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Dallas Buyers Club, like all movies, is available to be anything to everyone. This essay for Visual AIDS, writer Anthony Easton explores some of what is going on within the awards season favorite, providing an opportunity to consider what the film is communicating around a variety of issues, including Texas, trans bodies and drugs.
Dallas Buyers Club has all of the marks of making someone who cares about HIV/AIDS pissed off—it has a straight protagonist, played by Matthew McConaughey, straight love story that includes Jennifer Garner, and a straight actor (Jared Leto) playing a trans character who teaches lessons of mercy and tolerance. Plus the straight guy with AIDS is a redneck, a homophobe, and might have gotten the virus through anonymous sex in the back of an eighteen-wheeler. But being pissed about all of this provides legitimacy to a film, a movie that pretends it knows what it is doing, or even what it is about. Even in the glow of all the awards Dallas Buyers Club is receiving, it is good to break it down, and think about what the film is really about, what it is really trying to say, and being honest about where it fails.
RODEO
Rodeo looks good on film, especially that god’s eye view of the bull rider in
his chute with the animal. It’s also a useful metaphor. Think of the half
failed Jack Twist, in Brokeback Mountain,
he doesn’t quite succeed at rodeo, nor at picking up boys in the bar
afterwards. And although he does succeed finding a wife in the back of a car,
that never quite works out either. In these films, the shift and pitch of the
bull, mirrors the shift and pitch of an unstable life. In Dallas Buyers Club Roy Woodroof is shot at the rodeo, four
important times:
- 1.The beginning—not god’s eye view shot, but him in a sickly yellow shirt, against jaundiced wall;
- 2.Him playing poker with his buddies—talking about being confused about Rock Hudson and how he doesn’t understand how he could be a “cocksucker” because he had all that “Hollywood pussy”;
- 3.When diagnosed—he sits in the stand, and faces off against a rodeo clown,
- 4.Lastly, when he is about to die, as a coda to the rest of the film, he rides a perfect white bull.
Director Jean-Marc Vallée shoots these scenes through the struts of the chute, or jumps quickly between wide and close up shots, or makes the whole scene crowded with people; he makes sure that the bronco rider is still there making it less iconic and more paranoid.
SLEAZE
What it means to be a cowboy in Texas is to be more than a little sleazy. McConaughey
in the last few years, working against his vapid rom-com reputation, has been
making an encyclopedia of sleaze, often about the ways men act or talk about
women, when it doesn’t matter if they are there. (See how he teaches The Kid to
strip in Magic Mike; the endless
monologue in Wolf of Wall Street,
closeted queer and rape victim in the swampsleaze opus The Paper Boy, the contract killer and dirty cop in Killer Joe) There are bits in Dallas
Buyers Club that are as sleazy as anything in those films. He drinks, he
smokes, he does coke and meth, he rips off his buddies, he has a lot of sex,
sometimes with women he pays. He deals drugs enough on the side, that most
people seem to know him as a dealer rather than as an electrician. The day that
he is found to be HIV positive, he and a buddy fuck two women.
There
is a scene where he watches his friend screw through an open door--it becomes a
kind of act of recursive framing: Him, looking through the door, to a mirror,
three bodies in a very tight space. He wakes up after the bacchanal, discloses
to his friend and, drinks more. The movie tries a neat trick, ennobling a
sleazy character through hardship— Woodroof’s HIV makes him want to help people.
A good things about that string of sleaze MM has done in the last few
years, is that there were no efforts to make the characters either safe or
palatable. Too bad that run couldn’t have continued on into Dallas.
HISTORY
The first movie I ever saw about HIV/AIDS was The Band Played On, where the doctors played heroes, trying to find
a cure. I have been living in the shadow of the disease for my entire 33 years,
and know the doctors are not the only way of working through these issues. I
know the AIDS denial movement, I know the ones that are convinced about the
efficacy of plants, I know the fights about which care works better, and about
the problems with meds and side effects. And, the history of those with AIDS
versus those who are treating those with AIDS is still alive. If they are going
to swing this movie into the murk of those debates, if they are going to make
the historical movie they think they are making, it might be helpful to have
some other conversation than just repeating AZT is poison, and the odd piece of
set dressing. (Gran Fury’s Reagan poster was a nice touch though).
DRUGS
In a pursuit of drugs, the movie goes from Tokyo to Israel, from New York to
San Francisco, it goes down to Mexico, and there was one line about going up to
Alberta. It talks about Leto’s character Rayon and how much she loves intravenous
drugs, and Woodroof’s fondness for cocaine is communicated. It hints at being a
movie about how drugs are transported, bought, sold, and distributed. It almost
makes a point—hat the mechanics of the state, and regulation of the state,
flatten the difference between what is good and what is bad (note how Jennifer
Garner’s character flirts with arguments against the efficacy of AZT). Making a
film about unregulated pharmaceuticals being the new Cocaine, that is a film
with some potential.
PROBLEMS OF MONEY
Movies about the problems of money have existed since the silent films--from
Eric Stroheim’s Greed to Citizen Kane to Bonnie and Clyde to Risky
Business. This film is about money—with its cash in envelopes, card games,
pockets full of hundreds, and even the idea of selling memberships. The movie feels like we are exploring quasi-legal
cash money game and yet, one of the weakest scenes in the movie is where Rayon
goes to her father at the bank. She asks for help, and their estrangement over
her gender is made clear. Leto plays Rayon in a suit, and they talk about how
much money Daddy has, and how much money Rayon needs—it is not convincing. The
“grey market” that keeps working class people afloat is absent from that scene,
but it is present in the rest of the movie. The tension of green in plain white
envelopes is never really addressed.
ROMANTIC COMEDY
Jennifer Garner’s doctor is interested and seduced by McConaughey's Ron
Woodroof. They go out for dinner; he gives her a painting his mama painted. She
gets frustrated by him, and knocks holes in the wall when she is trying to hang
it. They go out on another date. He steals her prescription pad. She’s not too
angry. It seems that they fall in love. In this falling in love, he becomes
more conservative. He does fewer drugs, he lives longer, he drinks less, he is
no longer as homophobic or as transphobic as one can imagine. He becomes a
better man, but there are limits to that desire to become a better man. They
never fuck. Cocaine, heart attacks and dead trans martyrs can be shown on
screen, but in Dallas Buyers Club, a
pretty white girl risking sero-converting is a bridge too fair.
EROTIC DRAMA
This
is not one of those 70s films like The
Last Tango in Paris or Swept Away
where straight boys who do not understand who they are, or what they are doing,
through a series of sexual acts, have their identities reaffirmed. The sex in
those movies, or the irony of the sex in those movies, is though they are
intended to be radically upsetting of the status quo, often reinforce a
culture’s fears of genital concerns. Though this movie features a number of nude scenes, the
women who are nude are those who have been paid to be that way--they are
strippers and prostitutes. Though there are scenes where his home is
vandalized, his friends leave him, and he is violently oppressed for being HIV+
and therefore queer, by his service to the community, he gets better friends,
more money, and a longer life. At the end of the movie, this redneck hustler
even redeems the act of bull riding. The old life, of libertine pleasure is
policed.
HOW DID TEXAS GET SO TINY?
Everyone
has the perfect cowboy boots, bars serve that Gold label Coors, a Cadillac is
bought and a Cadillac is sold, (and this is considered a an example of Woodroof's emerging
capitulation to conventional morality). The accents are
perfect. The film feels smeared with the sweat and grease of a too hot summer.
It is a movie that is shot in half shots--through windows or doors, the back
seats of cars, with too crowded frames, in all close ups or medium close ups,
with jump cuts. Texas is supposed to be expansive, wide country, but this movie
is so interior--even the hospital scenes have a collapsed paranoia. There is a
scene of the rodeo, where 6 people are crowded around the stub end of a fence,
each of them not having space enough to move. There is a scene at a bar with
the same crowd of people, and the same lack of mobility. The hotel that he ends
up doing his business out of, it is the crowded rooms that are emphasized, and
not the vast expanse of parking lot and sky. When he makes a little bit of
money, he is given a house, and the house itself becomes tiny. The film never
does a pan or a sweep, or moves backwards, in a way that would suggest any real
scale.
There is a scene, early in the film, which doesn’t last more than 30 seconds. Kenny Rogers’ Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town is playing. We see the dusky rose of a Dallas sunset, and one line of the song, and then we go back to an ill lit and claustrophobic home. The song is about a man who was paralyzed from the Vietnam War, and his wife--who steps out on him, because he cannot move. It is a song against the government, and about the nature of sex. It is a song that would be understood by people in Texas, but it is used here only as a wink and a nod, and on to the same misery. Imagine a scene, where the song just played, and McConaughey drove his car, lopping and slow, through an actual landscape--it might indicate how life is really lived.
OSCAR BAIT
Jonathan
Demme make Silence of the Lambs, and
the Jame Grumb /Buffalo Bill character was a nightmare, but was imbued with a
strangeness, a set of characteristics, and played so well, that the word didn’t
seem cynical. We had Philadelphia, by
the same director, whose presence was cynical--Tom Hanks, all American boy next
door with the perfect husband and a death that was so noble that it was
literally operatic. We had Boys Don’t Cry,
which got the bored drinking, riding around, and the landscapes of ennui and
terror perfectly correct. But it was another martyrdom, and like the previously
mentioned films, won an Oscar. More recently, we had Precious, dumb about race and dumb about class, and continued to
make poor folks incapable of anything but a late Bette Davis kind of
sociopathy. And now we have Dallas Buyers
Club, which has the potential for being cynical, brash, smart--for making a
lot of statements about how money works, or about how drugs work, or about how
ugly Texas really might be, and there is a hint or a flirt. But Oscars got to
be made, and money needs to flow, and making a movie is expensive. So, we are
given the perfect doctor, the handsome lawyer, the transgendered victim dying
and lovely, and a movie star slumming it for gold. But he has spent the last
few years slumming, making transgressive, fuck-you movies of genuine power. Too
bad this was not one of them.
IN SEEING DEATH
In traditional accounts of martyrdom, the dying is deliberate, and seeing a
body is a mark of autonomy. We see neither the bodies of Rayon or of Woodroof.
But with Rayon, we see how it affects Woodroof, and how it adds to the
narrative of treatment that he is (both financially and socially) pushing. The
last scene we see of Woodroof, he is on the bull, working against the sickness
of his body. The difference between Rayon and Ron’s death is symbolic of how
the movie thinks of Rayon as subject to Ron “heroics”.
Imagine a movie about a rodeo fan who dies of AIDS and the failures of lost glory (Woodroof in really life never rode); imagine a movie where someone does good because of money and no one is ashamed of the capitalism; imagine a discussion of what drug use actually means, imagine a mainstream romantic comedy about AIDS that actually features fucking; or a Hollywood funded film where the sex isn’t code for something reactionary; imagine a working class tale of Texan energy that doesn’t force a claustrophobic smallness; imagine a movie where all bodies mattered. There are so many small details, and elegant edges to Dallas Buyers Club, but the film, because it wanted an Oscar, fails.
Anthony Easton is a writer, scholar and rodeo fiend.
For another look at the film, check out Visual AIDS Program Manager Ted Kerr's article, 47 Things I Talk About When I Talk About The Dallas Buyers Club for In the Flesh.