By Mark Adnum

One could say anything in life is simply coincidence, but after a while, when coincidence becomes multiple, a redefinition of "accidental" is necessary.

-Shirley MacLaine, "Out On A Limb"

I could have begun with a quote from more distinguished scholars of the paranormal, such as Charles Fort (1874 - 1932) who studied anomalous phenomena and who coined the term teleportation, or parapsychologist J.B. Rhine (1895 - 1980), who substantiated ESP.   Even Queen Elizabeth 2 once said that "there are powers at work in this country about which we have no knowledge". But I chose Shirley because she is a synchronic embodiment for what this essay aims to analyse: AIDS as a paranormal entity that has appeared since the 1930s in Hollywood movies.  

One of Shirley's primary realms is Hollywood movies, and so her image has been projected onto photographic film and celluloid, a process key to this essay. Additionally, though she was a star long before the 1980s, her greatest period of success, from 1983's Terms of Endearment and the publication of her most bestselling books, "Out on a Limb" and "Dancing in the Light" parallels the peak years of the AIDS Crisis in the United States, which is the other main concern of this essay. Also, her quote above directly addresses my other main interest here: an uncanny buildup of coincidences that leads one to suspect that coincidence is no longer at work.  

Primarily, though, I chose Shirley as she is a enterprising and scholarly celestial traveller par excellence and hopefully, I can follow her example here.

nensha

Fukurai Tomokichi, a professor at the Imperial University of Tokyo in the early Twentieth Century, published the results of his methodical studies of three Japanese mediums as "Clairvoyance and Thoughtography" in 1913.

Fukurai tested Miss Chizuko, Nagao Ikuko and Takahashi Sadako, who claimed to be clairvoyant, and found that they could not only repeatedly divine symbols and images that had been wrapped in various materials and placed in thick opaque envelopes, they could also talk at length about the covering materials.   Most impressively, Mrs Nagao demonstrated how she could burn an image from her mind onto a piece of blank card or film stored in a box or in another room altogether, a paranormal power Fukurai named nensha (thoughtography).   Mrs Nagao's pièce de résistance was her very accurate projection of the topography of the dark side of the Moon, which had yet to be photographed by satellites.  

After scores of nensha experiments in varied circumstances and controlled conditions, Fukurai concluded that the ability to project images paranormally onto film stock had been demonstrated.  

An example of Prof. Fukurai's nensha photos

Fukurai staged a public demonstration of nensha in front of dozens of journalists and scientists. The women were unable to perform nensha during this presentation, and were branded frauds and witches, at which point Chizuko took poison and Nagao fell into a delirious fever - both died. Fukurai published a second edition in 1931, where he reasserted the theory that he claimed had led to his ostracism and eventual "forced retirement" from the university:

In face of all the opponent scientists in the country, I make the following declaration: That clairvoyance is a fact, and that thoughtography is also a fact.

As Western thinkers, we, like Fukurai's apparently unappreciative colleagues, resist the concept that things we would consider cosmological or mystical may actually share what film maker Michelangelo Antonioni called the same "horizon of events" - a contiguous space occupied simultaneously and peacefully by the mortal and the physical.   As Antonioni observed - unlike the Japanese - we believe that the cosmic and the everyday are separated, and we therefore "call on an act of transcendence" to explain any uncanny appearance of the one in the realm of the other.   More often, we simply dismiss the event as coincidence or just something a little strange. Science is often brought in to offer explanations of crop circles, ectoplasms, and most just raise an eyebrow at the cartological and astronomical "mysteries" of the Great Pyramids.

But what if an act of transcendence isn't what's occurring when cosmic sprockets seem to jump themselves and throw sparks of matter through time and space?   When we see what looks like a misty apparition of a relative, who died a century ago, lurking in the background of our birthday party digital photo print, should we dismiss it as a technical glitch, shudder with the sense that our mortal horizon has come close to colliding with the cosmological horizon, or do as many Eastern cultures do and assume that that relative was really at the party, and has done her best to manifest her image onto the photo.

Spirit photography, where ectoplasmic blobs or misty apparitions of dead ancestors appear mysteriously in developed photographs, is known as shinrei shashin in Japan.   A variation of shinrei shashin is warped faces of those photographed soon before their unexpected deaths.   In South Korea, Fan Death Phenomenon, where left-on ceiling fans are believed to bring death to anyone sleeping in the room, is said to account for dozens of deaths each year, and is reported as such on television news broadcasts.   The spirit houses that sit out from of almost every Thai dwelling aren't decorative, they are built there to house spirits who may otherwise cause disruption if they habituate inside with the living.    Grand five-star Bangkok hotels contain enormous, palatial spirit houses, sometimes larger than the hotel lobbies themselves.  

So what would happen if we leant East in our thinking, and presumed the opposite to what we normally do: that there is only one horizon of events.   What if we follow Professor Fukurai and conclude that clairvoyance does exist, and that nensha also exists?   I'm going to try to demonstrate that not only might this be a good exercise for us to try, but that what happened with AIDS and cinema from the late 1930s right up until the cusp of the AIDS Crisis proves - among other things - that   there is, in fact, only the one horizon of events, and that AIDS, despite its viscerality, may also be a force.

Self-manifesting televisual Witches

Ringu --a 1998 Japanese movie remade in Hollywood as The Ring in 2002--is loosely inspired by the work of Professor Fukurai.   Though a Fukurai-esque Doctor-character makes a brief appearance, the film concentrates on a Japanese medium and the from-the-grave exploits of her even more gifted, murderous daughter.   In Ringu , a video tape is said to bring death in exactly seven days to whoever views its creepy, abstract contents.   From beyond the grave, the clairvoyants dead daughter Sadako has burnt a cryptic message onto the tape, an unsettling clip of words and both concrete and abstract   images including a young girl brushing her hair, swarming microbes, Chinese characters that spell "Sadako", and finally, a bedraggled girl crawling out of a well and towards the viewer.    We learn later that Sadako possessed disturbing witch-like powers and that her parents threw her to her death down a well.

The doomed viewers of Sadako's televisual curse die exactly seven days later, when Sadako manifests herself through their TV screen and crawls towards them across the floor.   One glance from her bloodshot eye, and they die instantly, their faces twisted in a wickedly inverted nod to shinrei shashin.   A journalist investigating the deaths of several teenagers realises that the cryptic video message is a form of puzzle-spell projected paranormally by an unseen, supernatural entity.

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeere's Sadako! Reality TV in The Ring

Ringu's nensha witch Sadako casts a tripartite spell.   She uses concrete imagery, abstract imagery, and cryptic language clues that give the message her signature and which are dribbled like a breadcrumb trail to create a tantalising puzzle that her victims, and the investigate journalist, can't seem to resist.

Like Sadako, the graveyard of ghosts of Poltergeist establish initial communication with humans they wish to torment via the television, when tiny Carol Anne, up way past her bed time, notices whispers coming from the snowstorm of early dawn post-programming.   She becomes absorbed in the talking TV, and at one point an electric zap in the shape of a hand darts out of the screen and touches her.   Elsewhere, the demons of The Omen predict their coming exploits with shadows and lines through future victims in developed still photographs.   Paranormal photo-portals are also observable in films such as The Shining , and The Sixth Sense . In The Exorcist , an open bedroom window is the portal through which that movie's time-travelling demon enters the picture and infects young Regan MacNeil but it is interesting to note that the character of Chris MacNeil, Reagan's actress mother, was played by redhead Ellen Burstyn after Shirley MacLaine, the original choice for the role, turned it down.  

Ghost-o-Vision: Poltergeist

Paranormal entities travel through time and space and seem to prefer to emerge at televisual portals.   They may have a narcissistic side, or at the very least, a love of photographic technology as they seem to love cameras and televisions and are aware that when they do appear, all eyes are locked on them (as we say to a startled, frozen looking person that they "look like they've seen a ghost!")  

Witch Time

In his analysis of The Exorcist , Mark Kermode notes that much of that film's terror is generated by its unsettling use of apparent temporal alchemy.   The film's spectral presence from the past is so powerful that it is able to bend the rules of time and space at will and leap from ancient Mesopotamia to 1970s urban America, leaving a trail of stopped clocks, dead priests and transposed relics in its wake.   The characters of the film are yanked into mortal combat by a malicious force of destruction that is impervious to human laws of time and space, and is, therefore, a formidable and frightening enemy that controls the playing field and which can turn its victims every which way but loose.   Kermode observed that " The Exorcist presented a credible portrait of the modern urban world ripped apart by an obscene, ancient evil" and that "the suggestion is that time has stopped, that the normal flow of the present has been interrupted by a force from the past."

AIDS, too, torments our sense of time and space and seems to operate along the lines of extra-temporal, dimension-crossing paranormal entities.  

It has murky origins and an enigmatic chronology that frustrates attempts to "pin it down".   Though AIDS was popularly seen to appear as if from nowhere--Madonna sang that it "came without a warning"--it has actually been lurking around for centuries, if not longer.   Research presented at the 13th International AIDS Conference in Durban in 2000 by Dr Anne-Miecke Vandamme of Belgium's Riga Institute found that human HIV-1 separated from SIVcp2, a chimpanzee virus, somewhere between the years 1675 and 1700.   Plasma samples taken in 1959 from a Bantu man in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo test positive for HIV-1.   In the early 1970s, dozens of American IV drug users died from what was called "the Junkie flu" which is now recognized as an early AIDS mini-epidemic.  

Referring to the long dormant period HIV spends in the body, the slow, often years-long process of a death from AIDS and the frustrating--sometimes retrograde--socio-political waves generated by the epidemic, Simon Watney has referred to AIDS as a "slow-motion epidemic".   What had been rapidly evolving gay dialogues and exciting social and civic improvements to the status of were pushed backwards by the epidemic, as pre-Stonewall bugbears such as the medicalization and pathologization of homosexuality, and calls for homosexual lifestyles to be policed and curtailed returned to front pages and government debates.

Andrew Sullivan has noted that during the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, gay men lived as "medievals among moderns", besieged by death and visceral rot amidst the high-tech 1980s U.S. metropolitan world of sterility and health.   Describing the atmosphere of American gay communities at that time, Sullivan wrote of the " dead [who] clutter the address books of the dying as bones once festooned the charnel houses of medieval city-dwellers".   His description almost matches Kermode's description of the experiences of real and fictional victims of demonic possession: "[they] were adolescents, living in modern urban surroundings, whose conditions evoked a cure more usually associated with the Middle Ages than the sanitised 20 th Century".   The experience of plague had not been a modern one but 1980s imagery of the AIDS epidemic reintroduced the sight of mystified doctors wearing protective clothing, and an ostracized, doomed segment of the population marked by ghastly external symptoms and cared for only by the pious.  

A main opportunistic infection of AIDS was Kaposi's Sarcoma, an ancient and unusual skin cancer previously only found in very old, Mediterranean men.   Setting a gothic tone in the early pages of "And The Band Played On", Randy Shilts talks of scattered early victims drowning in "primeval protozoa that had filled their lungs", Danish doctors working in primitive conditions in the "fetid equatorial climate" of the African cradles of human civilization, returning to Northern Europe to die of mysterious symptoms of extinct diseases, and an American epidemic that had its origins in the 1976 bicentennial celebrations around New York Harbour, a commemorative event set at an historical site.   Shilts begins the book with a passage from Revelations, the section of the Bible that deals with prophecy, and in an early chapter, documents a Virginian psychic spelling out the word "toxoplasmosis"--an obscure cat disease that would become one of the surprise human infections of AIDS--while she was in a trance in 1980.

A death from AIDS was often marked by severe physical and mental decline which included blindness and dementia, as well as a loss of strength and mobility and the need for mechanical respiratory assistance.   In the early-mid 1980s, the average American male lifespan was 73 years.   Gay men in their twenties, thirties and fourties were not only dying prematurely, but seeing many of the infirmities of old age telescoping into their young present.   Sydney artist William Yang photographed his late-twenties friend Allan's death from AIDS:

Yang captioned the photo :

I was in Ward 17 at St Vincent's Hospital, that's the AIDS ward, visiting someone else, when I looked through one of the doors and saw Allen. I recognised him immediately, but he had changed. He seemed like an old man. I had a strong desire to burst into tears.

Martin Dannecker has observed that "anxiety about AIDS consists of nothing but anxiety about dying before one's time" while Alexander Duttmann concurs that AIDS is a "rupture in history". AIDS thwarts personal futures and its demographic spread in the industrialised world has seen hundreds of thousands of parents outlive their children.  

The AIDS epidemic was decorated with objects from the past, such as Hollywood legend Elizabeth Taylor or the traditional handicraft of the AIDS Quilt, but it also desecrated the past, destroying cherished, meaningful cultural beliefs by, for example, warping the heterosexual iconography of figures like Rock Hudson and taking the young life of   All-American-Boy Ryan White.

AIDS operates within its own metaphysical realm and vibrates with extra-temporal, witchcraft-like powers.   We shouldn't be surprised, then, to find AIDS, like The Exorcist 's Christian coin or Ringu 's Sadako, appearing where it cannot appear : outside its own time.

"I'll bide my time"

1939: The Wizard of Oz

The Exorcist 's demon and Ringu's Sadako use similar spells, replete with jumbled language clues, startling visual tricks including apparitions of the dead, and obfuscating suspense tactics that draw their curious victims close so they can unleash a spectacular and deadly self-unveiling.   The spectral demon-face appears that appears in Father Karras' dreams, and on the range hood cover of Chris MacNeil's rented Georgetown house was played by Linda Blair's stunt double, Eileen Dietz in chalk-white skull make up and fake yellow fang teeth.   She looks horrifying, and always reminded me of Ringu 's Sadako and harsh-featured Margaret Hamilton as Miss Gulch/The Wicked Witch of The West in The Wizard of Oz , a family film favourite that seems to wedge itself into the centre of most discussions about gay cinephilia.  

Like many fairy tales and fantasy stories, The Wizard of Oz has a dark, occult edge and is saturated with witches, magick, and the paraphernalia of the supernatural.   In the story, an evil pair of witch sisters seem to have entire populations of enchanted dwarves and animals under their spell. Drugs, potions and the constant threat of pestilence and death are kept at bay by the film makers' epileptic-fit inducing soft-texture colour scapes, fantasy glades full of musical creatures and benevolent good fairies.  

Gay dialogues around the film tend to focus on the quest of its earnest central character, Dorothy Gale, who was played by one of the major deities of the gay icon-pantheon Judy Garland.   Dorothy is whisked away in a tornado to a fantasy land where she seeks to find her home amid a dangerous world of people who either don't understand or appreciate her, or who are downright out to get her.   Donning a pair of glittering red shoes, she hooks up with a motley crew of eccentric characters--one sibilant and hirsute, one emotionless and over-concerned with order, one a daffy cornfed type--who are each in turn are seeking some kind of new life.   A new non-biological family is formed, and a series of fantastic adventures unfolds.   Throw in the film's big budget musical numbers, endless headline dialogue and a camp villianess, and it isn't too difficult to see why the film has remained such an enduring gay cultural reference.  

Presenting a eulogy at Vito Russo's funeral, Simon Watney lovingly said that the gay film writer had to have been born "under the sign of the ruby slippers"; coffee mugs and t-shirts owned by gay men throughout the world bear the slogan "we're not in Kansas anymore!"   Gay-authored analyses of the film are invariably loyal to what they see as the film's immutably gay-friendly subtext.   The film is seen as a parable of gay male struggles to find happy, stable adult identities out of the ruins of their often turbulent, ostracised teenage years.   Reid Davis' "What WOZ: Lost objects, repeat viewings, and the sissy warrior - Psychology and the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz " is a typical example.   It's odd to me that such cheery analyses never seem to include the AIDS epidemic in their consideration of the film since my point of view, The Wizard of Oz is a gloomy AIDS-witch text.

The Wizard of AIDS
Dorothy Gale (Garland), zephyring her way through life, comes unstuck in the face of a relentless attack by Miss Gulch (Margaret Hamilton) who threatens to have Dorothy's beloved dog Toto killed by lethal injection.   More trouble arrives in the form of a devastating natural disaster (a tornado) that strikes Dorothy while leaving everyone else around her unharmed.   Thrust into a new and unfamiliar world, Dorothy is compelled to find a "cure" for her situation, and she isn't helped by the Wicked Witch of the West, a reincarnation of Miss Gulch who is determined to destroy Dorothy using, at one point, what sounds like biological warfare ("I've sent a little insect on ahead to take the fight out of them") and at another, poison.   Whenever I see the green-skinned Wicked Witch's army of hypnotised flying monkeys, all I think of is the African Green Monkey, a delightful creature who is often unfairly fingered as the human-biting instigator of the crossover of HIV from chimps to humans.

World's most wanted viral terrorist  

Drug-induced psychedelia is suggested by the poppy field scene, where Dorothy and her gang are almost lulled to sleep by the poppies, then re-energised by a mysterious out-of-season snowfall. They charge into the Emerald City full of beans and ready for action.   From the 1970s to the present day, many a gay guy has fled the sleepy environs of his nine-to-five job then, via the presence of poppy-derived opiated or snowy white powder, whirled into a fabulous venue later that evening.   This lifestyle reached its apex at New York's Fire Island, a notorious pre-AIDS gay party world.   Dorothy encounters true allies and false idols, and eventually navigates a safe path through her shapeshifting, often hostile new world to reach some form of young-adult identity.

But as David Bordwell may say, so what? Films can be read any way we like.   We bring our own knowledge structures and obsessions to a viewing of a film and as Bordwell has noted, abstract meanings are ascribed left right and centre, whenever we spot a cue.   As we tend to view our own personal and collective histories through archetypical or mythological structures, then any film made along such a structure (this would exclude about three films) can be read allegorically to any experience.   The Wizard of Oz can be read as an AIDS text, but for that matter, if youre creative enough with your metaphors, so could The Empire Strikes Back.

Bordwell's pragmatism is hard to argue against, and would encourage me to take my AIDS reading of The Wizard of Oz with a grain of salt, if it wasn't for a strange suite of circumstances that seem to overlay my reading of The Wizard of Oz with a slight hint of nensha witchcraft.  

The Wizard of Oz features a witch who speaks proprietarily of time ("I'll bide my time") and who trades in bugs that "take the fight out of" people because they cannot be defeated by any normal weapon or existing medical treatment.  

Like Ringu's Sadako, The Wicked Witch of the West, ostensibly trapped on celluloid, passes back and forth through the membrane between film and phiysicality at will, with Margaret Hamilton, covered in copper-based flammable make-up, suffering second and third degree burns during the filming of her flaming entrance scene as the Wicked Witch of the West and later during the scene where she writes SURRENDER DOROTHY in the sky with smoke.  Hamilton had to spend over a month off the set recovering.  

The Wicked Witch of the West disappeared in flame and smoke - and so did the actress!   Never able to escape her most famous role, the apparently kindly Hamilton--who was a former kindergarten teacher--was interrogated by angry children for the rest of her life as to why she had been so mean to Dorothy. In a sense, The Wicked Witch of the West "possessed" Hamilton.  

Linda Blair, who played possessed Regan in The Exorcist, suffered a similar series of fates.   She injured her back when a harness used to shake her violently up and down on a bed came loose, and though receiving an Oscar nomination for her performance, Blair has never been fully believable in any subsequent role that doesn't have her swivel her head or projectile vomit pea soup.  

Blar was lucky, though as far worse fates fell to her unsuccessful competition.   Dana Plato, who turned down the Regan role and enjoyed TV stardom in "Diff'rent Strokes", committed suicide by drug overdose in 1999, aged 35.   Anissa Jones, who also auditioned for the Regan role, committed suicide by drug overdose in 1976, aged 18.   Heather O'Rourke, Carrie Anne from Poltergeist, fell mysteriously ill after filming wrapped on Poltergeist 3 .   Six months later, she died of renal failure and burst intestines, aged 12.

Stoner legend has it that Pink Floyd's 1973 album "The Dark Side of the Moon" plays in perfect correlation to The Wizard of Oz , if play is pressed once the MGM lion roars for the third time.   Fukurai's Mrs Nagao projection of the dark side of the moon comes back to haunt us here.

AIDS appears in near-perfect acrostic form via the film's main character names:

  A untie Em

t I n Man/w I zard/l I on/m I ss Gulch/w I cked W I tch

  D orothy

  S carecrow

Am I the only one who finds this all a little uncanny?

Ernst Jentsch found that the uncanny is highly subjective, as what one person finds unnerving and "unnatural" may not be upsetting to, or may not even be noticed by a separate person.  
Nevertheless, according to Jentsch, a person senses the uncanny when something occurs that is "not quite 'at home' or 'at ease' in the situation concerned ... [the uncanny] suggests that a lack of orientation is bound up with the impression of the uncanniness of a thing or incident."  Jentsch also described the uncanny as a doubt to whether an apparently tangible or animate being is not real or alive, or, conversely, a conviction that an apparently lifeless and unreal object may in fact be alive.

Freud wrote that the uncanny "derives its terror not from something externally alien or unknown but--on the contrary--from something strangely familiar which defeats our efforts to separate ourselves from it."

Tzvetan Todorov, writing about the uncanny and the fantastic in literature, speaks of the terror that is generated by the collapse of the psychic boundaries of Self and Other, life and death, reality and unreality.

Admit it: there's a hint of the AIDS-uncanny that coats The Wizard of Oz.

The most we ever see of Sebastian Venable in Suddenly Last Summer .

1959: Suddenly, Last Summer

Suddenly, Last Summer opens on the words "Lion's View State Asylum", where Dr. Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift), a neurosurgeon, is performing a lobotomy.   The procedure takes place in a surgery so old and underfunded that the lights flicker and plaster falls spontaneously from the walls.   Medical students watch from a balcony.   Dr Cukrowicz complains that he is "not a witch doctor", and that he cannot work under such "primitive" conditions.   An extremely wealthy local widow, Violet Venable (Katharine Hepburn) offers to fund a brand new neurosurgery wing, on the condition that Dr Cukrowicz examine her niece, Catherine, who's currently imprisoned in a convent after suffering an emotional breakdown and falling into amnesia after witnessing the mysterious death of Violet's cherished son, Sebastian.   Catherine (Elizabeth Taylor) has been raving about strange things, casting suspicion on Sebastian's sexuality, and the apparently ghastly nature of his death and Violet, who is appalled by Catherine's "hideous stories", suggests a lobotomy is necessary to "cut [them] out of her brain".   But there's truth behind Catherine's ravings, and with the help of some sodium pentathol, Dr Cukrowicz liberates the homosexual and tribal-cannibal heavy truth from Catherine's traumatized memory.  

Sebastian was a covert homosexual, who used his mother and Catherine to "attract" men that he then seduced, paid for sex, or, it is suggested, raped.   In a surreal sequence, Sebastian, who is only shown in fragments and whose face is never seen, is chased by Mexican gangs, who corner him and tear him limb from limb, eating parts of his flesh.  

According to Tennessee Williams, future AIDS-activist deity Elizabeth Taylor was "hopelessly miscast" in this film adaptation of his one-act play about the two unstable women that circle the memory of a sexually suspicious, dead dandy-jetsetter.  Taylor was miscast, as there's simply no way that the horny Mexican youths would be interested in his dandy appeals with the buxom Liz, at the time considered the most beautiful woman in the world, constantly in his side and regularly about to fall out of her white bathing suit. Taylor was nominated for an Oscar for her performance, but how did she find her way into a role she was not physically suited for, but which prefigures her later incarnation as the face of AIDS awareness?   Catherine's friendship with the robustly hard-partying but ultimately sickly Sebastian mirrors Liz's friendships with Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson, both of whom lived large before dying savage and premature deaths (one from AIDS).   Catherine tries to defend her increasingly feeble buddy from the "devouring hordes" that surround them in their final days, and she bears witness to her dead friends' dignity when others try to maliciously rewrite their identities.   After Rock Hudson's death, Elizabeth Taylor performed precisely the same defiantly elegiac indignance.

Suddenly, Last Summer hardly justifies a case for clairvoyant, retro-projective powers of AIDS, but the references that are there are sufficient to evoke some kind of AIDS-Time suspicion.  
I can't identify AIDS in Suddenly, Last Summer , but I get the impression that some budding infection has taken hold of the celluloid by 1959, much like the November of 1980 that Randy Shilts cinematically described as "a month in which single frames of tragedy in this and that corner of the world would begin to flicker fast enough to reveal the movement of something new and horrible rising slowly from the earth's biological landscape."

Intermission: Jumping Cards and Time

Tarot decks are believed to be mystical entities that contain real energies and t arot card readers - cartomancers - assign special significance to any card that jumps out while the querent is shuffling the deck.   Early cartomancers such as Antoine Court de Gébelin and Jean-Baptiste Alliette (who took the professional name Ettiella) believed that the trump symbols and pip patterns of playing cards carried an encoded version of Ancient Egyptian written knowledge magically passed from the moon deity Thoth, who was believed to be the keeper and transcriber of knowledge.  

Romanian gypsies - people from the Eastern edges of Europe and thought to be descendants of the Egyptians - were treated suspiciously, and were thought to have powers of magic and witchcraft, were associated with the cards, while Eliphas Lévi, the author of "Doctrine of Transcendental Magic" (1855), claimed that Tarot was an encoded form of Kabbalah that carried the wisdom from the Tree Of Life. These energies form bridges that allow clairvoyance to pass from querent to reader via the handling of the cards.   When a querent, in the presence of a medium, handles the cards, he conducts their stores of divine energy.  

So, when a card jumps from the deck while the deck is being manipulated by the querent, it's treated as a metaphoric spark that has flown from the mystic energy stirred up by the handling of the deck: a manifestation of the mystical powers of the Tarot, the deck speaking for itself or the previously inanimate card, knowing its importance to the querent, ensuring it be read.   The reader will invariably note such a card, and usually place it somewhere central on the reading surface, and use it as an interpretative key to the entire reading.   Many people who've experienced a jumping card while they've been shuffling a Tarot deck will swear later that the card was by far the most meaningful card of their reading.

Einstein demonstrated that the laws of Time are not absolute, and that, for instance, time moves slower for an object travelling at high speed.   Einstein concluded that time could be subverted, and that time travel, including travelling backwards in time to visit the past, is possible , even though our current levels of technology prevent any experimentation in this area.

Presentism is the belief that only the present exists at any given moment:   the past did exist, the future will exist, but only the present actually exists.   Against this, Herman Minkovski suggested that time is the fourth dimension, and that the universe--time and space and human experience--is a four dimensional property something like a giant block of ice where all events including the past and the future coexist, frozen in their location in space and time.   Called the "block universe" view, Minkovski's theory is part of what is known as "event ontology" which asserts that motion is just a series of fixed events running in sequence, rather like the still frames of a moving picture, which, when run in sequence at speed, give the illusion of being in motion.   (Hence our word cinema, which comes from the Greek kinesis , meaning motion.)

John McTaggart created the A-series and the B-series.   In the A-series, individual events have the property of being past, now or future, and these properties determine their position in time.   These properties change.   In the B-series, individual events form a chain of earlier-than and later-than relations, and this linked chain is the order of time.   These relations are permanent.

So what happens when something that should be on McTaggart's B-series seems to jump its sprockets and end up in a different place?   How can an object, event or image appear earlier-than it should, side by side with objects, events or images that preceded it?

While the light projected through moving celluloid travels rapidly through the ether on its way from the projection booth to the screen, the film reel itself only run at 24 frames a second, far slower than the 299,792,458 meters per second required if its still frames were to jump their sprockets and warp time.

Survivor 1970: the cast of The Boys In The Band .

1970: The Boys In The Band

Morris Kight, Los Angeles gay activist, protested outside the Hollywood premiere of The Boys In The Band in 1971.   Speaking to Variety columnist Army Archerd, Kight explained:

Look, there is not a single character in the film I don't know. I know the drunk.   I know the pill head.   I know the pimply queen.   I know every one of them.   They're very real.   But they're only a part of this community--and happily they're a dying breed.

Guileless Kight couldn't have chosen his words more presciently, as of course, the actors who played the drunk (Michael), the pill head (Donald) and the pimply queen (Harold) were due to leave the earth prematurely, along with half the cast.   Kight's hope that such gay identities would "die" and leave behind a politically engaged, achievement-oriented gay community was to be realised a decade later, and in no uncertain terms.  

Half the cast of The Boys In The Band went on to die of AIDS: In the above picture, from the top row extreme left, Kenneth Nelson (Michael) died October 7 1993, second on the left Leonard Frey (Harold) died 24 August 1988, third from left Keith Prentice (Larry) died 27 September 1992. Robert La Tourneaux (Cowboy), sitting on the arm of the couch, died 3 June 1986, while Frederick Combs (Donald), sitting next to him, died 19 September 1992.

A product of the Stone(wall) Age--adapted from the 1968 play by Mart Crowley, and released in 1970-- The Boys In The Band is a wholly pre-AIDS text that follows a group of New York gay men as they celebrate their friend Harold's birthday with a party and, via litres of alcohol and endless forked-tongue dialogue, confront aging, loneliness and emotional displacement.   

The movie's first conversation--between best friends Michael and Donald--is about a cancelled doctor's appointment.   Donald's doctor has come down with "a virus or something.   He said he was just too sick."

Michael and Donald chat on and off for the film's first twenty minutes, during which time they use the following words and phrases:

•  catatonic fit

•  doctor

•  doctors

•  virus

•  sick

•  sicker

•  doctor (again)

•  terrible trouble

•  not good

•  not the greatest

•  sick

•  syndrome

•  waste, waste, waste

•  finis

•  freakshow

•  plane crash

•  I didn't think I could survive

•  anxiety

•  guilt

•  struggle to survive

•  die

•  I thought you'd perished

At one point, while chatting to Donald, Michael addresses an ornate portrait of himself that hangs on the wall in a giant gilt frame.   He talks of vanity and aging.   Michael looks slightly younger in the painting, and the aristocratic touch of a large self-portrait seems remarkably ostentatious in Michael's compact New York digs.   He turns away from the portrait and starts to wrap up Harold's birthday present.   A close shot shows him fashioning a red ribbon as a finishing touch on the gift-wrap.    The front-and-rear metaphors of Dorian Gray and the red lapel ribbons of AIDS bookend Michael and suggest he is the mass around which a century of gay history revolves on an elliptic and time-telescoping orbit.

In a subsequent scene, Donald and Michael talk under the silent lips of Man Ray's "Les Amourex" which features on a poster in Michael's apartment.

"Les Amourex" by Man Ray

Man Ray was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in future AIDS-film city Philadelphia.   Contracting his birth name, he seems to have concealed the "aidz" that his surname contained (see also, the W iza r d of Oz).   He was also a Dadaist, a word which is an anagram of a "tad AIDS".   One of Man Ray's key philosophies on photography was that real objects could be framed or re-arranged to look simultaneously real and unreal.   In other words, he was an artist of the uncanny.   How appropriate, then, that his work should appear in this scene, where two gay men, played by gay actors who would not survive the AIDS epidemic, have uncanny conversations about doctors and viruses and spar with each other using nihilistic humour. The lips of "Les Amourex" float, UFO-like, over a vast landscape.   A wide horizon tilts across the bottom third of the painting.   The lips are set with slight vanishing point perspective which in this context suggests that they straddle distant points of space and time.   Hovering near but unseen by the two Boys the lips are benignly closed and kissable over the polymorphous atmosphere of the early 1970s, but as they tilt towards the top right, and head for the 1980s future, we know they will yawn open terribly and devour without mercy.

They seem to usher in Alan, Michael's college roommate, who is in town and wants to meet up to talk with Michael about "something important".   Alan calls Michael, but Michael is already frantic with preparations to host Harold's party, and is happy when Alan agrees to visit another time. Alan has called Michael from a public phone booth and as he leaves the booth and crosses the street, car headlights and neon signs form out-of-focus balls of light which encircle him, like cells.   He is obscured from the foreground by a flashing hazard light affixed to a yellow and black warning post and as the phone-booth scene ends, concentric camera lens circles converge on his body like a target, and sirens wail in the distance.   Alan is framed as something ominous .   The idea that foreign element Alan may blow in unexpectedly and intrude on the gay party gives Michael the creeps.   Michael had worried that the gay guys would have to modify their behaviour if Alan attended, and he's relieved when Alan says he won't be turning up.  

With Alan out of the picture, everyone relaxes, and the party gets going.   Conversations about the Club Baths in San Francisco and past trysts on Fire Island are held, music plays.   The guys start to dance, one of them cheers - everyone's having a ball.   Then, unexpectedly, Alan does arrive.    When Alan enters Michael's apartment, the boys freeze.   The music is switched off immediately, and Michael is visibly unnerved.   Alan finds easy rapport with Hank, the most masculine party guest, and compliments Hank on his athletic body.   Alan's attention to Hank provokes jealousy from Hank's lover Larry.  

Alan, who's barged in despite agreeing not to and who appears to have no plans on leaving anytime soon, dishonestly says:

I really feel sorry about barging in on you this way.

AIDS is a four letter word starting with A, and so is the name Alan. Eschewing the paisley scarves and rainbow-coloured sweaters of the rest of the ensemble, Alan spends the entire film dressed in a tuxedo.   Platinum-haired Alan is black and white, so he shares the monochromatic palette of newspaper print, with which AIDS would later be most familiar.   AIDS and Alan, the unexpected and unwanted guest of The Boys in the Band seem to share many characteristics, so let's conflate them and use the logo A*** to represent them both.  

Though he recently gave up smoking and drinking, Michael immediately retreats to the kitchen and gulps down a large drink.   Then, he and A*** go upstairs to the bedroom, where Michael sits on the bed and A*** circles him with dominant, lion-like pacing.   Michael asks A***:

Why are you in New York?

When A*** returns downstairs, it starts to rain, then A*** and the flamboyant Emory have an argument which ends in a violent fist fight, a very disturbing scene which leaves Emory with a bloody mouth which is revealed when he screams in pain.   His friends help him to his feet, but Emory collapses onto the lounge and his friends step back as his blood spatters in all directions.   Swooping camera movements and jerky editing give the scene the feel of a major medical emergency, while dialogue includes Emory pleading "get away from me" and "I can't breathe!" while A*** barks barely intelligible pejorative at Emory and has to be physically restrained.   Emory describes A*** as "a beast".   During this scene, Emory is helpless, frantic, physically ruptured and in crisis, while his panicked friends attend him.

Emory in crisis

Harold arrives, and Emory cowers, embarrassed that his friend will see him bloody and bedraggled when he had dressed up for the party and bought Harold an expensive present (a hustler).   Harold witheringly addresses A***:

Who is she?   Who was she?   Who does she hope to be?

When he receives his gift, Harold tells Emory:

I'm so thrilled to get it I could kiss you.   But I don't want to get blood all over me.  

A*** says that he feels sick.   He goes to the bathroom, where Emory is patching himself up.   Emory screams and falls onto a nearby bed when A*** bursts in.   A*** is now a dangerous free radical, thundering around the house and bursting through doors, causing terror wherever he randomly, unexpectedly appears.

In further party banter, Sebastian Venable, from Suddenly Last Summer , is described as "a fairy who got eaten alive", and Harold tells Emory "one could murder you".   Meanwhile, with A*** locked away being sick in the bathroom upstairs, a sense of pre-A*** tranquillity returns to the party.   But like the alien-infected husky dog of The Thing , A*** soon returns and creeps through the party at which point the rainstorm intensifies with (Dorothy) gale force winds and torrential rain which knock shelves off the terrace walls and leave Harold's birthday cake - crowned with a dancing man candle - upturned on the floor.  

As the partygoers get drunker, Michael confronts A*** about his secret homosexual history, where it turns out that he had a lengthy affair with Justin Stewart, a college buddy that A*** claims "made him sick".   Michael claims that A*** left Justin with "scars".  

The film ends with A*** leaving and Michael collapsing, crying "I won't make it!   I won't make it!" and "you show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse".  

The Boys In The Band was directed by William Friedkin, who fired guns without warning on the set of The Exorcist to keep his cast on that film in a permanent state of anxiety.

Run!   A macho recreational paradise has turned into a disaster!

1978: Avalanche

In Avalanche , Rock Hudson plays David Shelby, an ambitious developer who's built a luxury ski resort at the base of an enormous snow-capped mountain range in Colorado.   Shelby invites the A-list to a gala opening, but disaster strikes when a massive avalanche levels the resort.  

Though not at all a gay-themed film--a typical 1970s disaster film, Avalanche is conspicuously heterosexual, replete with Jacuzzi-hopping ski instructors and tense fur-pelt wearing divorcees--the film was one of Rock Hudson's last.   As Rock became symptomatic in the early 1980s, we could surmise that he was most probably infected with HIV when he filmed Avalanche, and this idea exponentialises the loose and easy metaphoric associations between Rock and avalanche.   Eight years closer to AIDS ground zero than The Boys In The Band , Avalanche places the most famous AIDS identity of all centre stage and imperils him with hubristic, male-oriented doom in the shape of a natural disaster.  

The narrator of the film's trailer barks that Shelby "built a vacation paradise to match his dream!" but that his "mistake started the avalanche!"   During the trailer we hear Rock, as Shelby, say "I opened up this magnificent country for myself and anyone who wants [sic] to join me."   Though an environmentalist friend keeps warning Shelby that the resort is located in a dangerous place, and though Shelby's secret campaign donations to sympathetic Senators threaten to emerge, Shelby is completely committed to his belief that the ski resort is a worthwhile and noble endeavour.   Shelby passionately believes in the principles of capitalism and the beauty of his new slalom idyll, and basically wishes that the nay-sayers would simply shut up.   A meeting between San Francisco gay community and officials from the San Francisco Department of Public Health in March 1984 discussed the potential closing of all gay bathhouses in the face of theories that the bathhouses were facilitating the nascent AIDS epidemic.   Incensed gay protestors waved placards reading "Out of the Tubs, Into the Shrubs" and "Out of the Baths, Into the Ovens": references to gay community fears that bathhouse closures would be an early step in a rollback of their civil rights and sexual freedoms.

Many San Francisco gay men weren't native Californians and had, Like Shelby, "gone west" to find their dream lifestyle.   Despite warnings and warning signs for the best part of half a decade that their dream lifestyle had an unhealthy edge and may have a deadly sting in its tail, a commitment to gay sexual pride and freedom was rock hard.   When Avalanche 's cautious environmentalist Nick Thorne (played by Robert Thorne, whose first big-screen role was as the naked horse rider who arouses Marlon Brando's latent homosexuality in Reflections In a Golden Eye ) warns Shelby that there is a hazard, and that his resort is "risking the lives of everyone [invited] here to share it", Shelby responds with frustration, "I want people to enjoy this ... not bury them in it!"   Selby says that he's "fought like a son of a bitch" to get the resort open. Besides, it's too late - everybody is already there, the resort is packed and ice dancers are entertaining the media and the A-list.   To pack everything up and scuttle away would be a complete humiliation and probably a permanent regression for Shelby.

Rock's first appearance is akin to Mrs Bates' first appearance in Psycho . He stands behind a first storey window, unobserved and looking out and down at the people below, cut off from the hub-bub by the glass and the height. Howling winds blow.   This strangely creepy introduction to Rock melts into a warm indoors scene, where he reconciles with his ex-wife Caroline Brace (Mia Farrow).   Lines from their early dialogue exchange, when read on the page and out of context, sound awfully AIDS-eque:

CAROLINE: You're looking well, maybe a little tired.

DAVID: This is the big one.

CAROLINE: Well I guess you got it.

Later in the movie, Thorne notes that "things aren't normal.   There's a heaviness growing," to which Shelby replies, "you wanna panic the whole population because there's a heaviness?" (Reflect on the reluctance of the US government and gay bathhouses to close down in the early years of the epidemic, before the ghastly scope of the Crisis had become clear).

An zephyr of sexual guilt floats through the film, with a two-timed ski babe screaming then running into the snowy night wearing only her underwear when she finds her boyfriend in bed with another woman.   In her next scene, she tries to kill herself with a sleeping pill overdose.   Newly-divorced Caroline keeps accidentally using her married name, then catching herself and tentatively mouthing her new single-woman identity.   Shelby conducts a clandestine business call while having a bubble bath with a partially seen naked woman who is covered in bubbles but who isn't shown sharing the bath with Shelby.   This particular scene echoes the bubble-bath scene from the Hudson/Doris Day film Pillow Talk, where Hudson and Day exchange double entendre via telephone while enjoying separate bubble baths.   Hudson's popularity as a matinee idol, exemplified by his three collaborations with Day, was what made his illness and death from AIDS, and the corollary revelation that he was homosexual, a media sensation; Avalanche prefigures this detail, too by placing Hudson in an incongruous heterosexual bubble bath/telephone call scene.

We could scratch around for etymological AIDS pulses in Avalanche and note that the film title is an all-capitals word starting with "A" and that the surnames of Shelby's ex-wife and best friend warn him to Brace for a Thorne and that avalanches tend to be associated with falling Rocks but in finding AIDS' signature on Avalanche we need look no further than Rock Hudson's character's name:

D-A-V-I-D S-H-E-L-B-Y

Waiting for something?   Extras on the New York set of Cruising , 1980.

1980: Cruising

Ten years after The Boys in the Band , William Friedkin made his other gay-themed film, the infamous Cruising , a violent thriller about a homosexual serial killer, based on a novel by Gerald Walker.

Partially in response to criticism that Boys was irresponsible and anti-gay, Friedkin prefaced Cruising with a title card:

This film is not intended as an indictment of the homosexual world.   It is set in one small segment of that world which is not meant to be representative of the whole.

However, as Cruising was made within an inner-radius of the retrograde AIDS shock wave, it is a film marked vividly by clairvoyant references to the epidemic and it stands, for me, as a film about pre-AIDS homosexual culture in general.   Cruising is another pre-AIDS film about AIDS.

A creepy song playing diegetically in one of the gay bar scenes contains the lyric "when I close my eyes I see blood".   The first scene of the film shows two patrol cops cruising the gay area of town and noting that "one day this whole city's gonna explode".

Cruising 's gay killer is a quasi-human foreign element that strikes horny gay guys and only comes alive during sexual encounters where it torments then kills its partner.    Filmed from behind and speaking with an unnatural, HAL-9000 style voice, the killer haunts gay sex venues such as cruising grounds and peep shows or selects his victims from gay bars.   "Where are you from?" an early victim asks.   "Mars," the killer responds.  

Later, when this victim is tied face down to the bed, we get a dialogue cluster of aids:

KILLER: Are you afraid?

VICTIM: Should I be?

KILLER: I can't believe you're not afraid.

VICTIM: Now I'm afraid.

Earlier, this victim had playfully accused his killer as being "anal regressive", a taunt that will be upended when he is himself attacked from behind and an allusion to anal sex, the most efficient sexual HIV transmission route which would threaten to send the gay movement into permanent reverse.

Like AIDS, the killer navigates the gay milieu at will, freely selecting its victims, who hang out at the bars and cruising grounds unaware of its presence.   Indeed, the killer seems to take on the appearance of its victims - it lives inside of them.   Steve Burns (Al Pacino) is the cop that's selected to go undercover because he has the early-thirties slightly ethnic look that's apparently favoured by the killer.   Burns finds that the fragmentary descriptions of the killer could apply to almost any of the guys packed shoulder to shoulder in New York's cavernous leather bars.   The film's ending introduces the possibility that it is Burns himself who may be the killer.   While a prime suspect is found to be innocent, gay victims fall at random and often in clear view of their peers.  

Also like early theories about AIDS, early theories about Cruising 's killer circle around ideas of sexual perversity, malignancy of the rectum, sexual malfunction and the danger of irregular ("queer") male bodies.   The forensic scientist performing an autopsy on an early victim makes the following observations:

Anus was dilated at the time of death.   Slight rupture above the anus indicating intercourse.   We found semen but I couldn't identify it.   Aspermia.   No sperm.   Your killer's shooting blanks.   Maybe he has some physical aberration or a malfunction.   Could be his testes are infected.

Later, theories about homosexual guilt and self-hate are identified as certain motivations behind the killing spree.   The aperture of the film's conclusion suggests that the worst is yet to come for gay New York, that a scattershot of early killings is the tip of an enormous, oncoming iceberg of latently dangerous queer sexual identity.   Burns' girlfriend tries on his gay clone accoutrement of leather cap and mirrored glasses in the unsettling penultimate scene.    The film closes with an ominously melancholy sunset over New York harbour.   A garbage scow yawns lazily through the shot, and the skyline turns orange.   It's a return to the film's opening location, when a severed arm was found floating in the Hudson.   Nothing has changed, indeed, the inscrutable killer remains on the loose, emboldened by his success and unable to be stopped.   The city is his.

AIDS, approaching its physical manifestation at a pace, begins to sign itself with confidence in Cruising .   In the film, separate tabloid newspaper headlines announce HOMO KILLER ON THE PROWL and GAY KILLER STILL AT LARGE.   With wicked humour, AIDS has chosen to appear via one of these headlines so that it is adjacent to a sports article on Arthur Ashe, a top ranked tennis player of the day who died of AIDS in 1993.   "ASHE K'OD" is the headline to the article, and an adjacent profile on the star is titled "ASHE'S PAST IS DUST".   A blinking neon sign outside a hotel where a killing takes place advertises "RADIO SHACK" which is a jumble of ADIOS, AIDS and ROCK.  

Cruising also bought Morris Kight's outside-the-theatre warning that William Friedkin directed gay-themed films featured a dying breed of homosexuals into grisly corporeality when, two months after Cruising opened, a man entered The Ramrod, a leather bar featured in the film, and opened fire with a sub machine gun, killing two patrons and wounding twelve others. Earlier, gay activists had circulated a leaflet warning that "Gay People Will Die Because Of This Movie".

1982: The Making Love Sequence

1. body beautiful	2. disco pills
3. cruising	4. "Will you call?"
5. intermission: The Norman Heuristic	6. lymph lumps
7. lymphs and movies	8. "Dr Jekyll?"
9. "probably a virus"	10. poisoned food
11. infantile activism	12. the road to hell
13. signature	14. boo! behind you!

Just before it made its real-life debut, which no one would miss, AIDS made its most lucid proscopic appearance.   Making Love follows Zach (Michael Ontkean), a young doctor with burgeoning homosexual urges.   His wife Clair (Kate Jackson) is oblivious, and his love interest Bart (Harry Hamlin) is distracted by the early 1908s fastlane gay bachelor life.    The film, which sits on the edge of AIDS ground zero, is a container for an extraordinarily uncanny sequence that reads exactly as AIDS, without any metaphoric interpretation necessary.   Previously, AIDS has hinted at its presence.   In this sequence, it shouts its name.

In the Making Love sequence, a potted history of the epidemic-to-come plays out in perfect chronological order and one too-uncanny-to-be-just-uncanny moment follows the next.   Hitherto jumbled word-references to AIDS pull themselves into focus in the sequence's gasp-inducing final shots which have the word "AIDS" hovering above the gay characters' heads.   

The sequence begins 14 minutes into the film, with Bart, a successful writer of fiction, following a work out at the gym with some press-ups at home.   He checks his shirtless torso in a three-way mirror (Picture 1, below), then gets dressed in macho clothes, pops some kind of pill (a benzo? A Quaalude?) and heads for the local gay bar (2).   As Bart moves through the crowd, it's clear he's a popular, well-known guy, and the atmosphere of the club is friendly and indicative of a well-established community.   Bart cruises a guy, makes small talk with him (3) which we recognize as pick-up code.   They have sex, after which Bart can't wait to be back on his own (4).  

The next day, Bart is inspecting his body again when he notices swollen lymph glands in his neck (6).   He settles into Elizabeth Taylor (there she is again) and Montgomery Clift (likewise) in Raintree County (imagine if he was watching Suddenly Last Summer !) but, in between scoffing popcorn, keeps rubbing the swollen glands (7).   He visits the doctor, to find that his regular GP Dr Bloom is away, and that Zack will be examining him.   Earnest Zack is dressed in a white doctor's coat, and the surgery is all white.   Bart is a slash of colour, dressed in blue denim and using confident and flirtatious language, referring to Zack at various points as Dr Jekyll and Dr Doolittle.  

Zack asks Bart: "any new symptoms that I should know about?" and Bart indicates his swollen glands (9).   Bart confesses that he occasionally uses drugs and has multiple sex partners, but he tries "to be on the safe side" and is "very conscious of not fucking up [his] system".   Zack dismisses the swelling: "don't worry about it.   It happens all the time".   After they lunch together (10), where Bart refuses to eat his hamburger bun because such food is "poison", they stroll.

A girl guide is selling cookies to raise funds for "The Little Sisters of America".   For no apparent reason, Bart blindsides an elderly couple nearby with a sarcastic tirade about giving charity according to his idea of "the American way" (11).   The couple, who had their money out ready to buy, hastily run off without making a purchase; the girl guide curses Bart and forces him to buy her entire cookie stock.   At a bookstore, Bart buys Zack a copy of his latest novel, "Good Intentions" (12) and they say their goodbyes in front of a hearing aids shop (13).   Carefree Bart appears pricked by Zack and looks at him longingly after Zack makes a nervous exit.

In this sequence, then, we see confident and organised gay cruising, and a community atmosphere double-decked by mostly single men who keep in shape and who regularly seek no-strings sex.   Cinephilic, leisure-time culture is interrupted by an ominous swelling of the lymph glands, followed by early dismissals of symptoms, and a continued pursuit of sex, romance and pleasure and identification of false enemies.   Then, radical, self-defeating public activism that alienates the American "heartland" is undertaken with good intentions by which time the permanent hovering presence of the word AIDS has settled into place.  

On July 27, 1982, the acronym AIDS was coined during a stakeholders meeting in Washington DC.   With new non-homosexual cases emerging, GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency) was considered too limited a name for the syndrome, and, according to Randy Shilts, the suggested ACIDS was considered "grotesque".   AIDS, Shilts notes, was a gender-neutral "snappy acronym", but it was coined almost five months after Making Love 's general US release on March 5, 1982, meaning the film's AIDS-sequence must have been written and filmed around a year, at least, before the word AIDS stood for AIDS.   Further, the sequence must have been written and filmed around or before July 3, 1981, when the New York Times published what has become known as the "birth certificate" of the AIDS epidemic, a page 20 article entitled RARE CANCER SEEN IN 41 HOMOSEXUALS   (subheading: First Appears in Spots ).  

So, while gay men in 1980-81 may well have been reporting odd symptoms and swollen lymph glands to their doctors, they couldn't have been doing so in large enough numbers for a long enough time for such a practice to enter culture to the degree that every screenwriter and film maker felt they had to include such information as par-for-the-course of their gay characters' experiences.   In other words, as Making Love was made and released around the time the nascent AIDS epidemic was starting to stir and so if AIDS has a presence in Making Love-- which I feel it quite tangibly does--then such a presence cannot be due to any cognitive or empirical AIDS-awareness of o the film's makers.

The first time I watched the film, I was struck by the prescient AIDS-ness of this sequence and became fascinated as the sequence went on, unfolding almost as if to an as-yet-unwritten AIDS script.   When the word AIDS popped onto the screen, adjacent to Bart's lymph glands, I audibly gasped as though I'd seen a ghost ( ... perhaps I had?)   I couldn't believe my eyes: AIDS, the artist of this sequence, had audaciously signed its name to its work.  

When Zack leaves and Bart takes a step forward, another shop sign, BAMBOO BASKETS moves into the shot so that BAM is cut off.   BOO! AIDS.   My thoughts exactly.   It's one thing when AIDS sears its name onto celluloid, but quite another when it starts forming witty mini-sentences.

Since Making Love was the first (and last) pre-AIDS film to tentatively explore gay themes in mainstream films, it reminds me of Sadako, who waited patiently for her thoughtographed televisual curse to emerge at last and shock us - literally to death - by demonstrating that there is an open membrane between the cosmological and the earthly.

Did AIDS perform nensha ?