By the time the 80’s and the AIDS era arrives, Goldin finds herself perfectly situated to record what’s happening to her friends. Poitras captures the fury and the helplessness of the period, as vibrant young people dissolve into skeletons to the great indifference of the government and the broader public. She joins Act Up and finds a mirror to her childhood, where the same inability to extend empathy to the gay community is resulting in misery and death. Decades later, as the opioid epidemic settles over the country and scoops up Goldin herself, she adapts Act Up tactics against the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma and the creators of oxycontin. The Sacklers have bought indulgences with their drug money from the same cultural high priests that have anointed Goldin, and she uses her status within the art world to stage elaborate protests at museums with wings named after the Sacklers.
Poitras isn’t making a linear cradle-to-present-day story, and the arrangement of events in Goldin’s life presents the film’s thesis alongside its protagonist’s major achievements. The present-day anti-Sackler activism is on one track, and Goldin’s childhood and early successes are on a parallel track, with each informing the other. She’s leafleting MOMA at the same time Act Up is dumping the ashes of AIDS victims on the White House lawn. The only time the progression gets disrupted is in the repeated revisiting of Barbara, possibly the foundational relationship of Goldin’s life. That inability of her outwardly upright family to find a place for Barbara within it keeps getting recapitulated. The queens that Goldin loves are rejected everywhere else. Men in suits twiddle their thumbs while her friends die, openly wondering if the right thing is to let this plague continue at its genocidal pace. Doctors mindlessly write prescriptions hawked by pharmaceutical giants, leaving Goldin in the wreckage along with hundreds of thousands of others whose stories of addiction and heartbreak she chooses to immerse herself in. Whatever notions of ‘proper’ society Goldin has are destroyed, and her distrust is proven right again and again.
The film’s great revelation comes like a lightning bolt through Goldin’s photography. Her pictures are frank and uncensored, frequently featuring unposed, pornographic nudity. A penis squished between bodies, red and angry, as its owner grinds on his partner on a bed whose mustiness comes through the screen. These are alternately flashed through in montage or held in seconds-long static shots. One image in particular, of a very hairy male, befitting the 70’s, with his large flaccid penis draped across his thigh is, frankly, gross, and stamped itself onto my brain. This is Goldin and Poitras in direct conversation with the viewer. Why is this human body in the full flower of its physicality and sexuality obscene, but not the actions of the family whose name is engraved on the wing that displays the same picture? Goldin’s career is about seeing what people might prefer not to, but it’s also about asking why things are tolerable or intolerable, who gets to be upright and who gets cast out. This realization makes her a symbiotic match for Poitras, whose films are frequently about unequivocal crimes by the powerful and how the perpetrators stay untouchable, even twisting the uncovering of their sins into aggrievement. The screaming, rageful question is how can anyone stand it? All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’s title comes from a note from one of Barbara’s therapy sessions, and contains the answer. Both are constants in the world, and the ability to find the former in the face of the latter is the great human challenge. Nan Goldin’s cracked it, but the cost of that knowledge is unimaginable. A