All the P.A.I.N. and the anguish

I didn't realize that it had been over a month since the last time I posted here. That's a combination of factors, including having nothing to see at the Michigan Theater, seeing things again (Everything Everywhere All At Once), or seeing things that just weren't impressive enough to inspire a reflection (The Quiet Girl.) But tonight we watched something that we saw a trailer for at the theater, but ended up seeing on HBO. It was the documentary about photographer, Nan Goldin, her struggle with oxycontin addiction and the organization she created to bring attention to the Sackler family who profited from the drug and its casualties, and much more about her life: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. It was what you'd expect out of any serious documentary: informative, insightful, pertinent, but also harrowing and disturbing.

The film highlights the criminality of Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family, but it also exposes the basic criminal situation of the health system in the United States, where a company nominally producing products for the care of patients, instead is motivated almost solely by profit, in true Reaganite fashion. This is brought into focus when Nan talks about her initial addiction to oxycontin, which dropped her out of the dynamic community that she'd become a part of as a creative person in the neighborhoods of south Manhattan, and into rehab. When she emerged from her treatment and tried to reconnect with that community, she said: "They were all gone." as the AIDS epidemic had ripped through the LGBTQ circles that she had been a part of and the indifference of the medical community, until there was a profit to be made, and the ignorance or contempt of the general public left so many to die. This coincides with the first story that the film begins with, which is that of Nan's sister, Barbara, who was struggling with her own sexuality and was committed to multiple mental health institutions by her parents as a consequence.

The story of Nan's (and Barbara's) life is one of an attempt to make connections. Deprived of emotional contact at home (something that also troubled her sister), Nan sought out communities that she could become a part of and which, in turn, would embrace her. This led to some extensive drug use, which is what placed her in the central quandary that gives the film its premise, but also sex work, which she had never previously spoken of, and all of the issues that come with that which are, again, often made up of an indifferent or contemptuous public and a willingness to look down upon anything that it doesn't implicitly understand or accept as "normal." Nan, in contrast, made her career by creating images of people as they are; different, alive, human, which is what Barbara was and would have remained. On a technical level, it's an interesting departure from many documentaries in that the vast majority of the footage and images are from Nan's work, as she photographed the life around her, but also filmed the protests that her organization P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) conducted to expose the Sackler family's connection to the art world, leading to many museums and galleries dissociating with the family and rejecting their money, a large portion of which they had siphoned from Perdue when the lawsuits over its products began, before it eventually declared bankruptcy. So it's not director, Laura Poitas, just filming the aftermath of the original topic, but Nan's work, in the moment, that makes up the bulk of the film.

This is a very personal film that doesn't present many jarring or urgent moments, but instead provides a two-hour look at a very long and varied life and the constant dark clouds that hovered over much of it from the point when Nan was 11 years old. It's a story of perseverance, both in the face of personal foibles and corporate ones, and it provides a fair amount of perspective from a very different standpoint from what my life has been. On the other hand, it does provide one note that neatly coincides with my experience, when Nan mentions that her parents were ill-suited to be parents, but instead had kids because "that's what you did then.", which is right in line with my own experience. It's fairly long for a documentary, but remains compelling throughout and is definitely worth the time, if only for the straightforward examination of personal trauma that she reveals and her determination to come out the other side of it.