My fundamental problem with Angels in America: Perestroika

[kate_nepveu]

This is a post I've been meaning to write since I saw the HBO adaptation, or for almost eight years, though I am no longer using the absolutist shorthand of "the fundamental flaw." It assumes a familiarity with the play and involves spoilers for the entire thing.

I am finally getting around to this post because rushthatspeaks posted about reading the play, and in comments, I said I could sum up my problem with part two as "What has Joe done wrong?" Which turned out to be too succinct: I should have said,

"What has Joe done wrong, that he alone is not forgiven?"

Consider the three "bad guys" in the play. There's Roy Cohn, who one character calls "the polestar of human evil," who cheerfully admits to massive violations of legal ethics that, among other things, resulted in the execution of Ethel Rosenberg (who is haunting him as he dies of AIDS), and who is a vicious closeted bigot. There's Louis, who leaves Prior because he can't cope with the "in sickness or in health" part of long-term relationships, and who spouts massively self-involved racist bullshit. And there's Joe, who leaves Harper because he finally came out of the closet (he was raised Mormon), who is a Republican law clerk trusted by other conservative judges on the court to ghostwrite at least two particularly loathsome decisions, and who, on one occasion, punches Louis several times.

What happens to each of them?

Roy dies in pain, but is shown compassion by Ethel Rosenberg before he dies, and has the Kaddish said for him by Louis and Ethel at the request of Belize, the moral center of the play:

He was a terrible person. He died a hard death. So maybe . . . A queen can forgive her vanquished foe. It isn't easy, it doesn't count if it's easy, it's the hardest thing. Forgiveness. Which is maybe where love and justice finally meet. Peace, at last. Isn't that what the Kaddish asks for?

He is last seen in the afterlife, enthusiastically agreeing to defend God against charges of abandonment.

Louis is not taken back by Prior; he is last seen four years later having friendly conversations with Prior, Belize (to whom he spouted his massively self-involved racist bullshit), and Hannah (Joe's mother).

Joe is last seen [*] when Harper demands his credit card from him so she can leave. He pleads with her not to, saying that she is the only person in the world who loves him and he doesn't know what will happen to him with her. When she refuses, he asks her to at least call; she says, "No. Probably never again. That's how bad." Earlier, Harper—who is screwed up but positioned as a voice of insight—said that "the truth" about Joe was that "[h]e's got a sweet hollow center, but he's the nothing man."

[*] In the play; the HBO adaptation adds a brief moment of connection between Joe and his mother after Harper leaves.

(Interestingly-to-me, my impression is that the play considers Joe's principal sin to be leaving Harper. I base this on three things. First, when Harper declares him "the nothing man," she doesn't, as far as I can tell, know that he beat up Louis or about the substance of his work. Second, the play devotes relatively little time overall to Joe's beating up Louis; the person most upset by it seems to be Joe himself. Third and most importantly, as Belize says, "I smell a motif. The man that got away." That is: when even God's sin turns out to be abandonment (of Heaven and his angelic lovers), the common thread is really hard to ignore.)

But regardless: Joe is less corrupt than Roy (note that he refuses Roy's request that he join the Justice Department so that he can quash ethical proceedings against Roy). He left his lover for better reason than Louis. And he was responsible for less physical harm than Roy (some bruises, as opposed to an execution). Yet at the end, he alone is left unforgiven and entirely bereft.

Which really undercuts, for me, the play's explicit messages about forgiveness and denial of stasis. Indeed, I'm not sure there's a worse example of stasis in the play than Joe and Harper's marriage; though she loves him, their marriage is not making her, and cannot make her, happy (hello, Valium addiction?). Him either, though the play seems to have lost, between parts one and two, its compassion for his struggle to overcome the self-loathing denial inculcated by his upbringing. (I ached for them both in part one, as much as I did for Prior.)

I have my doubts about the consistency and necessity of Joe's characterization and role in the second half. But even taking those at face value, I still don't see why he deserves, in the play's moral logic, the ending he gets. And that is my fundamental problem with Angels in America: Perestroika.

Comments

[abigail-n.livejournal.com]

I had the exact same reaction when I watched the HBO mini a few years ago. When I mentioned this in a forum I frequented at the time, one of the other participants - who I got the sense was roughly contemporary to the characters, i.e. a gay man who had lived in New York in the 80s and 90s - reacted very vehemently, saying that he'd known people like Joe and that for all their pretense of inner conflict and half-hearted coming out, they always stayed on the fence, and that to his mind Joe deserved no sympathy. I didn't (and still don't) know how to respond to that, but it's led me to believe that there's a specific type that Joe is meant to represent that I'm not familiar with.

The more I think about it, the more it seems that there's an argument to be made for condemning Joe for his politics, and for standing by Cohn even after learning the sordid details of his career (and maybe this is what the guy on the forum meant when he said guys like Joe never change), but I'm not sure the play makes it. As you say, his greatest sin is made out to be his abandonment of Harper (which in the HBO version is heavily paralleled with Louis's abandonment of Pryor). Either way, what truly bothers me about Joe is less that he's condemned (and apparently damned) and more that his mother isn't. If Joe is to blame for not being able to overcome the culture that raised him to hate himself, how can Kushner forgive the person who did most of that raising?

[kate_nepveu]

led me to believe that there's a specific type that Joe is meant to represent

Huh. If that's so, and it may well be, I didn't get that, but that may well explain why (as I say in more detail to wrabbit below) I think I take a much more sympathetic view of Joe than the play.

which in the HBO version is heavily paralleled with Louis's abandonment of Pryor

It's not just the HBO version; several key Prior-Louis and Harper-Joe scenes in the play are written so they take place on stage simultaneously.

[rushthatspeaks]

I think it's that Joe never forgives himself and never accepts himself. This is a play in which people get about what they expect. Not what they deserve; what they expect. Except Prior, who is blessed, with more life. Louis expects, from the beginning, that he is going to be unable to cope, that he will leave Prior, that it will be unforgivable between them but that because he is basically a resilient asshole he will eventually forgive himself-- and that's what he gets. Roy Cohn expects that he'll be able to angle something because he's just such a charming bastard, that everyone's going to forgive him even in the afterlife because he knows how to work the system, and that's what he gets.

And Joe expects that everyone is going to hate him and Harper isn't going to take him back, and, in fact, that's what he gets. He is a gay man and a Mormon, and he neither comes down on one side or the other of that contradiction nor embraces it as a contradiction that he can live in.

In addition, I think Harper taking him back would have been utterly horrible for both of them, I think that marriage was a trap for him as well as for her. We don't see him in the some-years-later bit, but I think he has more of a shot at being happy than he would if he were in that marriage. I think the thing that the play smacks him around for is not the leaving but the trying to return as though none of it had ever happened.

[kate_nepveu]

This is a play in which people get about what they expect. Not what they deserve; what they expect.

That is . . . more horrible than either the play being taken over by Kushner's hypothetical abandonment issues, or the play mishandling its argument about Joe's politics. That's neither justice (which, Belize, is not "easy", thankyouverymuch) nor mercy nor, I think, liberalism either. It reminds me of blinkered arguments from a certain strain of conservative about bootstraps and individual effort and all that kind of thing.

And yes, of course Harper taking him back would have been horrible for both of them, I was attempting to illustrate his complete isolation and her reaction to him rather than argue that she should have agreed.

The play should perhaps smack him around for trying to return, but Harper's comments and her decision are all made before that. More on this to wrabbit below.

[wrabbit]

I agree with rushthatspeaks that it's the coming back, not the leaving, that casts Joe out of the narrative.

I think Joe's hubris in the end is his sense of - entitlement is the wrong word - but his moral slipperiness, his dishonesty and dismissal of consequence. Especially in parallel with Louis. Louis's meetings with Belize and Prior are a barrage of accusation that Louis has no true self and no true feelings, that he is fundamentally dishonest even to himself. Of course they have no reason to recognize his feelings, perhaps because they believe if he had them he would not have done what he did, but I think Louis is recognized by the narrator, nevertheless; Ultimately, the crime he commits and his consequential struggles with himself are ones of shameful honesty.

Joe, on the other hand, has his moment of shameful honesty to himself, but he doesn't continue on that path. Unlike Louis during their affair, he is happy to not think about the things his done; His talk with Louis at the end of Perestroika Act 1 seems to boil down to the disconnected and naive statement of 'good is doing what one needs to do to be happy, "free from politics and history."' He outright dismisses any real world damage done by social conservative politics that Louis brings up as being beside the point, whatever that is. Later, He does not take moral responsibility for the law he's written himself and physically attacks Louis when Louis attempts to force him to recognize it. Louis when he tries to reconnect with Prior, he goes to him fully cognizant of what he's done, completely accepting of the consequences, and without any sense of entitlement. Joe on the other hand is apparently emotionally unable to recognize his moral place in the world, and goes to Harper feeling completely entitled to her, I think specifically to the moral certainty and naivety that their relationship represents for him.

[kate_nepveu]

I think you are making an argument the play should have made but didn't. Harper would be right to be upset with Joe for trying to just come back, but she declared him the nothing man and demanded his credit card before that. And all his stuff to Louis . . .

Okay, the thing is, I do not actually have any personal experience with people attempting to come out after years of repression based on their religious upbringing. But I have an imagination and, I thought, a sense of Joe's character after part 1, and quite frankly I tended to see all of Joe's actions in part 2 through the lens of someone attempting to navigate new and very unsteady ground and desperately clinging to any perceived anchor, whether or not he realizes it. And through that lens his words and actions are still wrong but in a "get your head on straight" way not a "you are a worse person than _Roy Cohn_" way.

Maybe, as Abigail suggested, Joe is inspired by a particular kind of person and thus the play gives him less benefit of the doubt. But regardless, I think the play could have done better in making its argument about Joe: maybe move some of his political stuff into part 1, maybe make Harper's assessments more explicitly broad-based and not just about his leaving, maybe shift its treatment of Hannah.

(Louis is honest that he can't take sickness, yes; as may have come through, I read his conversations with Belize in particular as condemning less his honesty than his inability to get his head out of his own ass and see other people. But I have a very hard time with getting a grasp on Louis.)