Aids and the Representation of Social Reality

Film, the artistic extension of Literature, has been at the heart of social controversy and societal change for the better part of the last one hundred years. Even before film, literature that focused on social change in the 19th Century played a role that many have argued caused the very change it sought. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which first came before the public as an 1851 serialized story in a Northern abolitionist magazine, played a significant, indeed a causal role in the North’s backing of the Civil War – a necessary war of Emancipation – or so the argument goes. It would be nice to think that Art has such formative power. If it had, then we could easily see it as an overwhelming influence or primal cause, everywhere. Leni Reifenstahl’s propaganda masterpiece, Triumph of the Will, for example, then could be seen as factor that caused, rather than influenced reflectively, the machinations of the Third Reich, as it hurtled towards WWII. But even the Nuremburg Tribunal did not believe this, as evidenced by the fact that it did not indict Riefenstahl as a war criminal. In 1915 D.W.Griffith’s landmark film, The Birth of A Nation, in addition to its being a technical landmark in the history of film making, graphically argued for the virtues of the now thoroughly discredited Ku Klux Klan. On the one hand, Griffith’s film documented the rise of the Klan, and even slightly amplified it with what today we would characterize as free publicity via the mass media. On the other hand, by the logic of the Uncle Tom’s Cabin power-of-propaganda argument, The Birth of A Nation gave “birth” to the Klan, or at least aligned it with the South’s post-Civil War bid (e.g., the “South Will Rise Again”) to perpetuate segregation and the rule of Jim Crow. In my opinion, such thinking is fallacious. After all, are not both these judgments bound by History, that is, the often cited twenty-twenty of hindsight? Film art, whether noble or base, can cause change, but if it does, it does so secondarily and, as a rule, weakly. What then can Art, be it Literature or Film, actually do in relation to society and social change? In a phrase, it can be expressed thus: Art can reflect the world that it chooses for its subject, or more specifically, the film Philadelphia, which we will here discuss, represents a target segment of society in the “everydayness” of social change. This is no small feat, but it happens all around us, if we look at the Arts and the mass media as a mirror of change.

Philadelphia is a film that reflects social change as it is embodied in the attitudes first, then in the behavior of a businessman, who, as a lawyer, is in the business of prosecuting and defending litigious issues. Denzel Washington plays this lawyer, as he defends another lawyer, played by Tom Hanks. Hanks plays lawyer Andrew Beckett, who is suing his employer, a powerful and conservative firm headed by Jason Robards, because they have fired him – he asserts -- out of fear that his disease, AIDS, will diminish the firm’s standing in the legal community. This is an illegal act, but it is not immediately apparent that it is also an outrageously unfair one. How this plays out is not only the scenario of the film, it is the record of the rise to moral and ethical responsibility of one individual, the Washington character – and by extension, the rise to social attitude-adjustment in American society at large.

Before we condemn the movie The Birth of A Nation, for its defense and seeming promotion of racial stereotypes, which by today’s standards are gross and inexcusable, we need to understand the audience for this film. At what stage in the evolution of the human community is this audience? Similarly, what is the social reality “we” see being played out in Philadelphia? Andrew Beckett is a rising star in the law firm that decides to dump him, when they find out he has AIDS. He is not particularly virtuous, anymore than his employer is particularly immoral or unethical, given the cold