Live-tweeting The Normal Heart

Play and screenplay by Larry Kramer, directed by Ryan Murphy for HBO Films (2014)

My birth year.

And the Lord said unto Moses…

‘Lead my people out of Egypt!’

Just as the dialogue didn’t flow — it was, instead, a sequence of declarations, maybe suited for the stage but not for the screen—the editing moved rapidly between scenes like clicking through a set of slides.

Sorry folks, got that wrong: Matt Bomer is gay, married with children.

And, you know, because he was not Ned Weeks.

I was wrong about that. There are some narrative lines Larry Kramer is unwilling to cross.

Reading back over these tweets, referring to characters by actor names (Dr Julia Roberts, Jim Parsons, etc) or here as ‘the model’ seems disrespectful. In most cases, though, their characterisation was so sketchy that, at the time of tweeting, I actually had no idea what their names were.

Larry Kramer’s philosophy of life.

This is one line of dialogue which reveals Kramer’s need to rewrite history to make his actions seem justified. At that point in time, how could the president of GMHC know the government might one day fund them?

That sounds so bad. But also completely normal, for a community based organisation. As a director of the board, you owe a duty to the organisation to act in good faith. At a time when the organisation was trying to advocate to government, Kramer, sorry, Ned Weeks going around throwing bombs made that mission harder or impossible.

We see him do this time and again in a play Kramer wrote himself. He acts as though he’s the only one who remembers that people are dying. He throws that in the face of people who are trying to reason with him. The resultant explosion of grief and rage yanks them onto a histrionic plane of interaction where Ned is supremely comfortable operating and they are all at sea.

I call this tactic ‘the amygdala hijack’, after some work by psychologists Dan Ariely and Jonathan Haidt. It is a tactic common among psychopaths and people with borderline personality disorder. Am I pathologising Larry Kramer? Damn right I am. His own screenplay reveals him as abusive.

As much as the movie pissed me off, it was worth watching for that one scene alone. Weeks had lived through some terribly painful stuff in his childhood and early adulthood, and instead of solidarity, his older brother sent him off to psychoanalysts for reparative therapy.

Every gay man needs to know this. You can read work by Amber Hollibaugh and Sarah Schulman or watch the movie We Were Here to learn more.

That’s a line Kramer had and has no problem crossing.

That should read Dallas Buyers’ Club, obvs.

There’s this absolutely cringe-making scene where Ned gets Dr Brookner up out of her wheelchair to dance, and her smile as she rests her head on his shoulder suggests she’s secretly in love with him.

And then the film turns the corner emotionally.