the first mainstream hollywood film about aids and gay discrimination and it came out in 1993 which means it was already late and also genuinely courageous for what american studios were willing to greenlight at the time.
Demme made something that was designed to reach the widest possible audience and that design shows—Philadelphia is deliberately accessible in ways that sometimes work against it—but the intention behind that accessibility was to make straight america sit in a theater and watch a gay man die of aids and feel something about it. in 1993. that context matters.
the film is safer than it should've been. the relationship between Andrew and his partner is kept deliberately low-temperature, the gay community around him kept at a distance, and Demme was clearly more interested in making a film heterosexual audiences could accept than one queer audiences could recognize themselves in. it's a film about gay people made to convince straight people to care about gay people and that's both its purpose and its limitation. that tension is part of its history now.
still, it did what it set out to do.
complicated legacy, worth engaging with.
the first mainstream hollywood film about aids and gay discrimination and it came out in 1993 which means it was already late and also genuinely courageous for what american studios were willing to greenlight at the time.
Demme made something that was designed to reach the widest possible audience and that design shows—Philadelphia is deliberately accessible in ways that sometimes work against it—but the intention behind that accessibility was to make straight america sit in a theater and watch a gay man die of aids and feel something about it. in 1993. that context matters.
the film is safer than it should've been. the relationship between Andrew and his partner is kept deliberately low-temperature, the gay community around him kept at a distance, and Demme was clearly more interested in making a film heterosexual audiences could accept than one queer audiences could recognize themselves in. it's a film about gay people made to convince straight people to care about gay people and that's both its purpose and its limitation. that tension is part of its history now.
still, it did what it set out to do.
complicated legacy, worth engaging with.
