With Oscar-nomination deserving turns by Matthew McConaughey (I still can’t believe I’m writing this two years in a row) and Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club contributes to the genre of AIDS Cinema that has emerged in the past two years, particularly with last year’s How to Survive a Plague and this year’s Fire in the Blood. Set nearly thirty years ago, Dallas Buyers Club reminds us that a diagnosis of HIV or AIDS was a death sentence. In the most literal sense, patients were given months to live upon. In addition, many died alone, pariahs stricken with the mark of an unfamiliar, horrific disease.
At its core, Dallas Buyers Club — named after the number of groups set up throughout the country that evaded FDA regulations and sold “unapproved” (cum illegal) pharmaceuticals to fight the virus — is a deep look at the many politics at play in 1985. It does its best to tackle the role of big pharmacy in fighting HIV and AIDS, relegating the diseased to guinea pigs and indicting the FDA as complicit in a caplitalistic scheme to monopolize the drug industry. (If you’re looking for a more thorough, dedicated look at this, check out the aforementioned Fire in the Blood.)
More overtly, Dallas Buyers Club reminds us that AIDS was originally thought of as the Queer Disease, an ignorant believe that provided shelter for heterosexuals and fomented a deeper hatred and fear of homosexuality. A Texas electrician, drinker, cocaine user, and male slut, Ron Woodruff (Matthew McConaughey) is as straight and homophobic as they come. Thus, when he’s first given the diagnosis of HIV, he recoils from the apparent insult, arguing, “I ain’t no faggot motherfucker” like that “Rock Cocksucking Hudson.”
Similarly, those around him are much more frightened of his presumed sexual orientation, as if his presence will, first and foremost, spread “gay,” and then infect them with AIDS. Sad and disturbing in its own right, this provides a heart-rending look at the isolation immediately cast upon those with HIV and AIDS in the 1980’s, something that has been forgotten in 2013. And, as more films like this emerge, I’m not sure whether or not the rise of AIDS and HIV is something that should be forgotten, just because there are now treatments to harness HIV / AIDS and help those with the disease to live full lives. In a sense, the current access to medicine in this country has created an additional ignorance surrounding the disease, as if there is less to fear because it is treatable – or at least much more treatable than it was in the past.
Something else to consider is the way in which access to antiretroviral therapy creates a separate divide in classes throughout the world. As of 2013, 35.3 million people were still infected with HIV / AIDS, which many of these people living in the poorest regions of sub-Saharan Africa. Despite our ability to fight the disease in this country, it is still a major global concern, not one that has been eradicated. And it is still one linked to the lower class and deemed a queer disease in countries where homophobia still runs rampant – again in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. (Check out Call Me Kuchu for a tragic illustration of this.)
A film like Dallas Buyers Club is both all too familiar for those growing up in the seventies and eighties. It might seem anachronistic and saddening to those growing up in the nineties and aughts, but, if nothing else, it should be a reminder of the pain, suffering, and ostracism that exists outside of our country’s borders.
