Just mangled guts, pretending
From 'Angels in America,' a reminder that change isn't hard; it's wet and gooey
You’ll forgive me for circling the parking lot on HBO’s “Angels in America.” I’ve never seen or read the original Tony Kushner play, either. It’s basically “Rent,” right? (Don’t hurt me.) But: a sprawling miniseries, based on a sprawling-er play about AIDS … starring Meryl Streep in prosthetic rabbi makeup … where Roy Cohn is a main character … like, pick a lane.
With January hours to kill, I finally blazed through all six episodes of director Mike Nichols’ adaptation, which is streaming on Max. Brother, that’s dense television. There’s galaxy-braining about time, purpose, religion, politics, sexuality, and the limits of Emma Thompson’s dialect coach. And still, the series demands deep feelings from the viewer over and over again.
The closing line from Prior, played by Justin Kirk in the miniseries, gets all the fame in that regard. “You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: more life. The great work begins,” he says. Goosebumps, for sure. But another scene stopped me in my tracks.
In the fifth episode, Harper Pitt (Mary-Louise Parker) wallows at the Mormon visitors’ center where her mother-in-law volunteers. Up until this point, Harper followed all the rules. It left her with, in order: sexual frustration, social isolation, a pill addiction, a recently uncloseted gay husband, and frequent hallucinations involving Jeffrey Wright.
Surrounded by junk food and dosed to the gills with mommy’s little helpers, Harper envisions a statue of a Mormon pioneer woman coming to life. They get to chatting:
Harper: In your experience of the world, how do people change?
Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God, so it's not very nice. God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly, and then plunges a huge filthy hand in. He grabs hold of your bloody tubes, and they slip to evade his grasp, but he squeezes hard. He insists. He pulls and pulls ’til all your innards are yanked out. And the pain — we can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled, torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.
Harper: Then up you get. And walk around.
Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts, pretending.
Harper: That's how people change.
Hey, so, dang. What a heater.
There’s no-bullshit candor in there that lays me out flat. Kushner’s dialogue not only refuses to elide the pain involved in personal change, but assumes it as integral. Acceptance! Helluva drug.
You know how the ancient Romans looked at spilled entrails as a form of divination? OK, well, they did. They’d look at mine and see my joys and successes, but a lot of grief, too. Every sadness and anxiety, every little bit of hope that went unfulfilled — it all moved the furniture in the Ikea showroom of my soul. Even things I liked about myself changed, and sometimes I feel like the Ship of Theseus.1
(“Ship” implies a level of seaworthiness that I do not possess. Perhaps I’m the Dinghy of Theseus.)
I’m not trying to sound bleak. But honestly, this scene made me think of a recent conversation with my therapist. The longer I go without a partner, the more I worry it’s too late. I’m not the kid I started out as, nor the adult I dreamed of becoming. I fear I’m more mangled guts than man. How do you sell that to a nice, handsome guy with a good retirement plan?
My therapist gets all my first-draft metaphors; I told her that this feels like I got bitten in the arm by a poisonous snake. Of course, I called 9-1-1, sure that the paramedics would come ASAP. But they didn’t, and I waited, and I waited, and I waited. By the time they got there, they had to amputate the arm.
So, yeah, the thing I hoped for could still happen, but now I’m down a whole arm. And that was my good arm; it was hopeful, open, energetic, and not for nothing, skinnier.
“So often, something that I actually liked about myself shifts, and I end up feeling like the Ship of Theseus. (‘Ship’ implies a level of seaworthiness that I do not possess. Perhaps I’m the Dinghy of Theseus.)”
More TV shows should level with us like “Angels in America.” I just finished a watch-through of everything “Twin Peaks.” One of the most affecting character arcs belongs to Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook). An impetuous hooligan in the 1990 series, he’s grown into a decent-hearted sheriff’s deputy when we meet him again in 2017’s “Twin Peaks: The Return.”
Bobby became the kind of man his long-gone father2 knew was in there, deep down. But en route, he lost a lot and picked up extreme divorced dad energy. He eventually built a family with Shelly (Mädchen Amick), but something happened, and now she’s with the kind of lowlife guy Bobby should have become, statistically speaking. In one scene, he weeps at a mere photo of long-dead3 Laura Palmer.
Back to “Angels in America.” Harper’s hallucinated pal says, “It's up to you to do the stitching.” Touché, Mormon pioneer woman.
Whenever I worry about What Will Become of Me, it helps to remember that I have successfully schlepped my sad gay butt from countless Points A to countless Points B. Even when I didn’t want to do it. Even when it felt like hopping barefoot across hot concrete at the waterpark. I sent the pitches, I moved into the apartments, I paid the bills, I learned how to sleep through the nights again, I kept myself alive and safe. It won’t always feel like pretending.
So, from my mangled guts to yours: If it feels like you’re making it up as you go, I know a mannequin that says you’re doing just fine.
One rad thing
There’s a new collaboration brewing between The Knocks, Dragonette, and Aquaria, and I’m abuzz. The electronic duo, the singer, and the drag star, respectively, just dropped a new song, “Revelation.” It’s fizzy dance pop for adherents to the church of Carly Rae Jepsenism.
The preview clip for “Revelation” (which teases an upcoming album) and the video for an interlude-y song titled “Keynote” point toward a pre-millennium analog media aesthetic throughout whatever the project is. In the videos, Aquaria stars as an uncanny-looking yuppie — “Working Girl” meets “Max Headroom” — at the helm of some mysterious corporation. I see the vision.
But I’m really here because “Revelation” reminded me of the collective’s supreme 2022 track “Slow Song,” a personal favorite that I could listen to forever. The neon-drenched video features Aquaria strutting through the city after dark, before dancing on her own as Dragonette sings to an otherwise empty room.
“Slow Song” is romantic like a midnight kiss. Like all great pop songs, there’s something a little sad lurking behind the disco beat, like a shadow just out the corner of your eye. Beyond stoked to see what the new collab yields.
Outbox
I’ve avoided writing anything about the devil “Emilia Pérez,” because 1) I try to focus on art that I find valuable, and 2) the movie, though garishly stupid, is profoundly uninteresting. However, John Paul Brammer wrote about it, and his column is more entertaining than any moment of the most Oscar-nominated film of 2025.
One of my favorite bits from his “¡Hola Papi!” piece concerns Selena Gomez’s character:
“Jessi is written as being from the United States to explain away her accent, and, you know, I’m a No Sabo Kid myself, but Selena delivers her Spanish lines here like Emilia Clarke speaking High Valyrian in Game of Thrones.”
Brammer, like me, is also “more afraid of Selena Gomez than El Chapo.” I wrote a review of her really awful Austin concert years ago. The Selenators retaliated against me using psychological attacks developed at a CIA black site.
…
Instead of engaging with whatever news of witless cruelty emerged today, I recommend watching one of “The Best Anti-Fascist Films of All Time.” Writers Scott Roxborough and Patrick Brzeski curated this list for the Hollywood Reporter, and it’s chock-full of stuff to discover. They included films engaging with whatever global flavor of fascism you feel like condemning today. (Bleak sentence! Ah, well.) I’m partial to “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “Porco Rosso,” m’self.
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Last week, we talked about Lady Gaga’s new song/video, “Abracadabra.” For further reading, I recommend a Salon essay titled “The public's renewed love for all things Lady Gaga is a sign that we're stronger than we think.” Fair warning, some of writer Coleman Spilde’s arguments about Gaga and her relationship to the cultural landscape are big, fat, juicy swings. For example: “The music isn’t merely a distraction from the daily horrors; it’s Gaga’s way of confidently opposing the artless philistinism levied by the right wing’s frightening agenda.”
But by the end, I was on board. Read it here.
Lore drop: I played Theseus in my high school’s production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
After bingeing every piece of “Twin Peaks” content over 2-3 weeks, I am obsessed with Major Garland Briggs. I’ve gone deep on YouTube video essays theorizing what happened to him. I am Briggsmaxxing.
This is only true depending on which fan theory video you watch on YouTube.