Harry Dobbs

Bruce Springsteen is in the news – there’s a biopic coming out – and I’ve been thinking about HIV and AIDS.

I remember a woman with HIV who gave a talk at my school. She was a Springsteen fan and told us she’d seen him in concert many times, had kissed him once on stage.

Then I remember his song “Streets of Philadelphia” from the 1993 film Philadelphia, in which Tom Hanks plays Andrew Beckett, a lawyer wrongfully dismissed for having AIDS. Denzel Washington plays Joe Miller, the lawyer who represents him.

The character Miller dislikes the idea of same-sex attraction, and this doesn’t really change, interestingly. But by the film’s conclusion, he’s comfortable touching AIDS patients, something that terrified him at the start. There’s a sense of progress.

Philadelphia is emotionally manipulative, and I mean that as a compliment. It provokes a similar response in me as James Cameron’s Titanic, and Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life.

It’s a carefully constructed film, designed for mainstream audiences who are perhaps scared of people with the condition. Beckett’s out-of-office lifestyle is largely hidden away. There is a brief scene showing him in an adult cinema called Stallion (nice) and that’s pretty much it, bar a campy fancy dress party he hosts in his flat. He lives with a partner who comes across as a friend.

A lot of heavy lifting is done at the start to make Beckett as sympathetic as possible to an American audience. He works punishingly long hours at his corporate law firm, where everyone respects him, and he chats regularly to his family on the phone.

A workaholic family man – Americans can relate to that, surely.

Beckett dies at the end of the film, which is hardly a spoiler. It’s a kind death scene. His family are around him, and he tells his partner (after learning Miller won the wrongful dismissal case for him) that he’s ready to go. It’s as though he gives death permission to take him, which feels a bit neat, gives the character an agency that doesn’t exist in the real world.

The whole film is imbued with that 1990s “we’re all human, we’re all the same” ethos (think Michael Jackson’s ‘Black or White’ for an extreme of this), which would become hugely unfashionable and borderline politically incorrect in the 2010s.

Springsteen’s song plays during the opening credits, has the lines: “Saw my reflection in a window/ And didn’t know my own face”, as well as “And my clothes don’t fit me no more” and “I heard the voices of friends vanished and gone”. The lyrics apply to those affected by HIV and AIDS but are generic enough to have universal appeal.

He’s not singing about lesions and cruising.

And while Springsteen’s song plays at the start, the audience sees vehicle shots of the city of Philadelphia. The director, Jonathan Demme – most famous for The Silence of the Lambs – cuts images of mansions and skyscrapers back-to-back against images of inner-city murals, polluted underpasses and homelessness. The film doesn’t go anywhere with the theme of wealth, but it’s an effective opening.

I was talking to a friend about Philadelphia over lunch recently; she said she’s seen it multiple times. We wondered what would make the character Beckett resonate in a version made in 90s Britain.

We agreed he wouldn’t be a high-paid corporate animal.

Maybe he’d be an admin worker, or teacher, or carer.

Something low-key.

“He’d be popular in the local community,” the friend said. “Visiting old ladies, making them cups of tea.”

He’d wear sweaters, be single, have few connections.

It would be a quieter film, with more loneliness.

I doubt he’d litigate against his ex-employer. There’d be an Ishiguro-esque realisation of the futility of such an effort.

It doesn’t sound like a crowd-pleaser.