All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, 2022) (Patreon)

Poitras's brutal documentary about the life and work of Nan Goldin, while not exactly critic-proof, does present certain challenges for someone who means to write about it. That's because All the Beauty and the Bloodshed does a fairly good job at analyzing itself. It is a rather classical documentary in that it presents a set of problems, provides context and evidence, and ultimately puts forward an argument. And a large part of that argument is that power may adopt different guises, that it may alter the terms of the playing field over time, but it never really changes or goes away.

Although much of Poitras's film consists of Goldin discussing her life and work, articulating the trajectory that led to her monumental series "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency," there is a present-tense impetus for looking at Goldin right now. She has been the highest-profile American artist involved in the activist movement to expunge the Sackler family from the big-money art world. The Sacklers, of course, are the family that owned and controlled Purdue Pharma, the manufacturers of OxyContin and therefore the opioid crisis' most prominent profiteers.

One of the key points made in AtBatB is that, in terms of the power divide between victims and perpetrators, the opioid crisis is essentially a replay of the AIDS crisis of the 80s. One difference, of course, is in the way that the medical industry figured out how to turn a public health catastrophe into a source of profit. In the case of AIDS, the FDA and various pharmaceutical companies worked together to keep corporate profits high by not addressing HIV, and not fast-tracking experimental medicines that might have saved lives. The Sacklers, on the other hand, have saturated the market with oxycodone, employing a full court press approach to promotion and marketing of the drug. In the 80s, the idea was to withhold care; today, to bombard the health care system with addictive prescription meds.

Goldin explains how her artwork was a direct reflection of the New York downtown scene, a demimonde of scrappy, low-income artists and writers, many of whom were queer and looking for a space to simply exist. And one of the enduring aspects of Goldin's diaristic, personal-documentary style of photography was the fact that it both celebrated this marginalized community and exposed its emotional and physical fragility. Part of this was the toll that poverty takes, but as Goldin explains, it is also a result of scared, confused individuals replicating the worst elements of the dominant culture -- especially misogyny and domestic violence.

Goldin's work is bracing because it looks both outward and inward. As she tells Poitras, she never wanted to exhibit her friends' lives unless she was willing to  expose herself to the same scrutiny. So, unlike Diane Arbus, who gazed at social outcasts from an ocular distance, Goldin photographed her own life-world as she moved through it, which meant that she was frank about her abuse at the hands of a male partner, her drug use, and struggles with traditional notions of femininity.

AtBatB allows Goldin to recount her own early life history, describing her repressive suburban family and in particular the way her older sister Barbara was treated as an outcast for being "unconventional" -- depressed, but also creative, intellectual, and in touch with her sexuality. Barbara's rejection by her family led to suicide, and Goldin takes great care to describe her photography as an extension of her sister's legacy, creating a space within representation where others like Barbara may be seen and afforded love. 

While watching AtBatB, I began to have an awkward feeling, almost as if I were implicated in what I was watching. This is perhaps partly by design, since Goldin's art and activism are resolutely in opposition to the American bourgeois class, of which I have certainly become a member. But it was more than this. In seeing the photos and hearing the testimonies, understanding what Goldin and her surrogate family had been through, I felt as if I'd dodged a bullet. I became an adult in the midst of the AIDS crisis, and I watched a number of friends and acquaintances die from the virus. I think about how many of them were like me: creatively inclined, sexually ambivalent, never fitting in and looking for a place to call home. 

Then later, during my college and grad school years, I had health problems, mostly headaches. After a doctor decided I'd become too dependent on Fiorinal, I was cut off and I found ways to get Oxy. I used it semi-regularly, and eventually quit. Of course I had no idea at the time how addictive it was, and it's kind of a miracle that I didn't get hooked, ending up god knows where.

The last thing I intend to do here is take a film about socially marginalized people and somehow make it all about myself. At the same time, one of the strengths of Goldin's art is its everyday quality, way she brings people to light despite their pain, highlighting their radiant ordinariness. Conventional thinking demands that we see "us" and "them," people who are normal and people who are pathological, people from good homes and people on the streets. This is the horrible deception of capital, of heteronormativity, of racism and misogyny.  At the moment we focus on differences in order to appreciate and celebrate them, but I sometimes wonder whether this happens at the expense of a recognition of what we all share, and how different we actually are not. I think the strange emotions that AtBatB stirred in me was a palpable gratitude in the midst of social sorrow, how fortunate I am, we all are, to be alive.