It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not, -- Daniel Defoe
I
did not know much about Mark Ruffalo prior to his whimsical stand-in for Bill Bixby in 2012, much
like many viewers. I was able to recognize him as an important foil to DiCaprio
in Shutter Island almost solely,
in far too narrow a fashion, because his lead work with an agit prop made film ,
entitled The Normal Heart , made me furious. As a “made for television”
project, it was designed to provoke as a raunchy modern Dionysian outcry for
homosexual freedom at the start of the AIDS epidemic in the eighties, letting
the good times roll under the “voo doo
economics” (notoriously characterized by George Herbert Walker Bush) administration of the actor politician who in
those very 80’s, was very good at projecting his solidarity with lines in the
sand; and just why did Ruffalo and Julia Roberts (perhaps aging out of synchronicity?)
and Alfred Molina, not unknown in his younger years for representing gay
pathology, lend themselves to this cable documentary drama? Ignorance is not
always the requisite criterion for bliss: I might have suspected, but didn’t,
that the director, Ryan Murphy was a lapsed Catholic who went ape shit after
coming out, with a chunky, heuristic fervor, both his camera and his screen
writer insistent upon the fact that histrionic orgies are cause for celebratory
affirmation, as opposed to the pall of repulsion, with death from a new epidemic
causing such outrage amid the urban left that a viewer might be persuaded a new
era of genocide had enveloped the big cities. When Roberts doctor Emma Bookner
emphatically tells her patient queue to “stop fucking,” Ruffalo ardently asserts that you can’t tell
gay men this. “Sex is all they have,” be belts out with nasal hypermania. This
doesn’t really offer retrospective justice for anyone, and this angry teleplay
ignited a backdraft on this besieged spastic writer in the opposite direction Murphy
and his cohort celebrities expect. Forget about reactionary incitement with the
potential for intimidation: if a
physician suggests abstinence from coitus as a temporary measure to save my
life, then logic dictates I follow medical advice,
I
was actually present when AIDS broke onto the scene in the United States as a
foreign enemy, and took my brother’s life due to drug addiction, so Ruffalo’s
doubletake provoked an illegal degree of rage, the type of which not only
shackles the marginalized, but also places them on the radar of law and order.
The much dissected Anthony Fauci has been fabulously quoted, as Covid waned, saying
“we’ve entered the age of the pandemic,” but he began his rise as a public
figure trying to break the stranglehold of HIV, and at best managed a ceasefire
with a drug regime that is evidently the gay black male’s cocktail, if the Truvada
commercials are accepted as an anecdotal representation. Ruffalo may have
mollified me since, slightly, with his short serial I Know This Much is True
, but HBO, at best, regardless of craft, is a network of domestic terrorism,
and needs to be perceived accordingly. Radical Traditionalist Catholics were once the holy warriors who repelled the Saracens from Europe, when our blood was worth its faith.