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Abstract
Between 1987 and 2013, HBO produced or distributed over twenty HIV/AIDS programs. These films trace a cultural shift from an early focus on AIDS as a public health issue to be dealt with through individual “safe-sex” practices and ethical citizenship to a later focus on AIDS as a global pandemic where the explicit strategy becomes a reliance on non-state actors to combat AIDS. This article argues that HBO's HIV/AIDS films are embedded within a cultural approach to AIDS that relies on governmental logics and neoliberal solutions – not direct action, but directing action.
He would like to thank Jeremy Packer, Steve Wiley, Maria Pramaggiore, Sarah Sharma, and James Hay for their valuable guidance during the dissertation phase of this project.
He would like to thank Jeremy Packer, Steve Wiley, Maria Pramaggiore, Sarah Sharma, and James Hay for their valuable guidance during the dissertation phase of this project.
Notes
[1] Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 596.
[2] Ronald Walter Greene, “Y Movies: Film and the Modernization of Pastoral Power,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2005): 20–36.
[3] Amanda D. Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized (New York: New York University Press, 2007).
[4] See Linda K. Fuller, ed., Media-Mediated AIDS (Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2003); Kylo-Patrick Hart, The AIDS Movie: Representing a Pandemic in Film and Television (Binghamton, NY: The Haworth Press, 2000); Alexandra Juhasz, AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Roger Hallas, Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
[5] See two edited collections on HBO: Gary R. Edgerton and Jeffery P. Jones, eds., The Essential HBO Reader (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008) and Marc Leverette, Brian L. Ott and Cara Louise Buckley, eds., It's Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-Television Era (London: Routledge, 2008). The only book-length published study of HBO's early history is a journalistic account written by a former HBO public relations executive. While incredibly useful, it lacks the critical and scholarly approach that would open up this historical period to a more thorough and productive analysis. See George Mair, Inside HBO- The Billion Dollar War Between HBO, Hollywood, and The Home Video Revolution (New York: Dodd, Mead, & Company, 1988).
[6] For an extensive history of this discourse in the cable television industry, see Patrick Parsons, Blue Skies: A History of Cable Television (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008).
[7] There are a number of books detailing this history including Douglas Crimp, AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988); Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Paula Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Cindy Patton, Globalizing AIDS (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
[8] The politics of public television in the United States is explored in Patricia Aufderheide, “Public Television and the Public Sphere,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8 (1991): 168–83; Robert Avery, Public Service Broadcasting in a Multichannel Environment (New York: Longman, 1993); B.J. Bullert, Public Television: Politics and the Battle Over Documentary Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Michael Curtin, Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995); James Day, The Vanishing Vision: The Inside Story of Public Television (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Laurie Ouellette, Viewers Like You How Public TV Failed the People (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
[9] See previously cited Juhasz, AIDS TV and Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic for an overview of this early period. For particular examples, see Ronald Greggs, “AIDS: Chapter One. Tongues Untied. Absolutely Positive: PBS and AIDS,” Jump Cut 37 (1992) 64–71.
[10] This becomes increasingly important as the funding for PBS continues to erode, and PBS draws upon strategies once in the province of cable television. See Laurie Ouellette, “Reinventing PBS: Public Television in the Post-Network, Post-Welfare Era”, in Beyond Prime Time: Television Programming in the Post-Network Era, ed. Amanda Lotz (New York: Routledge, 2009), 180–202.
[11] Michel Foucault's published lectures on the subject include Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York; Picador, 2003), Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
[12] For a number of projects that use the lens of governmentality within cultural studies see Jack Z. Bratich, Jeremy Packer, and Cameron McCarthy (eds.) Foucault, Governmentality, and Cultural Studies (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003).
[13] Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage Publications, 1999), 64.
[14] Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 246.
[15] Samantha King, Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and Maren Klawiter, The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer: Changing Cultures of Disease and Activism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
[16] See for example Amy Hasinoff, “Fashioning Race for the Free Market on America's Next Top Model,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25 (2008): 324–43; Katherine Sender, “Queens for a Day: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and the Neoliberal Project,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23 (2009): 131–51; Jennifer Petersen, “Media as Sentimental Education: The Political Lessons of HBO's The Laramie Project and PBS's Two Towns of Jasper,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 26 (2009): 255–74.
[17] Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, Better Living Through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 2.
[18] Ouellette and Hay, Better Living Through Reality TV, 2.
[19] Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 30.
[20] Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic, 131.
[21] See previous notes for Crimp, AIDS: Cultural Analysis; Fuller, Media Mediated AIDS; and Hart, The AIDS Movie.
[22] For more on HBO's discourse of public service, see Shayne Pepper, “Public Service Entertainment: HBO's Interventions in Politics and Culture”, in Media Interventions, ed. Kevin Howley (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 127–42.
[23] I am using the phrase “after-school special” for two reasons. First, it best describes how these HBO productions drew upon the aesthetic and mode of address of ABC's “After-School Special” series. Second, some of these programs were actually televised on ABC and HBO and then distributed on videocassette by HBO Home Video.
[24] John J. O'Connor, “ ‘Just a Regular Kid,’ About AIDS,” New York Times, September 9, 1987, http://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/09/arts/just-a-regular-kid-about-aids.html.
[25] T.L. Stanley, “AIDS Material a Positive?” Mediaweek 7, no. 24, (1997).
[26] C. Everett Koop, M.D., Koop: The Memoirs of America's Family Doctor (New York: Random House, 1991), 195.
[27] Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic, 190.
[28] Lynne Heffley, “Cable TV Reviews: ‘Everything You Need to Know’ About AIDS,” Los Angeles Times, October 12, 1987 http://articles.latimes.com/1987-10-12/entertainment/ca-8805_1_voluntary-aids.
[29] “Tell It As It Is Prime Time,” Orlando Sentinel, October 23, 1987 http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1987-10-23/news/0150380016_1_prime-time-hbo-condoms.
[30] Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic, 7.
[31] Monica B. Pearl, “Epic AIDS: Angels in America from Stage to Screen,” Textual Practice 21, no. 4 (2007): 761–79.
[32] See previously cited Pepper, Public Service Entertainment.
[33] Crimp, AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, 6.