Angels in America

Update on Dec 17, 2003—Perestroika was not nearly as good as Millennium. It was still well worth the time spent watching it, but the Mormon exhibit scene didn’t come close to rivaling the hallucination scene with Prior and Harper. Also, I’m not sure that the didactic, “We aren’t going to die in silence” statement really does justice to a titanic struggle between Prior and the Angels. Plus, is that all the Angels represent to humanity?

Watched this on HBO on Sunday and again on Monday. The comment boards at HBO had almost twice as many comments for AIA as for any other movie listed. It was a spectacular show…I miss that language of the theatre and need to go to more plays. Although, Sacramento has yet to show me a play that was really worth the time. I wanted to see more about AIA so went to sparknotes.com to read a synopsis and some minor critical talk. Sparknotes has an extremely irritating registration process…ooooh, let’s protect cgbikes from reading anything until she enters a password with at least 1 number. See if you can guess what it is. Maybe someone will hack in and post naughty messages to the boards and I’ll be booted off. Of course, if they don’t pull yeahkenny03 and his chain mail messages off the boards I don’t know what anyone else could say that would be more offensive. They need to read my favorite usability site (except the part about using a plain white background and not too many funny colors). I have strayed from the point.

My favorite character, and the one with the best lines so far is Harper. Well, she may not always say the best lines, but she’s in the best scenes. I love the hallucination scene with Prior when she says her church doesn’t believe in homosexuals and he replies that his church doesn’t believe in Mormons. Harper gets it almost immediately and is open enough to incorporate the idea that belief isn’t the same as fact into her world view.

The exchange can also be thought of from a spiritual perspective, which is perhaps alluded too as the characters are interacting in the hallucinatory world rather than the “real” world. Perhaps there is a “real” spiritual world around us which we don’t really believe in, but that exists nevertheless. Certainly at this point Prior does not believe in it. I suspect that Harper yearns for a spiritual world, but feels disconnected from her Mormon faith based upbringing and isn’t quite so willing to believe in what she has been taught about that. She both believes in and rejects the spiritual world maybe?