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Response to amacha:
I think two really great points are brought up here. The intersectionality of discrimination was not really touched on in the film at all, and I’m glad you brought to my attention how even within the AIDS discrimination, there was further stigma and consequences for certain demographics. I also liked how you brought up the healing portion. It is definitely counterintuitive to think of healthcare professionals as not there to cure, but instead to just care for those they are with. It shows a broader aspect to their job and to them as individuals, as they had to reprioritize.
The film 5B follows the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and the intense discrimination that grew with the disease. As AIDS was not understood, people associated it as stemming from gay men but were unsure how it could be transmitted. As a result, hundreds of individuals were put into hospitals, and often with limited or unfair treatment. Until the dedicated AIDS ward opened up, 5B, the patients were not touched. The nurses decided to treat the patients with affection and love, and as the head nurse Cliff said, if they’re going to die, then the nurses might as well touch them and love them.
The way that the nurses treated AIDS patients is not just through chart talk or cultural competence. They approached them with compassion. Because at first they were not there to heal or cure the illness, they described it as the individuals “permitting us to share this intimate experience of dying.” As we saw in Bauby’s book, there is a level of dehumanization that comes with extreme conditions. The nurses in 5B were trying to bring back the human experience by taking away the blame and stigma. One thing that really stuck out to me was the nurses describing the patients as their friends; they were witnessing their friends die. But in the process of all that pain and grief, the nurses were able to change how they made the patients feel.
The Masque of the Red Death tells the story of a plague that progresses in each individual within thirty minutes, escalating in extreme bleeding. Prince Prospero locked himself away in his castle, buying pleasurable activities and security. Away from the outside world, he protects himself from the disease. Eventually, at a masked ball that the Prince arranges, attention is drawn to a man who appears similar to a corpse. It is apparent that he is bleeding, infected by the plague, and eventually, the Red Death consumes every one at the ball.
This reminds me of other illnesses and conditions that we have talked about in class. It is common to an extent to think of certain conditions as only affecting “the other.” When class and wealth cannot protect an individual from falling to the ailment, the illness is universal and taken almost more seriously. We see that now with coronavirus. Pandemics do not respect geographic boundaries or pick their victims based on wealth. Everyone is equal in the face of disease, which is shown in the Red Death. While the Prince puts up physical boundaries to protect him from the outside world, he is no different from anyone else when exposed to the plague.
