GLOW and the Limits of Nostalgia: US Health Care and the AIDS Crisis
In one of the most dramatic moments of season two of the awesome Netflix series GLOW: the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, Debbie breaks Ruth’s leg in the middle of a match. There’s a lot of drama embedded in this moment because, of course, in the ring, Debbie is taking out her anger on Ruth, who slept with Debbie’s husband. Or, at least, that’s where the drama of the moment seems to come from: how far will Debbie go to revenge her marriage?
For me, though, the drama of that scene and the plot developments that follow has everything to do with the way we think about and understand our experiences of the U.S. health care system.
That system is currently in a bad state. No matter your political beliefs, the fact that our health care system is beyond dysfunctional and crazily, dangerously expensive is difficult to dispute. So what happens when a feel-good TV show, set in the mid-80s, sends a character to the hospital? Ruth’s trip to the hospital happens at the intersection of nostalgia and ideology. It’s a moment where we can see the show grappling with the question of responsibility, for ourselves and for others: who ought to pay, when Ruth breaks her leg at work? But then, in a fascinating and moving subplot that happens underneath this drama with Ruth, the show comes close to exploding the whole question of payment and responsibility, when it narrates the beginnings of the AIDS crisis.
The ladies of GLOW have, shall we say, a hazardous occupation, and Bash, the trustafarian who is bringing his childhood dream to life with the show, has been cut off by his mother. This means, as the girls point out, that they don’t have health insurance. This is bad, if perhaps not 2018-level bad, because health care costs were beginning their steady increase (thus the development of managed care health insurance during the 80s).
Back to the scene at hand. The bone breaks. They carry the invalid Ruth out to Melrose’s hearse and debate, for a moment, where to take her — the closest hospital? Or the best hospital? Oh, if only we lived in that world. We certainly don’t: if you have any of your wits about you, you head for the hospital that’s in network (and even then a doctor who treats you might surprise you later with an out-of-network bill). And if you don’t have health insurance, you probably cry for a while, lament your life choices, google prices at various hospitals, and set up your GoFundMe.
But in magical TV-land of 1985, they go to the good hospital, and Bash promises to pay for Ruth’s bills. Bash is a troubled guy but he’s good-at-heart, the show promises us again and again. When he pays for Ruth’s bills, despite the fact that he is not contractually obligated to, he’s showing us again that he’s a good guy. He’s not just trying to prevent a lawsuit — and what group of washed up, broke, nothing actors is going to successfully sue his rich and powerful family anyway.
But what’s most interesting is what happens to the question of responsibility, of who’s responsible for Ruth’s well-being in this moment of crisis. Bash plays the vaguely paternal figure, without fanfare or question — of course he’d pay, it’s the kind of guy he is. Responsibility falls more squarely on Debbie’s shoulders: she’s the one who broke Ruth’s leg. Walk it out one more level, and it’s Ruth’s fault too: she’s the one who slept with Debbie’s husband. All of the thinking the show asks us to do is right there, in parsing out responsibility between our heroines. Bash’s responsibility for providing a safe working environment, for enabling his employees to access health care, for compensating them for workplace injuries? The show leaves all of this both undramatized and notably open: we know it’s an issue, the show points that out. Bash has not insured them, or himself. But he assumes responsibility as part of his good-guy character. The show opens up the issue but walks itself back from investing any dramatic or narrative interest in it.
So then the very end of season 2 is quite interesting, with respect to the question of Bash’s responsibility. His “butler” — and lover, it becomes evident — goes missing. Bash looks for him. At the end of the season, Bash gets a phone call from a hospital: Florian is dead. What to do with his body, as no funeral home will take him — a reversal of Ruth’s experience choosing her hospital. Florian has died of AIDS, and, devastated, Bash marries Britannica so she can get her green card — and so he can hide his sexuality. More importantly, this sham marriage is an attempt to hide from the intensive fear and anxiety that went with being a gay man at the start of the AIDS crisis. Bash’s money will not protect him and his friends now.
Bash is staring down a historical emergency against which his paternalistic disposition will fold. He can take care of Ruth, pay her bills — but he can’t care for Florian, or for himself, or for a generation of gay men. He can’t bring himself to take care even of Florian’s body — shame and fear overwhelm the good-guy character. The AIDS crisis shows up the lie of the nice guy with money, who’ll always take care of his friends. The nostalgia of Ruth’s hospital trip, of the show’s aesthetic, comes up against a harsh reality at which the show hints, but does not show — Florian became ill and died off-screen (while the character becomes a minor gay icon).
No amount of personal responsibility, no amount of personal wealth, and no amount of caring is going to save these characters. It’s notable that the show moves toward these claims, but only in a subplot that does not directly affect the heroines of the show, who become, when Bash marries Britannica, a distraction and a place to hide — indeed a closet. In turn, GLOW’s 80s nostalgia alternates with abject fear, generating a moving and complex affective rhythm.
In a moment of nostalgia, the show has its rich, nice-guy friend intervene to make an ordinary encounter with the health-care system a little less bad, a little more compatible with a sitcom. But that nice guy himself embodies an emergency against which he is powerless and ashamed. And of course, there’s one place the show doesn’t go: toward a government’s responsibility to its citizens. And it’s that deep, overarching kind of mutual social responsibility through government that would be necessary to recover from a crisis like that of the emergence of HIV, a true public health emergency that went beyond any individual experience.
