When I was a little boy I would occasionally get beat up by bullies on the playground. My response to this was to concoct revenge fantasies where the bullies got theirs and came to suffer and regret their actions. Tony Kushner's Angels in America is just such a revenge fantasy; except Kushner is, presumably, an adult.

Angels is about revenge for the AIDS epidemic, and since Kushner is clearly a man who subscribes to the belief that all existence is political, the revenge is demarked by ideology. The "good guys" in Angels — the sympathetic homosexuals — do not hesitate to speak in pretentious, vague, high-minded editorials on the evils of Reagan/Republicans/The Supreme Court/Conservatives/Gingrich/etc., all the standard-issue demons of the mid-eighties (the story is set in 1985). Every thought, every event, every soliloquy has either a political source or political implications or both. Amidst the backdrop of friends and loved ones with AIDS, they fall back on politics for explanation and understanding. Well, OK; annoying people have their place in drama too, but the characters never grow beyond their annoying shallowness. Why not have them transform over the course movie to understand the deeper personal implications of their lives and actions and the actions of others? Hell, the movie is six hours long, you've got plenty of time. And these people are visited by supernatural visions for Christ's sake. Are they so shallow that it does not change them? Turns out they are; they finish off in pretty much the same spot, fretting over the superficial political nature of their existence. That's not entirely true, they go from being depressed, defeated and shallow to cheery, determined and shallow. It's quite a journey.

The "bad guys" suffer horrible fates, and it is made clear to us that they damn well deserve it. The bullies on the playground here, apart from the generalized ideological enemies listed above, are two Republican homosexuals who don't toe the I'm-bravely-out-of-the-closet-and-therefore-I'm-oppressed line. One is Roy Cohn, the notorious lawyer from the Rosenberg trial and McCarthy hearings in the fifties. It may indeed be the case that he was an evil man in real life, but I strongly suspect there are people in this world that could and would make the argument that he did the country a service — such is the nature of politics, opinions differ. The Roy Cohn in Angels has no redeeming characteristics, has done nothing but hurt people out of mean-spiriteness, and most damning of all, he refuses to admit he's a homosexual. For that, he is haunted by his past and dies alone and disgraced.