All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a story about shame and silence. The kind of shame that leads parents to give up on their children, to reach a certain point where the struggle becomes too much to bear and the inability to rely on “respectable society” fractures the bonds of family beyond any hope of repair. And the kind of silence that sees this happen again and again, through generations and decades. But it’s also about a different kind of shame — something that can be weaponized against nefarious targets, and something that can be shaped by a life lived from a place of empathy and that can maybe help in the long run.
Artist, photographer and filmmaker Nan Goldin is one of the most fascinating people alive. She’s been a mover and shaker in the art world for several decades, with a magnum opus called The Ballad of Sexual Dependency that is among the most interesting and influential works of the late 20th century. She was part of the New York City art scene when that really meant something, and was friends and collaborators and colleagues with people like Cookie Mueller, David Wojnarowicz and Rene Ricard, getting at the weirder, queerer experiences that traditional venues and tastemakers considered too “earthy.” From the beginning, Goldin’s work has always been generous of spirit, filled with an empathy for sex workers, social outlaws, the ostracized and the shunned.
Following a wrist injury in 2014 and a serious OxyContin addiction that nearly killed her, Goldin decided to use that empathy for the countless number of Americans caught up in the tangled strands of opioid addiction. In 2017 she and a collective of artists, addicts and bereft family members established Prescription Addiction Intervention Now — an organization working for harm reduction, destigmatization of addicts and holding responsible the corporate greed that caused the opioid crisis eating America alive from within. It’s in that last capacity that she and the group have focused their energies on the Sackler family, the domestic ghouls who, through Purdue Pharma, made billions of dollars peddling highly addictive painkillers to the public and then, through lobbyist dollars and donations to members of Congress [cough cough, Sen. Marsha Blackburn and her Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act], helped get laws written to keep them from being held responsible for doing so.
Seeing the amount of respect that the United States government has for artists (next to none), Goldin and PAIN found a new approach. Having been part of the upper echelons of the art world for some time, Goldin was well aware of the many museums that had accepted donations from the Sacklers — the family’s name has adorned wings of some of the most prestigious institutions for art throughout the world. So they began a series of demonstrations (equal parts flash mob and old-school ACT-UP die-in) that put the bloody source of those big donations right in the face of high society, calling on the art world to call out these monsters when actual authorities would not.
Director Laura Poitras has a MacArthur Fellowship, a Pulitzer and an Oscar, but she’s also got a gift for structure, allowing the various aspects of Goldin’s life and art speak to one another. Poitras elevates this film from great documentary to humanist triumph, letting the appearance and voices of brilliant artists that we lost in one plague (most notably Mueller and Wojnarowicz, who live again for a little while in this remarkable film) gain resonance as we confront the subsequent plagues of OxyContin and COVID-19.
It’s been there in Goldin’s life and work since the beginning, shaped by and working through her parents’ inability to acknowledge the bisexuality of her sister Barbara, whom they shunted off to a mental institution, culminating in her suicide. Goldin tells the stories locked away “for decency’s sake,” regardless of what polite society prefers. PAIN and the crusade against the Sacklers’ disingenuous manipulation of business law are the logical expansion of the work Goldin has been undertaking ever since she first began taking photographs. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed will inspire you in ways that will make homophobes, pharmaceutical profiteers and those who delight in institutional cruelty very nervous.
This film won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, and it’s hard to imagine anyone watching it and not being affected by the places it goes. There’s a sequence in which members of the Sackler family, during the bankruptcy hearing that will allow them to shed liability for the thousands of deaths their products caused, are legally compelled to listen to the testimony of people who lost loved ones to opioids. It’s the most horrifying thing you’ll see in a film all year, just malignant privilege utterly incapable of the slightest amount of concern or care. And if you’re one of the countless Americans whose lives have been affected by the ongoing opioid crisis, it’s going to angry up the blood — good.
For every would-be demagogue, influencer or Twitter pundit who would call themselves truthtellers: Please have several seats and listen to a woman who’s been telling us about ourselves in whatever medium is accessible at the time.
