Select Page

I finally broke down and saw Dallas Buyers Club tonight.  It is looking increasingly likely that Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto are going to win the Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, so I figured I kind of had to.  I didn’t want to watch the Oscars and find myself being one of those people who has to say “I heard they were really good.”

But I really didn’t want to see this movie.  Why should I pay $12.50 to watch people dying of AIDS when I watched that in real life in the 1980s and 1990s?

Have you ever had some sort of severe physical pain?  A broken bone, a surgery, the birth of a child, perhaps?  You can remember that it happened but you’re remembering the theory of it; the intellectual knowledge that you were in pain.  Most people can’t remember what that pain was actually like on the kind of level they did when they were experiencing it.  If they did, most women would probably never have more than one child.

It’s not like I had ever really forgotten what the world was like back in those days but it has been decades since I knew a person who died from complications due to AIDS.  When that much time passes, it fades and becomes abstract.

Seeing Dallas Buyers Club made me remember the late 1980s and early 1990s.  It made me remember shit I didn’t want to remember.  Fear.  Pain.  Death.  Hopelessness.  I’m a little mad at the movie for bringing all that up again.

But it also made me remember people I hadn’t thought of in 20 years and others that I have thought of more recently but not as often as I used to.  It made me miss them but in ways that made me smile, so I guess the movie made me remember shit I did want to remember, also.  That alone makes it qualify as my Differently for the day, I think.

For the record, Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto deserve every single award they are getting and many, many others that have not been created yet.   Do not argue with me on this.  You will lose.

quilt