We Were Here

We Were Here is an amazing documentary, which takes archival footage and photos from the whole period of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, and interweaves it with current interviews with five very different people who were deeply involved. The best thing about it is the way it gives a human face to the epidemic and takes you back to the way the first days must have felt like -- the mounting fear as man after man got sick and died, and no one knew why. I teach a course in gay film and literature, which is a very introductory survey; I have a section on AIDS, and a couple of months ago, when I began that section, I said to my students that this was my least favorite part of the course; I was stunned when a student asked me why. It had never really occurred to me that my 20-year-old, mostly straight-identified students had no clue what the epidemic felt like, and that if they think about HIV/AIDS at all, it's probably as a manageable STD. So of course I'll be adding this film to the mix, so that I don't have to try to explain to them.

This film tries to re-create the gradual understanding of what was happening, and how people reacted. So for me, the archival material was the most powerful. Some people allowed themselves to be filmed as they went to the hospital when they first got sick; you can see them as they realize that they really have it -- you can watch a young man who's the same age as my students, maybe 20, and the look on his face as he realizes he's going to die ... maybe in a few days, maybe in a few weeks. You see people covered with KS lesions -- I'd forgotten (or blocked) what that looked like. You see gray, skeletal people who look as if they're in their nineties, but they're really 25. I'd forgotten what it all really looked like. This film puts you back, reminds you what it was like when gay men -- as someone in the movie puts it -- were dropping like flies.

That is what most haunts me: the faces of people who, on camera, realize that they are going to die. Everyone went so fast in the beginning, and there was nothing to do -- the nurses can only help people die as well as possible. I remember the feeling of helplessness when there were no drugs at all -- a friend who went to Denmark for some weird blood-boiling treatment, people who went to Kenya for a herbal infusion, all grasping at straws.

The experience of watching this is hard to describe: I'm happy the film was made, because my experience with my students jolted me into the realization of how fast history is forgotten, but being put back into that space is fairly terrible. I'm saving for another blog my thoughts on my own relationship to AIDS in the eighties, when I identified as a straight woman, but certainly that was one of the movie's effects -- making the audience think about where we were in relation to the crisis. Director David Weissman carefully frames the experience of AIDS through the lens of the community's response, and even though in the Q&A afterwards he talked about his hope that the film would relieve people of the guilt they felt about not doing enough, I don't see how that's possible. By definition, the five people he interviews are those who did a lot -- were there at the right time, stepped up, were creative and imaginative and passionate about crafting a response to the crisis. The title surely refers to them, too -- "we were here" is a plaintive cry from those who died too young, who must have been terrified that they were slipping unexpectedly away from the world before they'd had a chance to fully inhabit it, and might be forgotten or even blanked out by those who didn't want to remember gay men. But "we were here" is also the people who went through the fire, and made sure that the forgetting didn't happen, the ones who were on the front lines of response. How can we not measure ourselves against those who did so much of the right thing?

The very next night, I went to see Contagion: the contrast with We Were Here makes a bad film even worse. Because the film tracks the spread of a new virus -- one with a 30% mortality rate that's spread through touch or sneezing and kills people within a couple of days -- it's a perfect opportunity to think about fear and panic. It spreads across the world, from Patient Zero Gwyneth Paltrow, and the U.S. turns into a disaster zone, with states closing their borders, giant FEMA hospitals staffed by nuns (because nurses go on strike), looting, murders, food riots, etc. But Stephen Soderbergh should have read a little more Octavia Butler -- his vision of that disaster is glossed over, prettified, utterly unrealistic. This could have been a meditation on the limits of community -- a negative obverse to the way the gay community helped each other in We Were Here. Minneapolitans (where Paltrow's family lives) are clearly not gay: they seem quite happy to lock themselves up in their houses and watch from behind the curtains while looters shoot their neighbors. Amazingly, their houses seem to be warm and clean in the dead of winter, with running water and food -- despite the fact that most people have stopped going to work, and it's hard to imagine who might be keeping the water running and the cell phones working so teenagers can text each other about how rotten it is to be grounded: that's the worst effect of a plague, after all. Throw in a dash of potential racism as it's suggested that the virus originates in Kowloon when a bat infects a piglet -- we're supposed to think U.S. factory farms are much cleaner and nicer than the Chinese pig farm where this happens. All is saved in the end: a heroic researcher, apparently working single-handedly (?!), comes up with a vaccine within a few months, and we can breathe a sigh of relief. It's hard to tell why anyone bothered to make this film: it utterly refuses to face the reality of how people would behave in such an epidemic, and barely skims the surface of the emotional effects.