The AIDS Movie: Representing a Pandemic in Film and Television [Paperback]

The author analyzes what themes appear in American feature-length movies where AIDS is the main topic. Why didn't anybody tell me that this book existed? Why have I never heard of this author? Why didn't anyone propose this study before? The book cover pictures an AIDS ribbon overlapped by a roll of film. Each film unit, with red behind it, begins to look like a ruby. So many academic book covers are just boring, but this one was eye-capturing.

The Stonewall-initiated gay rights movement was not born by itself; it was heavily influenced by the anti-war movement, the feminist movement, and ideas about free love. Similarly, Dr. Hart shows that AIDS films were not born of themselves. He points to how melodramas and science fiction works first used the themes that AIDS films now employ.

Unfortunately, the author wants to have his cake and eat it too. On the one hand, he laments that AIDS films focus too much on gay men and thus will never convey to other people that they need to fight to protect themselves. Well, since gay men composed a large percentage of those first infected in the United States, it makes sense that members of the gay community would want to document the struggle against the disease in their films. He repeatedly states that most HIV-positive people in the world are not gay, but he is the one that limited his study to American works. He criticizes works without gay AIDS sufferers for always mentioning gay men, the example of when young Ryan White was taunted by homophobic epithets. However, that's why happened to the teenager: the myth that AIDS= gay and gay = AIDS was used against him in oppressive manners. There's no reason to look down upon the film for that reason; that's how it happened to Ryan White in his real life.

At times, Dr. Hart seems to hate all of these films, even the ones made for gay men, by gay men. He seems to like films that dance around the topic of AIDS more than those that deal with them directly. Though the reader can tell that Dr. Hart is HIGHLY educated, there is a way in which this book felt like a long undergraduate paper.

Because of the limitations of Hart's study, he fails to acknowledge the gems that he has left off of the table. He complains that these works don't feature enough people of color. Well, "Zero Patience" had many men of color, but it was probably excluded since it's Canadian. He states that AIDS movies are disturbingly asexual. Well, "Tongues Untied" was very sexual, but he excludes that because it's a documentary. He never realizes that maybe AIDS movies just need to catch up to great things going on in other productions.

Dr. Hart mentions that oppressions that HIV-positive characters face in these films. However, he never mentions the bigotry in some of these films. Gregg Araki's "Living End" has been blasted for his misogyny. "Parting Glances" can be read as weightist and anti-bear. In Hart's section on AIDS-like films, he forgets the most important two films: "Predator" and "Alien 3."

Using Hart's book as a stepping stone, a different author could write about AIDS films in the new decade. He or she could also mention phenomena that Dr. Hart fails to discuss.