and her carefully constructed defaults. Unlike Roy, Harper manages to circumvent these defaults and arrive at truths she can bring back with her to the real world, the world that has all along informed her imaginative life. In “Antarctica,” she immediately begins to interject imaginative flourishes. It’s too cold (all the better, Mr. Lies reminds her, to numb feelings), so she wants to build a fire. She also wants to marry an Eskimo (comically reflective of her ignorance) and start a family, and Mr. Lies scolds her, reminding her to “[r]espect the delicate ecology of your delusions.” Harper’s potent love for Joe and desire for a nuclear family trump the deep freeze, and an “Antarctic Eskimo”—Joe—arrives, confounding the smooth, unflappable (even tranquil) Mr. Lies: she’s a better liar than he is, because beneath her lies always throbs the insistent reality of her unexamined life. By the time she emerges from the freezer, however, she’s Brooklyn’s newest homeless person, trying to start a bonfire with public property, and she’s returned to her apartment where she shares living space with yet another reality-denying Pitt fundamentalist. It’s important to note that her Antarctic idyll melts before Mother Pitt barges into her life: she answers Joe the Eskimo’s announcement that he’s having an “adventure” with an assurance that his un-closeted life can’t be “worse than what I imagine.” Inexorably, via her imagination’s recalibration towards truth, Harper pulls herself against the tides of illusion.
With Mother Pitt, who shelters against the realities of New York at the Mormon Visitors Center, Harper finds a negative model, but the “Mormon Mother” in the Visitor Center diorama offers another perspective. All three Pitts have enacted a counter-journey to the one celebrated in the diorama: Joe, Harper, and now Hannah have all trekked east in search of a better life (Joe notes cruelly of his mother, “You sort of bring the desert with you”—though to be fair, all the Pitts do, as their name implies: each is in his or her own distinctive slough of despond). Hannah’s square-jawed resolve dovetails in Harper’s imagination with the doughty Mormon pioneers, whose hard-headed resolve saw them past the obstacles of persecution, flood, drought, illness, and the mountainous gateway to their western Eden in desert Utah. Although greatly reduced in scope from the stage version (and without a second hallucinatory visit with Prior), Harper’s visions in the diorama room in the film produce a similar effect: they are Harper’s internal monologue externalized as a dialogue between Harper and the pioneer wife she comes to understand as her doppelganger (even though it’s the “dummy husband” who more nearly approximates Joe; when the Mormon Mother, played by Robin Weigert, comes to life and begins talking to Harper, she bears only the vaguest resemblance to Mary-Louise Parker: she’s plainer and thicker, but of similar age and temperament). Harper asks an innocuous cliché: “Was it a hard thing, crossing the prairies?” but the Mormon Mother won’t allow her such an easy out from the hard work of her imagination: “You ain’t stupid. So don’t ask stupid. Ask something for real.” This hallucinatory exchange finally verbalizes the trend of all Harper’s hallucinations, against her wishes and perhaps even against her better judgment, towards the “real” and away from the “untruthfulness” of the objectified life she and Joe have shared. It’s at the end of this penultimate episode of the mini-series that she confronts Joe with the accusation of her naked body and elicits from him the “Truth” that she is “nothing” for him. Although devastated, even stunned into temporary immobility by this truth (she still stands naked in the doorway after he has left), she thanks him as he goes. The moment has left her, in the best, most literal sense of the word, disillusioned. Whatever spell she and Joe (and her received beliefs) have cast together over themselves, the spell for her has broken and, drug-free, she is able to leave Joe (still begging to stay and cling to the tatters of his own illusions), the prison-keep of their apartment, and New York. She retraces the pioneer journey west at film’s end, on a night flight to San Francisco, blazing her own trail against her reified inheritance. Beaming out at us from the portal of her window-seat, she’s lit by the setting sun and an inner radiance. She looks better, healthier, than at any other moment in the film, including the projected glamour of her first hallucination, shared with Prior. She is real, and having witnessed her own mending, can now envision (without drugs) a more wholesale mending that encompasses not only suffering souls but the natural world.
If encounter with reality has given Harper a flattering makeover, it’s a minor alteration compared to the physical transformation of her mother-in-law. Our first glimpse of Hannah is when any of us would be at our least presentable, awakened from sleep in the middle of the night. Her hair is a lifeless tousle, her features blurred, her robe bunched around thick, midlife dimensions. Her impatience with her son’s distress is as unattractive as her appearance, as she scolds him for calling her so late, for his embarrassing talk about his father and himself, for his drinking (which she implies, as a last word, is the root of all the phone call’s litany of problems—“Drinking is a sin. A sin! I raised you better than that”—when in fact it’s merely the least serious of his many symptoms; Joe is in no danger of addiction to any substance but fast food). Arriving in New York, she’s literally weighed down by baggage, and though she gets results, as when she barks at Thompson’s homeless woman until Hannah has a route out of the Bronx, she continues to manifest as unappealing (assuming that everyone ought to speak English, the one language she knows, and outraged that an immigrant bus driver allows her to become so lost). When Prior first meets her, at the Visitors Center to which he has been led in stalking Joe, he exchanges insulting assumptions with Hannah, although plain-speaking Hannah is actually less direct than Prior. At first she only attempts to ignore him, then to shoo him away. When it is clear that he is here because of Joe, she inquires, with palpable distaste, “Are you a … a homosexual?” When he confirms her diagnosis, she asks if he is “typical,” and sizing her up, he begins his counter-assault: “Oh, I’m stereotypical,” and cites the profession of hairdressing as an example. She immediately takes the bait (as Harper had earlier, in her stereotyped hallucination), asking if this is what Prior does for a living (and unlike her daughter-in-law, failing even in delayed reaction to see the joke). His eyes darting appraisingly over dowdy hair, features, and ensemble, he says, “Well it would be your lucky day if I was, because frankly …”
At this moment, something in Prior seizes up, and his change begins. From the beginning of the film, he has been a mixture of terror and rage, most often aimed at Louis in symbiotic tandem with the reality of his AIDS diagnosis sinking in. Louis’ hints about abandonment serve as Prior’s presentiment, something he doesn’t have the courage to treat as prophecy, and thus he makes no emotional or practical preparation for its fulfillment. After Louis has left him alone with his illness, then has the temerity to resurface and tell him about Joe, Prior’s outraged self-pity reaches its apotheosis: “There are thousands of gay men in New York City with AIDS, and nearly every one of them is being taken care of by … a friend or by … a lover who has stuck by them. […] Everyone got that except me. I got you.” This has the predictable (and desired) effect on Louis, whose impotent tears become Prior’s next target. This is when he banishes Louis, telling him not to return without visible evidence of his suffering. There is no doubt that Prior has been treated unfairly, both by life and Louis. Yet he has not been abandoned. Aside from the compassionate care he is receiving at the hospital, he has a constant and steadfast friend in Belize, and he has no reason to think Belize will not stick with him no matter the cost. For much of the narrative, Prior behaves badly, and his behavior (already eccentric with his insistence upon the monk’s cowl as his public persona) sinks still lower when he destroys his delicately stabilized health by stalking Joe, humiliating himself and Belize at Joe’s office at the courthouse, and essentially indulging in a multi-borough tantrum. Launching into a bitchy insult of an unsuspecting stranger, as he’s about to do when confronting Hannah, is when he finally hits bottom, and Nichols and Kushner literalize this by having a feverish spell knock him to the floor, and thus into Hannah’s capable hands.
The dialogues they have are quite unlike those of any other ideologically opposed individuals in the film. Louis and Belize (who aren’t even that opposed ideologically) snipe at one another because of Louis’ pomposity and Belize’s righteous anger on behalf of Prior (he’s also disgusted that Louis has shown so little interest in Belize himself as a person that he has no inkling of Belize’s personal life and wrongly assumes his antagonism towards Louis is because he still holds a torch for Prior). Roy and Belize, of course, hurl colorful abuse at one another, and although Belize bestows typically empathic physical care, neither allows this to soften his personal antipathy towards the other. Louis and Joe avoid substantive discussion of their differences altogether until it’s too late, and all that’s left to them is violence. But Hannah and Prior transform each other by speaking and listening to the truth of each other in newfound mutual respect. It may be possible to see some of the groundwork for Hannah’s transformation in the time she spends alone with Harper, especially when Harper assures her mother-in-law that only Hannah is more out of place in her life than Harper is, and when Hannah confides aloud her “disappointment” at having accustomed herself to “how disappointing life is.” Harper is hardly a prophetess at this point; she’s just barely verbal. Yet there is a submerged tremor of suffering and outrage in Harper that leaves Hannah pensive. Hannah is as frigid emotionally as Harper has imagined she’d like to be; seeing her mother-in-law is her final cure for desiring the deep-freeze. Yet neither woman ultimately desires the cold. Talking with Harper, Hannah is franker about her life than ever before; Prior occasions Hannah’s further thaw in ways her own son and daughter-in-law cannot, so ingrained is their history with each other. Warming to Prior promotes the heat of her wrestle with the Angel, as well as the possibility that Hannah may one day be able to share her warmth with Joe, the man lost out in the cold at narrative’s end.
Sitting in Emily’s examination room with Prior at the hospital, Hannah muses, “When I got up this morning, this is not how I envisioned the day would end.” Delivered by Streep in that clipped, heartland plain-speak, the line is comic relief, but contextually at this point in Angels, with its obsessive motif of the relative limits and limitlessness of the imagination, the comment is also her referendum on her own emptiness. Hannah couldn’t navigate her own way out of the Bronx, let alone existential alienation. However, she is prepared to voice not only her reified circumstance but her “disappointment” with this predicament, leaving her open to seek alternatives beginning with the expansion of her consciousness. She is far from the Mormon safe house she has defaulted to on the West Side: she’s in the hospital, holding the hand of a terrified AIDS sufferer. The walls of the tiny room she’s lived in for five-plus decades haven’t so much expanded as exploded. Introducing Hannah to Emily, Prior says, “This is my ex-lover’s lover’s Mormon mother.” After a comic pause, Emily says, “Even in New York in the eighties, that is strange.” Prior, who has earlier attempted to tell Belize his vision of the Angel (to practical-minded Belize’s resistance), now unburdens himself to Hannah, whose grounding in the eschatological mythology of the Latter-Day Saints makes it comparatively easy for her to talk about angel appearances. Despite avowing his own experience, he finds her description of Joseph Smith’s vision “preposterous.” Mother Pitt admonishes him: “It’s not polite to call other people’s beliefs preposterous.” She adds that Smith’s vision was the product of “great need for understanding,” certainly a quality that would describe most characters in the film. “His desire made prayer. His prayer made an angel. The angel was real. I believe that.” Astonishingly, Prior says, “I don’t,” even though he has made this verbatim assertion to Belize and then Hannah about his own angel. When he explains himself by labeling “repellent” her presumed system of belief, she demands to know: “What do I believe?” He responds with the cliché cop-out, “I can just imagine …” Hannah firmly corrects him, using his own diction: “No, you can’t imagine the things in my head. You don’t make assumptions about me, mister; I won’t make them about you.” For the first time, Prior actually sees Hannah rather than his objectifying projection of her. A moment later, she confesses to a failure of imagination about her son Joe’s sexuality, not because of a culturally received aversion but rather because, “for me, men in any configuration … well, they’re so lumpish and stupid.” (Having expressed these thoughts aloud serves as a segue to what she discovers about herself with the glamorous, amorous Angel in her shared dream with Prior.) Prior regards her with even greater seriousness now, and he says, in reified self-consciousness, “I wish you would be more true to your demographic profile. Life is confusing enough.”
Together on their shared “threshold of revelation,” waiting for the hospital to find him a room, they begin to talk more easily, even to share a laugh over what God does to recalcitrant prophets (“feeds them to whales”), but Prior’s laughter ends abruptly in a coughing fit that sends him spiraling back towards the mire of self-pity. Hannah has already admitted earlier that she doesn’t “have pity. It’s just not something I have,” and as he foretells his certain death, she interjects, “You shouldn’t talk that way. You ought to make a better show of yourself.” If she’d only spoken the first sentence, it might have been construed as pity and thereby invited even more wallowing in woe, but by adding the second sentence, she makes the first sentence a critique of his attitude, not a pep talk about his illness. Prior tries to cow her by flashing his K.S. lesion, now nearly the breadth of his chest, and, without dismissing it, she refuses to make it totemic: “It’s a cancer. Nothing more.” And then, making a full thought of the phrase, so it can’t be construed as a misunderstanding of the gravity of his situation: “Nothing more human than that.” Once again, she makes a motion to leave, and Prior asks her to stay. “You comfort me. You do—you strengthen my spine.” After he has weathered his dark night with the Angel, as Belize welcomes him “back to the world” and Emily proclaims “the dawn of man,” Prior wants to know where Hannah is. Belize explains that she’s just stepped out to the rest room, but follows incredulously with the question, “Where did you find her?” With a warmth that admits none of the chilly irony with which Belize and Prior can sometimes regard the world together, Prior says, “We found each other.” The phrasing permits two interpretations: each has identified, against all the odds of objectified expectation, a friend; each has located the other who was, at the time, stumbling and lost. What happens to them during their shared dream with the Angel is nothing less than awakening—for Hannah, a sexual awakening only suggested rather than fully explored by the narrative (reflecting Hannah’s natural reticence); and for Prior, an existential awakening to the preciousness of life, which compensates for its absurdity and suffering.
At the end of the film, after the apocalyptic storm of the Millennium’s advent gives way to the restructuring perspective of Perestroika, Nichols and Kushner afford both visionary Prophets a last word, even though Belize has already intoned the words at the core of Angels—“love and justice,” “forgiveness,” “peace”—that weather even apocalyptic storms. Harper speaks to us from the calm of the tropopause, a liminal space of “safe air” from which she can contemplate an imagined mending of all that is broken, torn, and wracked. She knows she must descend again into the “painful progress” of the world, but for the first time, this prospect invigorates her. If Harper prophesies, Prior is the Prophet, the one who dresses the part, who understands suffering because “I am a gay man, and I am used to pressure, to trouble.” Offered celestial nepenthe in his dream of heaven, Prior literally rages against the dying of the light, demanding that the Council of the Continental Principalities take the absentee deity that allowed “all this destruction […] all the terrible days of this terrible century” to “court,” should this absent creator return “to see […] how much suffering his abandonment had created, if all he has to offer is death” as compensation for pain and suffering. It is Prior’s way of making “a better show of” himself, as Hannah has advised. The second episode of Angels ends with Prior saying, “I wish I was dead.” Here in the final episode, confronting what he has precipitously wished for, Prior observes that most people who have lived “through much worse” refuse to surrender to death, and he opts for “hope” and “more life.” No more dramatic “transformation,” Nichols’ stated object of his filmmaking, could be imagined.
Two gay young men wrestle with an angel in Angels. Joe Pitt wrestles to deny his life, to fight “with everything I have, to kill it.” Prior wrestles to wring from immortality’s “cessation” the privilege and burden “to be alive.” As the Angel bestows the sign of blessing, with Millennium’s storm still crackling, she’s left alone in the ruin of heaven, as Prior turns and strides in resolution away from her towards his life-bed, once assumed to be his deathbed, in one of the most beautiful and logically elegant sequences of the entire film. Angels is constructed as an intricate series of mirrors: Harper and Joe both stand naked before their illusory loves and are left humiliatingly abandoned, invited to disillusionment; Joe and Prior both wrestle with angels; Prior and Hannah both discover the body’s connection to the soul through ecstatic union with the Angel; and so on. At the film’s climax, the thunder of Millennium roaring over Manhattan, two gay men confront Death in hospital rooms, attended by Belize. Roy yields to the angel of Death, while Prior’s wrestling produces a truce and a blessing. The Angel’s blessing is her last act in the drama—she won’t be seen again; after this, Thompson is “plain” Emily. While Harper and Prior continue to prophesy, they do so without the cinematic pyrotechnics to which the narrative has been accustomed. What remains is the film’s self-conscious artificiality, which underscores the narrative’s “double vision,” as Kushner calls it, with “empathic imagination” and “skepticism” equally invoked. “I believe in the power of theater,” and by extension, the cinema, he says, “to teach and to heal through compassion, through shared agony. And it also offers a way of developing critical consciousness.”58 In this sense, Kushner’s “double vision” promotes the imaginative work entailed within reification’s redemptive dimension, which invites us to understand our objecthood and to imagine alternatives. Within moments of regaining consciousness after his near-death experience, Prior has become Dorothy, regaling a coterie of loving, familiar faces with his tale of having seen them in his “remarkable dream.” The aggressive and comic allusion to The Wizard of Oz is an internal deconstruction of the “realities” of heaven we have just witnessed in Prior’s company. The allusions continue: saying goodbye to Hannah (who has also had a “remarkable dream”) but only allowing her to leave if she reassures him she will return, Prior trots out the familiar parting meditation of that notorious dreamer and drama queen, Blanche DuBois: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Hannah, who really must brush up her Broadway literacy with her newfound gay friends, bristles, “Well, that’s a stupid thing to do.” But it has become both Prior’s and Hannah’s new strategy for coping with life’s confusion and alienation.
The Bethesda Fountain is the symbolic center of Central Park, which is the symbolic center of public community in New York, which is the symbolic center of American culture. The fountain and its angel also serve as the setting for the coda of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, adapted for Nichols and HBO. In having his four friends meet at the fountain, with its biblical allusion to ancient Jerusalem’s civic center of healing, Kushner invokes a prophecy of expanded citizenship, a “kindness” (as Nichols calls it) that locates all benevolent action between people in our species’ essential equality—our shared kind (photograph by the author).
The brief epilogue in Central Park returns us to a site (and sight) that has become familiar to us as we journey through Angels, since the Angel gracing the Bethesda Fountain is the climactic image of the title sequence that opens each of the film’s six episodes. Mendelsohn calls the title sequence “one of the most moving moments” of the entire production, “suggest[ing] something essential about the mighty scope both of Kushner’s concerns […] and of the drama he’s written.”59 In a seamless, bravura use of CGI and form cutting, the sequence begins over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, moves over the Angel Moroni atop the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City, past the Gateway Arch of St. Louis and the skyscrapers of Chicago to dip out of the clouds once and for all above the Financial District in Manhattan (a shot similar to the one at the end of Working Girl, with the difference that the shot moves uptown and into the park rather than out into the harbor), ending in a zoom to a computer-generated close-up of the Bethesda Angel, which, just before the titles end, shifts ominously into motion. Nancy Franklin writes that when the angel “lift[s] its blank, grave eyes to stare into your own,” the effect is to include, or perhaps indict, the audience: “‘Yes, you,’ the eyes seem to say. ‘This is about you, too.’”60 The closing scene of the film of course permits no such CGI “magic,” but it is no less self-conscious of its artifice. In fact, the epilogue is among the most artificial sequences of the film. The site is one of the loveliest in the Park, a complex dialogue between the fountain and its central sculptural element, the angel sculpture of Emma Stebbins (first woman to create a public sculpture in New York61), the Lake and boathouse, the Bethesda Terrace, and, presiding over the skyline, the monumental apartment towers of the West Side. It is a central locus of the Park not only in terms of geography but also in psychological and symbolic terms. The project’s chief planners, Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, called the Terrace and Fountain “the heart of the park”62; the allusion to Bethesda accesses the fifth chapter of the Gospel of John, with the story of the public pool in Jerusalem which was reported to have healing powers and so had become the locus of many of the disadvantaged of the city. “It is not surprising to speak metaphorically of […] religious symbolism at the heart of Central Park. The Park was created to be a moral landscape.”63 Nichols and Kushner are equally interested in establishing a moral geography for a transformed culture. As Central Park is at the symbolic and geographical heart of democratic Manhattan, free and open to all, so the Bethesda Complex—not Wall Street or any of the city’s many cultural institutions—is Nichols and Kushner’s civic center. Kushner chooses this place for his closing scene of regenerative prophecy because it is so centrally symbolic to the identity of the metropolis, which is as much in evolution as any of the characters.64 The location of the final scene of Angels in America weaves a poetic web of historical allusions—ancient Jerusalem, Old New York, the 1960s counterculture, post–Reagan advancements in AIDS research—to community healing.
In early versions of Angels, Kushner had Prior make the claim that the complex was a memorial to the Civil War dead, contextually freighting the site with Prior’s vision of a second civil war, passively waged against the homosexual community as society ignored the AIDS scourge; when Kushner was corrected about the “purpose” of the Bethesda Complex, which makes no mention of the Civil War, he removed this allusion from the play. What replaces the allusion is Prior’s more poetic observation that angels “commemorate death but they suggest a world without dying.” Given the context of the scene within the narrative, a four-years-on coda in which death has not claimed Prior, he remains a prophet but in a less strident key. He has matured into his role, and he presides over the scene, in character but post-drama, directly addressing the camera and orchestrating the direct addresses of his friends. It is his birthday, four years after his near-death deal with the Angel, and his desire remains consistent: for healing and wholeness, for “More Life.” Of the four friends assembled, Hannah is the most changed, “noticeably different,” in Kushner’s original stage play description: “she looks like a New Yorker, and she is reading the New York Times.”65 Fisher writes, “A wiser, more sophisticated Hannah asserts Kushner’s view of the interconnectedness of all humanity, regardless of race, sexual preference, religion, or politics and of the primacy of loyalty and commitment to others and to society.”66 In our last glimpse of her four years earlier, Hannah has encountered Joe by chance in Brooklyn, both of them on the outside of a street-corner Mennonite chorus,67 and Hannah has made tentative overtures to be there for him as she has been for Prior. That he neither appears nor is mentioned in the film’s epilogue suggests he may still be wandering, as we saw him last, disappearing down into the underground precincts of the subway and his shame.68 Perhaps surprisingly (given Prior’s rejection of Louis’ renewed overtures of love), Louis is present in the coda—Prior has rejected Louis only as a lover, confounding expectation and testifying to Belize’s ideology of “forgiveness.” Louis and Belize, who is the one constant angel of Prior’s past, present, and future life, continue to irritate one another (and to abide each other, for Prior). The last action mirrored in the film is the blessing: Nichols visually alludes to the Angel’s blessing on Prior “in heaven” by framing Prior as he delivers a blessing to us in close-up with the Bethesda angel over his left shoulder. His defiant prophecies about the reified redemption of the marginalized form the bulk of his parting homily, in which he asserts “we are not going away,” and “we will be citizens.” Nichols says “being a citizen” is the “main subject” of Angels, and he was struck by the centrality of “kindness” in the dramatic architecture of Kushner’s narrative.69 The connotative inference in the word “kind” of a relationship between benevolence (to be kind) and kinship (to be of a kind) offers perspective on the vision of Angels in America. Citizenship is a shared understanding of “kindness” in all its forms, and the wisdom of reified awareness transcends constructed prejudice in hope of an encompassing fellow feeling.
Prior leaves us with more than mere prophecy, however; he transfers his blessing on to us, as a great work of art must. With his final words, “The Great Work Begins,” Prior Walter closes Nichols and Kushner’s great work. These are the words imagined by Prior in his dreams of the Angel, a self-exhortation to prophetic life, to dream past his visions into the real light of day. In this final, daylight, direct address to the audience, Nichols and Kushner offer to us in Angels in America the invitation to cross the “threshold of revelation,” commissioning a continuation of the “great work” begun vicariously, magically in their art, to awaken us to the redemption latent in our reified world. “‘It’s the thing I’m the proudest of,’” Nichols has said of his epic.70 In the Great Work of the imagination begin responsibilities.