Olfactory Frsson

 It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by  another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not, -- Daniel Defoe

I did not know much about Mark Ruffalo prior to his whimsical stand-in for Bill Bixby in 2012, much like many viewers. I was able to recognize him as an important foil to DiCaprio in Shutter Island  almost solely, in far too narrow a fashion, because his lead work with an agit prop made film , entitled The Normal Heart , made me furious. As a “made for television” project, it was designed to provoke as a raunchy modern Dionysian outcry for homosexual freedom at the start of the AIDS epidemic in the eighties, letting the good times roll under the  “voo doo economics” (notoriously characterized by George Herbert Walker Bush)  administration of the actor politician who in those very 80’s, was very good at projecting his solidarity with lines in the sand; and just why did Ruffalo and Julia Roberts (perhaps aging out of synchronicity?) and Alfred Molina, not unknown in his younger years for representing gay pathology, lend themselves to this cable documentary drama? Ignorance is not always the requisite criterion for bliss: I might have suspected, but didn’t, that the director, Ryan Murphy was a lapsed Catholic who went ape shit after coming out, with a chunky, heuristic fervor, both his camera and his screen writer insistent upon the fact that histrionic orgies are cause for celebratory affirmation, as opposed to the pall of repulsion, with death from a new epidemic causing such outrage amid the urban left that a viewer might be persuaded a new era of genocide had enveloped the big cities. When Roberts doctor Emma Bookner emphatically tells her patient queue to “stop fucking,”  Ruffalo ardently asserts that you can’t tell gay men this. “Sex is all they have,” be belts out with nasal hypermania. This doesn’t really offer retrospective justice for anyone, and this angry teleplay ignited a backdraft on this besieged spastic writer in the opposite direction Murphy and his cohort celebrities expect. Forget about reactionary incitement with the potential for intimidation:  if a physician suggests abstinence from coitus as a temporary measure to save my life, then logic dictates I follow medical advice,

I was actually present when AIDS broke onto the scene in the United States as a foreign enemy, and took my brother’s life due to drug addiction, so Ruffalo’s doubletake provoked an illegal degree of rage, the type of which not only shackles the marginalized, but also places them on the radar of law and order. The much dissected Anthony Fauci has been fabulously quoted, as Covid waned, saying “we’ve entered the age of the pandemic,” but he began his rise as a public figure trying to break the stranglehold of HIV, and at best managed a ceasefire with a drug regime that is evidently the gay black male’s cocktail, if the Truvada commercials are accepted as an anecdotal representation. Ruffalo may have mollified me since, slightly, with his short serial I Know This Much is True , but HBO, at best, regardless of craft, is a network of domestic terrorism, and needs to be perceived accordingly. Radical Traditionalist Catholics were once the holy warriors who repelled the Saracens from Europe, when our blood was worth its faith.