Tuesday, December 09, 2003

NEW LIFE

There's a lot to say about Angels in America, the HBO version. And a lot of it's already been said. What strikes me, now having watched all of hour 1 and most of hour 3 is..how it felt to be in New York City in the 1980s. To move here to have that quintessential New York experience, the struggle and the triumph, and to be swept, as a straight woman with a lot of gay friends, into something much larger and more terrible than your own ambition. To see the people you admired collapse and vanish. It did feel apocalyptic, and Kushner captured it, and Nichols captures it again.

What's so strange now, 18 years later, is how the "AIDS crisis" has now receded from the horizon, because it has spread to Africa, China, and the poor all over. Will of Will and Grace seems never to have volunteered at God's Love We Deliver (please correct me if I'm wrong), and Jack, that narcissist, has become, of all things, a student nurse. Which in the old days, meaning the 80s, would mean that he tended to his sick brothers, as Belize does in Angels. Heh. Imagine a dream sequence where Belize and Jack meet up. What would they have to say to each other?

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