ANGELS IN AMERICA.
The Film “angels in America” is a 1991 film that describes the lives of people who are struggling to embrace and live with their sexual identity. Throughout Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America, we are able to experience what it was like to be a homosexual during the AIDs crisis through the plays a vast amount of characters. With his plethora of different characters, Kushner can ask the reader questions like: How do people identify themselves and who has control over how they identify themselves. In this work, Kushner explains the nature of identity through representation and its characters.This essay describes the lives of two characters- Roy Kohn and Joe Pitt.
Queer Theory is the best methodology by which to look at Angels in America since utilizing Queer Theory permits us to see/lights up the contrast between socially developed sex and sexual acts dependent on sexual character. Eccentric hypothesis contends that sex is a social build, that the social standards of men being manly and ladies being ladylike were controlled as a culture to be viewed as ordinary
- Roy Kohn.
Kushner depicts Roy as a powerful New York lawyer with connections; Who can pick up a phone, dial a number and speak to the President’s wife in minutes. He and everyone agree that he is a person who works hard, gets what he wants and who demonstrates his skills when we meet he is always Juggles multiple phone calls in his office. Although Roy may deny it, everyone knows that he is corrupt and believes that politics is the game of life. This belief allows him to justify Joe’s request to prevent him from being disqualified from lending half a million dollars to one of his clients. The separation in Roy’s perception of identity occurs with the theme of Roy’s sexuality. The public identifies Roy as gay because he has sex with men. Still, Roy disagrees and denies the accusations because he identifies himself as a heterosexual man who haves sex with men.
No matter what anyone says or tells him, Roy can never allow himselfto be identified or grouped as a gay person. After the consultation, his doctor Henry symbolized the company, as it represents an external appearance of Roy’s views. In one quote, Roy agrees with the company’s views and says, “His problem … is that you hang words and labels that you think mean what they seem to mean.” Go to: “Gay or lesbians. They think those are the names that tell who someone is sleeping with, but they don’t.” With these words, Kushner demonstrates that Roy has his image of himself, but does not translate it into society. Henry does not make a clear accusation when he stops when he says “Roy Cohn, you are …”, but involves the reader in what he verbally thinks: “You have always had sex with men,” Kushner uses Henry as a member of the society to show the difference between the two perceptions of identity. Even though Roy thought he was one, the world called him another (Kushner, 1993).
The reader discovers that Roy is anti-Semitic when Kushner tells us about Ethyl Rosenberg. The presence of anti-Semitism can be deduced from the comments he makes about her, taunting her community as “little Jewish mamas.” The fact that Roy is Jewish as well is where his argument about homosexuality begins to lose bearing. A Jew himself, Roy’s hatred of Jews, along with homosexuals, indicates that he may be a homosexual. In this manner, Kushner portrays Roy as a character who tries to control his own identity. Whenever Roy refers to homosexuals, he assumes that they are all unsuccessful, and for this reason, he says that he cannot possibly be homosexual. Kushner shows the reader that even though Roy’s argument has no plausible evidence, he does not allow himself to be labeled by others. This approach Kushner takes is a very existential view on life and illustrates that we are never bound to anything and can choose to do or become whatever/whoever we want to.
Kushner uses Roy’s conflict between his work and his sexuality to teach the reader about identity. According to Roy, homosexuality is not an “ideology or a sexual taste, but something much simpler. Contrary to the popular beliefof the society, he thinks that homosexuals are failures and that he cannot be one because of his success, Roy repeatedly denies that being gay explains that he has a lot of power to be gay and repeats that he is not gay because he has contact with President Reagan and his wife and that “they are gays who know nobody and nobody,” although Roy is very confident and denies homosexuality at work, he cannot control the fact that society identifies him as homosexual.
- Joe Pitt.
The main conflict Joe faces throughout Angel’s in America is his struggle to come to terms with his homosexuality. Being married to a woman named Harper, and identifying himself as both a Mormon and Republican creates significant friction when Joe struggles to understand the source of his homosexual urges. Joe is split between the sexuality binary of either straight or gay, despite having aspects of both. The massive social pressure to identify with only one category forces Joe to take another look at his marriage and examine not only his true feelings but at the foundation of the marriage itself.
When Harper finally confronts Joe with her suspicions of him being gay, Joe attempts to dodge the question until Harper becomes too hysteric to continuing avoiding the question. With hesitance, he says that he is not gay and that it would not make any difference and attempts to end the conversation. Joe still attempts to cling to the sexuality binary he has been taught to be in because he is not yet ready to “come out” and align himself with the homosexual binary.
However, Harper does not relent and continues to press Joe until he finally caves and tells him that he might be one thing deep within, no matter how wrong or ugly that the thing is, so long as I have fought, with everything he has to kill it. To Joe, belonging to one dichotomy or the other no longer makes a difference because he feels like he doesn’t belong in either of them completely. However, he realizes that he can no longer pretend to be something he’s not and tells Harper the truth.
Yet even continuing past this point in the play, Joe struggles to identify himself with a single sexual binary. While he talks with Louis, openly gay men who work in Joe’s office with whom he has sexual tension, he opens up to Louis by saying that it would be heartless and very bad. It would be very great for him to open up to the society, but it is not as easy as it would seem. Joe explains to Louis his desire to be free from everything he is—everything he identities with—and to be free of all of the binaries and categories society has placed upon him. “I can’t be this anymore. I need a…change,” he finally admits to Louis. Fed up with where he has been placed in his life, Joe now begins to accept who he really is, and the struggles he may face for identifying with the homosexual binary.
ThroughouttheentiretyofAngelsinAmerica, Joeattemptstodecipherthecomplexityof his sexuality and to figure out where he belongs in respect to that. Since his society only provides him with two binaries, straight or gay, Joe is forced to reevaluate his life and his relationships with others in order to understand which dichotomy he bests fits into. But with like many of us, Joe finds that he doesn’t seem to fit entirely in either category and is forced to giveupapartofhiminordertoprovide intowherehethinkshebelongs.Whetheritisrightor wrong, Joe must struggle with trying to pave a new path towards his self-understanding while still falling in-between the heavy lines of the sexual binary.
(Kushner, 2014)
Conclusion.
Tony Kushner’s message in Angels in America is that identity is defined by
the individual, not by anyone else. We are in charge of our own lives and can change
who we are whenever we want to. Kushner teaches us these lessons through the use
of Roy and Joe in his play. Roy Cohn sleeps with men but lives as a heterosexual because he has defined himself as one. Society places a different label on him, but it comes down to him to choose the way he would like to live life. While Joe Pitt struggles to find an identity that fits him because he is a bisexual and the journey he goes through in life to identify himself sexually.Kushner teaches the audience that every single one of us decides who we are in this world; no one else has the authority to do so (Geis and Kruger, 1997)
References.
Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. Vol. 1. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993.
Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A gay fantasia on national themes: Revised and complete edition. Theatre Communications Group, 2014.
Geis, Deborah R., and Steven F. Kruger. Approaching the millennium: essays on Angels in America. University of Michigan Press, 1997.
“How To Analyze A Film | Introduction To Literature.” Courses.Lumenlearning.Com, 2020, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/introliterature/chapter/how-to-analyze-a-film/.