The Normal Heart's Ned Weeks Tries To Survive A Plague

A few years ago when The Normal Heart was revived on Broadway, I was lucky enough to see it with my esteemed former colleague Joe Reid. I believe it was the great Mark Blankenship, discussing it afterward, who pointed out that the end of the play -- when protagonist Ned marries his lover Felix moments before Felix dies -- is an inversion of the traditional ending of a stage comedy, where order to be restored with the happiness of a wedding. But watching Ryan Murphy's TV adaptation of the play (from a screenplay by its original playwright, Larry Kramer), something occurred to me that has probably been observed a thousand times by theatre experts much smarter than I. Ned is also a new kind of tragic hero: instead of his hubris leading to his death, as in Shakespeare's tragedies, Ned's tragedy is that he survives.

One of the first scenes of the movie finds Ned getting an exam from his doctor, Emma, who is on the front lines of the AIDS epidemic as it's still known as "gay cancer"; her agenda is to convince Ned to get angry enough about the growing crisis to use his position as a writer to make himself a leader in the fight against the disease and convince his fellows and peers to stop having sex. Ned tells her he has no desire to be a leader, or to try to talk gay men out of their usual sexual practices. Then his friend Craig dies (and Craig's lover Bruce is not allowed into the hospital room to say goodbye), and Ned is galvanized. His desperation to raise awareness of the crisis in and outside the gay community leads him to find -- and aggressively lobby -- Felix, a culture reporter at the New York Times. And when they start a relationship, Ned's anger gets even more personal.

The ten-year age difference between Ned and Felix leads Ned to repeated references to all the time he wasted hating himself. As a student at Yale in what would have been the late '50s, he convinced himself he was the only gay man at the school; we later learn from his brother that Ned started therapy after a suicide attempt during his freshman year. Felix -- apparently correctly -- intuits that Ned has never really had a lover; though they hooked up years earlier at the baths, Ned gave a fake name, and didn't remember Felix when they met again because he'd kept his eyes squeezed shut during their first encounter (which...how? Who hooks up with Matt Bomer and doesn't gaze at him in stunned awe the whole time because they can't believe a person that beautiful is even walking around on earth?). Real love has come late for Ned, which means he appreciates what a rare gift it actually is.

Because his time with Felix is Ned's only respite from his generally demoralizing activism, Felix's revelation of a lesion on his foot and eventual (seemingly inevitable) diagnosis is a horror on every possible level. The fifty-some-odd friends Ned's already lost to AIDS are -- obviously -- bad enough; now that the only man he's ever really loved is almost certainly dying, the urgency to effectuate real action against the disease has exponentially increased, along with Ned's rage. He's angry at the government, at both the local and federal level, for failing to take action to arrest the epidemic; angry at the rest of the Gay Men's Health Crisis for being too complacent; angry at Felix (briefly) for not fighting as hard as Ned would like; angry at himself for his own fear of ending up alone, again.

But then, the GMHC makes it easy for Ned to reorder his priorities by kicking him out of the organization that was founded in his actual living room, and lets him suspend his fury long enough to cover Felix with love during his last moments of life. (He also owes a debt to Felix for helping to start healing the rift between Ned and his brother Ben, so that Ned will have one more source of support in the time after Felix's passing.)

Ned does allow himself to hope again, maybe most potently by honouring his invitation to Yale's Gay Week mere hours after Felix's death. As out gay and lesbian couples dance to "The Only Living Boy In New York" (and if you didn't choke up at the first chords of the song, you're made of sterner stuff than I; I'm crying again just remembering it), we really come to understand Ned's place in this new world: optimistic, perhaps, that he had some hand in helping the next generation to live more openly and experience more love than Ned allowed himself; but heartsick for himself that he wasn't able to move the science along fast enough to save his one true love. I was skeptical of Ryan Murphy (for all the obvious reasons), but he and Kramer and Mark Ruffalo have all done something extraordinary and unforgettable here.