Angels In America

I encourage everyone to watch Angels in America now that they can since it's forever on DVD. I've only seen the HBO miniseries (which is brilliant). I'm sure it's great on stage. I just got done watching it today (well, yesterday) and always am blown away by how profound it is.



True, it's a little high and mighty, but it has all the goods to back up its arrogance. I mean, literallly, I don't think anyone can translate what is being said sometimes. But when it's good, its great. The words are amazing. I've never been so taken by words. I can see why the teaming of Tony Kushner and Mike Nichols turned out so well. They're both from theater backgrounds.



Some more profound moments...

Roy: Like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? Not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simplier: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call, who owes me favors. This is what a label refers to.



Harper: So when we think we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable.

Joe: I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture I'd look at twenty times every day: Jacob wrestles with the angel. I don't really remember the story, or why the wrestling - just the picture. Jacob is young and very strong. The angel is...a beautiful man, with golden hair and wings, or course. I still dream about it. Many nights. I'm...it's me. In that struggle. Fierce, and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so how could anyone human win, what kind of fight is that? It's not just. Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from God's. But you can't not lose.



Harper: I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die. But there's still the rest of you. There's your breasts, and your genitals, and they're amazingly stupid, like babies or faithful dogs, they don't get it, they just want him. Want him.

Angel: You are Mere Flesh. I I I I am Utter Flesh, Density of Desire, the Gravity of Skin: What makes the Engine of Creation Run? Not Physics But Ecstatics Makes the Engine Run: The Pulse, the Pull, the Throb, the Ooze...

Angel: The Body is the Garden of the Soul

Prior: It just...It just...We can't just stop. We're not rocks - progress, migration, motion is...modernity. It's animate, it's what living things do. We desire. Even if all we desire is stillness, it's still desire for.

Harper: Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.

Prior: The world only spins forward.