A red-haired woman with frizzy hair is dressed in a leather dress. Dancing next to her friend, she spins a black whip while The Marvelette’s hit The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game plays in the background. They’re in a cluttered room, a familiar scene that reminds me of the anarchist housing collectives I lived in during my early twenties. The room is cluttered with clothing, gadgets, and trash bags. Dancing with a breezy confidence, they embody an artistic freedom that comes with living and loving your friends and comrades in ways that inspire and rouse the blood. This is one of the many scenes of Laura Poitras’s documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. The protagonist is Nan Goldin—a photographer, activist, and trendsetter.
The film primarily focuses on Nan Goldin, but it does so by revealing episodic encounters of her life—her family, her adorations, and, most prominently, the bloodshed that was wrought by two epidemics, HIV/AIDS and opioids. The documentary examines Goldin’s life, her suffering, and her enigmas. Her sister committed suicide when Nan was eleven years old, and four years later, her parents gave up to the foster care system. Despite the rejection from her parents and turbulent home life, she found her voice by being in a community with other misfits. The most prominent is David Armstrong, whom she met in her foster home at 15. She notes early on in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed that her friendships were foundational to her survival. She knew Cookie Mueller, a frequent star of John Waters films, and David Wojnarowicz, an artist who politicized the HIV/AIDS crisis.
When her friends slowly began to die from the disease, she made a point to move beyond the banality of conventional art and highlight their internal beauty amid a deadly virus. The U.S. government's glacial response to the AIDS epidemic was pernicious, most notably because it disproportionately impacted gay men. One of the most prominent stains on the reputation of the Reagan administration was its lack of response, even as it ravaged American cities in the early 1980s. President Reagan didn’t publicly mention AIDS until 1985. By that point, more than 5,000 people, most of them gay men, had already been killed by the disease. For Nan, a person who was deeply immersed in New York City’s queer artistic scene, this was devastating, akin to her friends dying in a war. Over a decade later, she would be directly impacted by another epidemic.
One message of the film is that the Sackler family is rubbish. Not only because they developed OxyContin but the way they marketed the drug to make the drug saturated into the American medical system. She became addicted to OxyContin in 2017. The damning side of a man-made and profit-driven epidemic is that she saw the Sackler name next to her artwork at the Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This inspired her to form PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), an advocacy that conducted direct actions to the cultural scene. Like ACT UP, they did die-ins and cluttered museums with prescription bottles bearing the Sackler family name. The sheer impact of the opioid crisis emerges at different moments in the film, expressed by the family members of the deceased, evoking with pained gestural languish their grief. They speak at rallies, march with PAIN members, and talk about harm reduction.
During the film, Attorney Mike Quinn, along with families of victims of the opioid crisis, provides testimonies directly to the Sackler family on Zoom during a virtual trial, which happened during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Relatives do not hold back, staring directly at the camera with cracked voices, asking the Sacklers how they can sleep knowing how many people they murdered. Theresa Sackler looks unfazed, Mortimer’s video is off, and David Sackler appears stunned. But this is not enough. Ultimately, the court ruled that $750 million would go directly to victims or their survivors. However, it is estimated that the profits from the crisis are worth at least $10 billion.
The gulf between this present-day American epidemic, with over 500,000 deaths, looks radically different from the HIV/AIDS crisis, and yet, the tenacity of family and friends is precisely the key to seeking even an ounce of justice. In one of those rare moments near the end of the film, we get a victory—the Sackler name is removed from the halls of the Met Museum, and slowly, others follow suit.
The documentary was moving precisely because it revealed the inner lives of a generation but also the commitment of an artist who felt passion for her subjects. There is grace in the film because of Goldin’s rawness and transparency, and tragedy because we see the carnage that surfaces during an epidemic—a survivor trying to reflect on her five-decade career. Near the end of the film, Goldin shares a quote from her sister’s diary, which was a quote from Joseph Conrad:
Droll thing life is that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope for is some knowledge of yourself that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets.
The documentary is not just an homage to Goldin but to the queer folk, artists, writers, and incendiary people who tried to survive despite the suffering in the world. But more than anything, Poitras, as a director, shows that we honor the dead by fighting for the living.
A Read
In my latest art review for Apollo Art Magazine, I discuss the new Josephine Baker exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Icon in Motion. The exhibition frames the African American performer as a writer of her own life. As I write:
With no shortage of commentary from scholars and critics, ‘Icon in Motion’ presents the complexity of Baker’s identity in stark contrast with the rudimentary nature of her early performances in Europe. But it is also about interrogating the stakes of performance – not just in art, but in life. Baker’s lifelong performance exposes Black women’s vulnerability in a world that was not only misogynistic but also full of racially reductive imagery. Can Black people in majority-white spaces in Europe defeat racism within a system built on exclusion? By insisting on gaining authority over her life, and being able to play more than one role, Baker provided an answer on her own terms.
In addition to publishing an essay, I interviewed researcher Moshtari Hilal for Silver Press, where we discussed her latest book, Hässlichkeit (Ugliness), a memoir, and reflected on beauty standards in Germany. When I spoke with Moshtari Hilal in the early autumn, I asked her what inspired her to compose the text. Not only was she looking at the lives of others, but at how she saw herself in the world. Her tools were visual and literary, historical and personal. During the interview, we spoke about her theoretical inspirations and the power that beauty has in Germany, Afghanistan, and beyond. As a writer, I was interested in talking to Hilal about how she worked through an unenviable thing: ugliness’s role in feminist politics and our lives.
Some Recommendations
This a hot take on polyamory that is worth digesting, especially for those interested in the class dimensions of sexual promiscuity
Been soaking in the brilliance of Black performance as captured by Hanif Abdurraqib in A Little Devil in America
Lidija Haas discusses the art of memoir, and Lucy Sante is her music
Don Shirley's Orpheus in the Underworld is music to my ears
Emily Raboteau discusses the climate crisis and the writers who are trying to shift the environmental canon
Amitov Ghosh reports on the British and American families that profited from the nineteenth-century opium trade
Closing Thoughts
Thank you all for continuing to read and engage with this newsletter. The best way to help Mobile Fragments grow is to share it with your family, friends, and others who want to keep up with my meanderings. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber (only if you’d like). Whether you are a paid subscriber or not, your support is appreciated.
With Love,