I'll admit it: Savage Nights (Les nuits fauves), Cyril Collard's famous 1992 film about being bisexual, HIV+, and careless – by which I mean: really fucking careless: having sex with someone without telling them – is at least as exasperating as it is impressive. Does that make me a fuddy-duddy?...
Lots of drama about rebellion and being independent... and French quasi-intellectual messing around, complete with cigarettes, fights, threats and existential babbling. But, unlike Gregg Araki's The Living End (same year, similar concerns – and a film I dislike even more than this one), Collard's character isn't too young, dysfunctional and screwed up to know what he's doing. This is an educated young man, talented, capable, comfortable, who just wants to pretend he's not positive – without caring much about anybody else.
I've always been concerned that Foucault, whom I so respect, may have acted a bit like this....
Although I confess, I absolutely love the scene where, when a group of skinheads are attacking an Arab, he cuts his hand and threatens their leader with infection. And they back off – HIV becomes a weapon. And I can go with the ending... though I'm not sure he earns it (at least not – and I know it's cruel of me to say this as he died soon afterwards – not within the film).
But the infection bit... it reminds me of a creepy guy I know in Darlington, obviously wasting (and thus self-evidently with a non-negligible viral load) who justified not telling the many guys he had anonymous sex with that he was positive. Fortunately, he is by far the worst example I've known in twenty-five years; unfortunately, since I laid down the law to him, he no longer even talks to me.
Maybe it's the cheap justifications that repulse me so: if you're lying to yourself and to other people, and they aren't even the same lies, how can you expect...?
Stupid, stupid people.
•••
Later, after a drink: I'll admit, though I still think Collard was narcissistic and manipulative, he did indeed get to me. He's managed to make me feel careful: it's the old trope of Avoiding Life – which also assumes, Latin-style, that Life includes violence, stupid fights, threats, and doing incredibly vile things to other people – but now I wish I had a bit more of that left in me... aargh.
Of course, when I was younger, I was willing to allow awful things to happen to myself: but not to other people, there I drew a heavy black line. Perhaps that's why I ended up alone.
This will pass.
•••
And still later – and perhaps rather obviously: because, for years now, I don't have new experiences, I just revisit old ones by reading old poems, stories, writings; because there is no motion in my emotional life; and because I talk to medical students, in charmingly reasonable terms, about my experiences over the past twenty-five years, but obviously that's not the same as actually having those experiences; therefore going into these films, these songs, these novels, is actually creating new feelings: because even if I have had these ideas before, feelings are obviously not re-felt in the same way that ideas are.
That's the really tough part about doing this work: wading through new feelings, about AIDS....
Comments