Movie Review: The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson

The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson *** ½ / *****

Directed by: David France.

Written by: David France & Mark Blane.

 

The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson is most effective when it looks at the larger picture, and a little more suspect when it tries to zoom in on the details. The film uses its title figure – the famous drag queen Marsha P. Johnson, a figure in the Stonewall riots, and a gay activist her entire life, until her mysterious death in 1992, to tell the complicated history of transgender people in the gay rights movement. While today, the LBGTQ community is overall very supportive of trans rights, that wasn’t always the case – and director David France has the footage to prove it, as a large rally for gay rights in the 1970s features trans activist Sylvia Rivera giving a speech, where she is essentially booed and shouted down. She left the movement after that – and had a complex relationship with the movement for decades after – going through her own struggles, before dying in 2002 herself. When the film looks back at the movement in those earlier days, or focuses on the current situation – which is better, but far from good – the movie follows a murder trial where a man admits to beating to death a Trans woman, but says he did so out of “panic” when he discovered she was trans – it is excellent. When it focuses on the personal story of Victoria Cruz – a trans woman herself, from the same generation of Marsha and Sylvia – it is also quite good – giving a more personal side to the movement. But it’s on shaky ground when it examines Marsha’s death itself – coming up with very little other than shaky conspiracy theories.

 

Marsha’s death is undeniably strange – she was found in the water off the Christopher street pier in 1992 – and the cause of her death was drowning. There doesn’t appear to be any trauma on her body – she wasn’t beaten, stabbed, shot, etc. – and the police essentially rule it a suicide, and move on. But was it? It also could have been an accident. It also, of course, could have been murder. Cruz is convinced that it was murder, and does everything she can to try and prove that. She goes to Marsha’s surviving siblings to get them to give her permission to get the autopsy report from the medical examiner, she reaches out to the original investigating officers, with little success, and she digs through the records of the organization in which she works – the Anti-Violence Project. She reaches out to those who knew Marsha – her roommates, her friends, etc. What she discovers in this investigation is, honestly, not that much. The original officer won’t talk to her – but a cold case detective eventually does, saying he looked into the case a couple years ago, and couldn’t find any evidence that she was murdered. Part of the autopsy record is missing – but it is 25 years old, so that’s not that unusual (on the phone, Victoria asks the woman in charge of the records “So you’re saying that out of all of your records from 1992, this is the only one missing” and the reply “No, I’m not saying that”). There is a witness that says she saw Marsha at 4 am the day before her body was discovered – and she was being followed by two men and looked scared. There is also an anonymous phone call, warning Marsha’s roommate away from his then current mission of trying to wrestle the local gay pride festival away from the Mob – but that’s about it. By the end of the documentary, the feeling I got about Marsha’s death is that I still don’t know what happened – with murder, suicide and accident all still being possible. The biggest problem may well be that the police didn’t do more of an investigation back in 1992 – but unfortunately, we cannot go back in time and do that now.

 

Everything around this investigation into what happened to Marsha in regards to her death was so fascinating however, that I didn’t much care that the crime aspect just went in circles. The film was directed by David France – whose debut film, How to Survive a Plague, was an even more impressive doc – about ACT UP in the 1980s, and their struggle to get people to take the AIDS epidemic seriously. This film is another important one, looking back at the history of the gay rights movement, and documenting how contentious it once was. For someone like Marsha, there was no hiding she was – and being a “drag queen” at that time was a day in, day out form of activism. The trans community were outliers then, and they remain the most picked upon, abused and mocked members of the LGBTQ community to day. This documentary acts as a reminder of how far we have come as a society in these matters – and how much farther we have to go.

DVD Review: How to Survive a Plague

How to Survive a Plague
Directed by: David France.
Written by: David France & Todd Woody Richman & Tyler H. Walk.

How to Survive a Plague mixes old news footage and home movies to tell the story of ACTUP – an organization that was enraged with government and drug company complacency during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s through the mid-1990s – when finally a combination of drugs was discovered that helped to prolong the lives of those infected with HIV. There is still no cure, but considering people were dying in a matter of months when the disease first came into being, and can now live seemingly indefinitely with it, this was a major breakthrough. That is happened has more to do with ACTUP than it does with the government.

 The movie shows just how the group progressed – what they did through the years (starting in 1987) as the death count rises. ACTUP  was smart enough right from the beginning to know they had to use the media to their advantage – so they had the type of protests that were too big for the media to ignore. They have media insiders teach them how to deliver catchy slogans that the media can grasp onto – the sound bite is more important than a speech – and know how to use grand gestures – huge banners reading “Silence = Death” or covering Senator Jesse Helms house (a hateful, hateful man) with a giant cloth condom. The system wasn’t working, they couldn’t change the system from within, so they did what they could to change it from the outside – and let everyone know they weren’t going anywhere.

Throughout the course of the movie, we will see them protest everyone from New York Mayor Ed Koch to then President George H.W. Bush (Reagan gets a pass, presumably since the movie begins late in his administration), to Helms, to the FDA and NIH, to various drug companies – and in 1992, Bill Clinton on the campaign trail. Their message really was simple – unless you step up and DO something, you are murdering us, and our blood will be on your hands.

It’s a provocative message, and I must say at times, I did think they were accusing the wrong people – but that hardly matters. They needed to guilt people into helping them, because nothing else was working. When AIDS first hit, hospitals did not want to diagnose people with the disease, or treat those who had it. Their bodies were often put in black garbage bags, and many funeral homes wouldn’t accept the bodies. Drugs, that were widely available in other countries, had not been approved by the FDA yet – it took them years to get through the “testing” phase, and people with AIDS did not have years to wait.

As with any group like ACTUP – from Vietnam Protesters to Occupy Wall Street and everything in between – eventually cracks start to emerge. Drugs still weren’t becoming available, and those that were didn’t help as much as hoped. Some wanted to get more involved in the inner workings of power – both in politics and the drug companies themselves – and others saw it as a waste of time. The movie pretty much skips over a few years in the early to mid-1990s when the new cocktail of drugs was discovered – saying only that it was “a dark time” – mostly because the group was fracturing, and people were still dying. But the movie ends with some inspiring moments. The only modern talking heads we had seen throughout most of the movie were those of scientists who worked tirelessly to research the disease and develop drugs to help those infected. Many of the faces we see during the course of movie who are infected say often that they expect to die. Many do. But some are still around today, and that is inspiring. And yet, for them, it seems more sad than that. They certainly feel a degree of survivor’s guilt over being the ones who didn’t die.

But overall, How to Survive a Plague is a tragic, yet inspiring story. Without ACTUP, who knows how long it would have taken for drugs that actually helps AIDS patient to become available. ACTUP is an example of how to protest effectively – and the value of doing so.