This is a short note about Jean-Marc Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club, which I saw yesterday. The film tells the true story of Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), an emphatically heterosexual electrician, rodeo cowboy, homophobe, and plaid shirt enthusiast who is diagnosed with AIDS and given 30 days to live. After self-medicating with AZT, drugs and alcohol until he collapses in a Mexican hospital, Ron starts living healthily, and also importing non-approved AIDS treatment drugs into America to sell. The film has two other main characters, neither of whom has a real-life counterpart: Rayon (Jared Leto), a trans woman with AIDS who helps Ron run the Dallas Buyers Club; and Eve (Jennifer Garner), a doctor who is won over by Ron’s approach to treating AIDS and eventually loses her job challenging the medical establishment.
Like Mark from Eastenders, through whom I came to know about AIDS as a child, Ron got AIDS from having sex with a woman. The film protests Ron’s heterosexuality a little too much. In a gesture that I find morally awful, Vallée goes so far as to locate the precise heterosexual encounter which infected Ron with HIV, flashing back to a dark motel room and a woman with track marks on her arm. I am fascinated by the inclusion of these shots, which isolate the moment of transmission and definitively remove the possibility that Woodroof might have had sex with a man, or that any of his other sexual partners, those without obvious physical markers of being IV drug-users, could have given him HIV. The close-up on the woman’s arm assigns guilt for Ron’s infection.
Rayon, the only queer character in the film, is figured as complicit in her own horrible death. Ignoring advice from Ron she refuses to live healthily: at first this manifests as her insisting on continuing to eat processed food, foreshadowing her insistence on continuing to shoot up – again, against Ron’s advice- until she coughs up blood and dies. Eve, her doctor and long-time friend, says she died because she was a drug addict, attributing her death to a personal problem unrelated to the conditions she lived under as an uninsured trans woman with AIDS. As Rayon’s drug use causes her to weaken and die, while Ron’s clean living and happy sexual encounters with HIV+ hotties help him to live, I see Dallas Buyers Club subtly apportioning blame.
Rayon was surely written into Woodroof’s story to connect Ron personally with some of the communities most affected by AIDS- queer people and drug users- and to make it easier to measure Ron’s progress from homophobe to…less homophobe? But their relationship is thin and Rayon is expendable, her death necessary, even, for Ron to truly acquire the status of non-homophobe. I see this as the film’s ultimate goal.
I’ve watched a lot of documentary films about the AIDS crisis recently, and one aspect of responses to the crisis that seems especially radical to me is the formation of non-traditional support and kinship structures around people with AIDS. Dallas Buyers Club is striking in that there is no kinship or community in it- just a line of people with AIDS at Ron Woodroof’s door, waiting to get hold of the medications to which their membership entitles them. Ron appears at a support group for people with AIDS several times, but the life of the support group is subordinated in the script to the need to tell Ron’s story. In a 20-second scene we hear a people talking about the non-availability of specific drugs while the camera remains on Ron skulking at the back of the hall trying not to make eye contact with anyone, filling the viewer in on the medical situation without making them engage with anyone with AIDS who isn’t Ron. At a later meeting Ron arrives to distribute literature about the buyers club and gets into a confrontation with an FDA representative (what was he doing there?). The support group is cut exactly to the dimensions of Ron’s story, lending a background of desperate, neglected people to provide narrative motivation for Ron’s actions, background info on the crisis, and a stage for the confrontation between the enterprising individual and the government.
The experience of constant loss which people who lived in AIDS-affected communities talk about in the films I have seen is from a different world to Ron Woodroof’s world- save Rayon nobody dies, or rather, there is nobody in the film whose death you would notice. It is the story of one man who has the tenacity and greed to survive and flourish during the AIDS crisis. Worst of all, it is a film which takes no emotional toll on you whatsoever.
I am glad that I saw Dallas Buyers Club, and there were things I liked about it. However I think it tells a story that does not need to be told. You can read analysis of Rayon’s character as a passive recipient of pity here. And for an account of AIDS activism for access to treatment that isn’t all about one person I recommend this article and the films How to Survive a Plague and United in Anger, which are about ACT UP.
