Imagine a world in which a devastating pandemic has become stubbornly intractable. You’ve lost multiple friends (‘David, Howard, Graham, Terry, Paul…’), yet the wider world offers more blame than sympathy. There’s war in a remote part of Eastern Europe, bringing refugees to your shore.
And then one night in September, you turn on both the TV and the radio simultaneously – because two of the nation’s public broadcasters are in sync for an unusual event. Channel Four (the “gay” station) and Radio Three have collaborated to air the work of a radical, sexually deviant artist who’s spent the last several years actively protesting government policy.
With both devices on you’ll get the effect of a rudimentary ‘stereophonic’ sound, which is important because there’s not much to ‘look’ at in this film. It’s more of a meditative experience: a blue field of color, and words. Of rage, poetry, mortality and communion. The audience is taken almost inside the artist’s own body: ‘all that concerns either life or death / is all transacting and at work within me.’
This world is 1993.
I never know how to use the word ‘palimpsest.’ It’s a term I picked up young, probably reading the New York Times Book Review. But I think that 1993 and 2023 fit the definition. As we live through this year now, can’t we detect lingering traces of the earlier one underneath?
That sense of temporal layering is used to palpable effect in Blue Now, a live presentation of Derek Jarman’s final work, directed by Neil Bartlett and featuring a quartet of contemporary queer readers. A live soundscore by Jarman collaborator Simon Fisher-Turner vibrates at a ritual frequency that is simultaneously between past and present. The show’s tour, which I saw in Brighton, concludes this week at Tate Modern.
In 1993, I was not in Britain to experience the first Blue’s first broadcast. I was in suburban Massachusetts, but AIDS had made its way into my consciousness that same year, via Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia. It was probably the first film I ever saw that depicted two men dancing romantically (not kissing, though, this was Hollywood). Philadelphia ‘brought AIDS home’ to an imagined ‘mainstream’ audience (my family? me?) that had never seen an actual KS lesion. Blue didn’t represent any of the physical marks of the condition. Assuming intimacy, it explained little, showed nothing
I first heard the name Derek Jarman from Siskel and Ebert (god love em) when they reviewed his earlier, homoerotic film of Edward II. I already loved movies and watched the show religiously every Saturday afternoon, videotaping it when I couldn’t be home. No doubt disdained by their peers as middlebrow, America’s two best-known film critics offered a valuable public service to budding suburban cinephiles. In between the blockbusters and Oscar bait, glimmers of a different kind of cinema shone through.
I don’t recall them covering Jarman’s Blue. Coincidentally, though, another 1993 film with the same title caught my attention: the first in Krzysztof Kielowski’s Three Colors triology, featuring Juliette Binoche. I recognised her from Damage, a steamy film that Roger and Gene had reviewed around Christmas just the year before. I didn’t see any of these films upon immediate release but I filed their existence in my brain. These segments on syndicated television were missives from an adult world of European eroticism, elliptical non-Hollywood storytelling and queer politics. Foreign in almost every way, yet connected by tenuous threads to other, more familiar cultural products. Damage had nearly been given an NC-17 rating and was thus way too sexy for me to see. But we’d watched director Louis Malle’s previous film Au revoir les enfants in my high school French class. I was also intrigued to know that this arthouse auteur was married to the actress I watched every Monday night on TV.
While European cinema still eluded me, Murphy Brown was just the kind of culture that a precocious but sexually hesitant thirteen year-old could easily glom onto: quippy sitcom liberalism targeting the tail end of a Presidency that seemed increasingly bound to topple just as the Berlin Wall had a few years before. My upbringing had happened entirely under Reaganite Republican rule, but now a new regime was emergent. All through the previous year’s Presidential campaign, we were told ‘Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.’ Our new leader came from ‘A Little Town Called Hope’ and was poised to usher in a younger, fresher Left-wing politics.
Murphy was a mainstream show that (mildly) challenged the Moral Majority and was easy to rally behind. Never moreso than when the Bush/Quayle ’92 campaign launched a cynical culture war over the dangers of single motherhood, with my favorite fictional character in the crosshairs. This was a ‘sex scandal’ I could process easily and pick a side. I was so resolutely #TeamMurphy that my 8th grade book report on The Scarlet Letter featured a point by point comparison of her vilification by Vice President Quayle for an out of wedlock pregnancy and Hester Prynne’s treatment for the same crimes in Puritan New England.
I knew that this ‘family values’ rhetoric was outdated and harmful, but I was not yet clear-eyed enough to understand that Clinton’s values were equally cynical. His promises were a rhetorical phantasm, progress in sheep’s clothing, without justice or accountability. So hollow were the victories of Clinton’s Third Way that here we are again thirty years later, combatants in the same battles, with right-wingers trying to ban books and scapegoat queers. In Britain, a party on the center-left is again poised to take power by studiously avoiding any extremity that might be mistaken for ideology. In a culture obsessed with sex, those with the least political power, are conveniently cast as the biggest threat to our precious children.
Everywhere you look, it’s 1993 again.
I came back from Blue in Brighton over the Bank Holiday to an episode of my favorite film podcast that mashes up Murphy with Malle. As part of her essential Erotic 90s series, Karina Longworth argues (convincingly) that the sitcom marked the end of the Reagan-Bush years, just as Damage was the film first of the Clinton era.
Something must be in the air, truly, because Damage was also adapted last month into a flash-in-the-pan Netflix series called Obsession. Like so much content these days, it cannibalized something no one thought needed to be remade, presented itself for binge-viewing and was soon forgotten, such is the speed of our current consumption cycle. Instagram tells me that I just missed traveling to Spain to catch an exhibit called ‘Meisel 1993,’ dedicated to the work of 90s zeitgeist photographer Steven Meisel (who just the other week announced he and Madonna would be auctioning off photos for charity from their infamous 1992 collaboration the Sex book). In March, I saw the other Blue again in my local Picturehouse. Kieslowski’s Colors trilogy of European unification was re-released to UK cinemagoers at a time when this island is now a continent-free nation adrift in the Atlantic. What would Derek Jarman have to say about Brexit? Or the Gender Recognition Act? 1993, I learn, was also the year of ‘Tampongate’ and look now who’s on the throne….
So what, you’re saying. This was 30 years ago, and our self-devouring culture uses anniversaries as an excuse to resuscitate content and profit off of nostalgia. The thirty-year cycle makes sense: people who had their formative years in the early 90s are the ones now making films and podcasts and think-pieces, so they’re inherently biased to view that period as significant. Maybe. Maybe in the 80s there was an obsession with the 50s (does that explain Reagan and Thatcher’s revanchist rise?). But the early 90s feel singular to me. (I would say that, wouldn’t I?)
The 1990s were a ‘cusp’ time. Looking back at the culture I consumed in 1993, I see myself grappling for the first time with adult understandings of Art, Politics & Sex. (I did eventually watch Damage on VHS and was dumbfounded by the contortions that Juliette Binoche got into with Jeremy Irons – adults found that pleasurable??)
All thirteen year-olds feel a similar sense of transition, but the 90s were ‘cusp’-y for the wider world, as well, a decade self-consciously branded as the endpoint of everything that had come before (just ask Francis Fukuyama). It was giving fin-de-siècle energy supercharged by fin de millennium. From the fall of communism to the dawn of the internet, the zeitgeist was full of optimism and promise. For some.
If teenage Brian had had access to more to queer voices, I might have picked up on the darker notes in that millennial thinking: the fatigue, rage and rebellion from years of plague and suffering. At critical junctures, some of these prophetic voices were able to cut through the mainstream messaging and call out the system. Clinton’s era-defining catchphrase ‘I feel your pain’ was actually uttered in response to Bob Rafksy, an ACT-UP member who interrupted the candidate at a campaign event in 1992 demanding a more urgent response to the epidemic from the Democratic Party. How much of that pain was truly felt? Clinton’s promise of massive increases in AIDS research funding was never met. By 1993, the President had signed the United States’s HIV travel ban and Bob Rafsky was dead.
We return to examine the 90s because today’s cultural battles seem analogous. Let us look now though with eyes unfiltered by false faith in systems:
‘If I lose half my sight, will my vision be halved?’ - Derek Jarman
The sounds of Simon Fisher-Turner’s eerie, unclassifiable soundscore for Blue NOW resemble radio transmissions from somewhere past the river Lethe. Jarman’s words first reached the world through the BBC; now, on any given day, you can turn on the radio to hear broadcasters reduce the rights and existence of our trans siblings to a matter of ‘debate.’ In interviews, the new centre-left leader who hopes to usher in a post-Conservative era is already backtracking on his pledges.
Together in community at the Theatre Royal, Brighton, Jarman’s energy vibrates through us anew. Queer power comes in resistance to systems that were never set up for us. We mustn’t be distracted by the debates they create, or the spectacles and Bank Holidays they offer. Then as now, our survival depends on bonds forged with chosen family: we will always take better care of ourselves than they can. Keep your arms linked in solidarity with your siblings and your gaze fixed firmly into the blue…