The most powerful Oscar nominee you didn’t see
On a busy Saturday night in February 2019, hundreds of patrons of the arts ducked out of the cold and into New York City’s bustling Guggenheim Museum. Some were there to view the vast assortment of works on display; others may have been simply seeking refuge from Manhattan’s frigid temperatures. But no one expected a live demonstration, and certainly not from one of the esteemed artists featured within the museum’s pristinely pruned collection.
Hiding in plain sight that night, among the patrons scattered throughout the museum, was photographer and activist Nan Goldin, along with several members of her advocacy group, P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). Goldin and P.A.I.N. had been quietly organizing a demonstration in protest of the Guggenheim’s acceptance of funding from the multi-pronged Sackler family — the billionaire owners of Purdue Pharma, which created and marketed OxyContin and sat at the root of America’s opioid crisis. When a name that rings of so much death is enshrined in something as beautiful as art and history, it glorifies the name by association, stripping it of all the harm it’s caused.
The group planned to strike when it was most effective, maximizing the amount of eyeballs and attention that their protest could receive. They smuggled in banners, empty pill bottles and thousands of fake, white prescription slips that could be tossed from every level of the museum’s ascending spiral structure. At peak occupancy, P.A.I.N. members unfolded their banners along the railings, threw themselves onto the floor alongside the pill bottles and cast the prescription slips into the air, letting them cascade toward the ground to cover their bodies in a die-in protest. Written on the slips for all patrons to see was a quote from Richard Sackler from the OxyContin launch party: “The launch of OxyContin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition. The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense and white.”
Filming from the ground floor with handheld cameras that wouldn’t stir museum security’s suspicion, P.A.I.N. captured a truly remarkable sight as the Sackler’s blizzard came to life. The footage, which appears in Laura Poitras’ marvelous 2022 documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” is a haunting vision of lethal corporate greed. It’s everything that great art can and should be: visceral, inspiring and unforgettable. And it did not win the Oscar.
The wrong things are kept secret
In 2023, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” was up for best documentary feature, which — unlike some major categories at the Oscars — is typically stacked with impactful heavy-hitters. These films break through a dense documentary market with their stirring portraits of wars, political leaders, activists, artists, musicians, movements, and occasionally, regular people like you and me. Often, it’s a close race. But even more frequently, the average viewer won’t seek out the documentaries that don’t take home the gold, no matter how intriguing or important they are.
With so much at stake in this moment in time, that reluctance looks more like apathy. And I get it. How much can one film really change a world that seems like it’s careening faster and faster toward annihilation? It’s far easier to sit in the boiling waters of despair until the heat becomes tolerable than it is to try to alter the temperature all on our own. That’s exactly why documentaries like “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” are so critical. Poitras’ film is the rare tale of a civilian standing up to an empire built on billions of dollars worth of bloodthirsty rapacity and winning. But more than that, it’s a true story of just how essential art and community are to our existence, and a reminder of how easily these things can curb our collective heartache, so long as we seek them out.
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Largely composed of photos from Goldin’s many works and exhibitions, videos of P.A.I.N. demonstrations and interviews with Goldin and the group’s members, Poitras’ film starts at the heart of the matter and paints outward from there. “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” opens with footage of the first P.A.I.N. protest, inside the now-former Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, at the Temple of Dendur — one of the museum’s most notable sights, just off its crowded lobby — Goldin and the group chant about the Sackler family’s complicity while holding a banner emblazoned with “SHAME ON SACKLER.” While onlookers applaud, P.A.I.N. members toss empty pill bottles into the pool facing the temple before collapsing for their first public die-in, inspired by the ACT UP movement’s historic die-ins during the AIDS crisis. Goldin witnessed these protests firsthand coming up in the New York art scene, watching countless loved ones succumb to a disease that the government refused to address.
But the correlation between the experiences of her youth and those of her later life wasn’t the only thing driving Goldin’s unwavering denouncement of the Sacklers. She reminisces on a childhood growing up in a repressive household during the 1960s, when second-wave feminism and the women’s liberation movement were just starting to achieve legitimacy. It was a time of both freedom and mandated restraint, and Goldin’s older sister, Barbara, was caught in the middle. Barbara died by suicide when Goldin was just 11, and as she remembers overhearing, their mother asked the police to tell her Barbara had been in an accident. “Denial, they didn’t want us to know the truth,” Goldin says in the film. “That’s when it clicked.”
From here, Goldin and Poitras weave a thread that connects all of Goldin’s experiences so far. Some might call it trauma, while others might say it’s knowledge. Everything we do and live through informs our actions. History clears the fog from life’s great mystery, and suddenly, it’s easier to see how all of the pieces fit together. Radical honesty is the only way to move forward, which is why burying the truth to manufacture a new narrative in its place does nothing but harm. The only difference is the scale of the suffering. And Nan Goldin has been on both sides of that spectrum and lived to tell the tale.
History no longer set in stone
Goldin was prescribed OxyContin for a wrist surgery in the 2010s, and by her own account, became immediately addicted. She recounts her experience with the drug in the film, going from the prescribed three pills a day to 18, until her opioid receptors were depleted and she switched to snorting the crushed pills. After taking fentanyl that she thought to be OxyContin, Goldin overdosed. By a statistical miracle, she regained consciousness entirely on her own.
So many addicts and their loved ones are not as lucky. More than half a million people have died from opioids to date. To drive home the severity of the opioid crisis and communicate just how vulnerable the average person is, Poitras includes several testaments by parents at P.A.I.N. demonstrations who have lost their children to the drug. Despite knowing its addictive properties, the Sackler family and the Purdue marketing team downplayed OxyContin’s potential brutality, as Poitras so keenly points out by including a clip of a 1998 Purdue marketing video, claiming talk of the drug’s addictiveness was “far from actual fact.” In virtually no time, OxyContin grew the Sackler family’s empire into a billion-dollar entity while the drug ravaged America and left a wake of death in its path.
But “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is not out to expose the Sacklers’ wrongdoing and negligence. There are plenty of films, series and civil courts that have done that already. Poitras and Goldin are burrowing deeper, looking at what fuels our humanity and drives our will to live. Goldin’s stories of the ’80s art scene are as priceless as the photographs and slideshows that pepper footage of her P.A.I.N. protests. Her experiences are almost mythic, like peering through the looking glass at a time when misery could actively coexist with unbridled bliss. There are yarns about Provincetown’s early days as a queer mecca; accounts of her time taking the bus to Jersey to dance in non-nude strip joints and back through the tunnel to end the night at a dive bar; memories of young love and the great freedom that comes with being seen; and invaluable ruminations on some of Goldin’s most notable works, like her revolutionary series, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.”
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It’s those very works that made Goldin such a venerated powerhouse in the art world, and in turn, an activist who made the museum industry quake. Goldin specifically chose to target museums and art institutions that featured her photographs, understanding that her message had all the more sway because of her status as a member of their collections. And though she feared retaliation from the Sacklers — who have all the money in the world to not only pursue retribution but bury their misdeeds — the cause was too important, and too infuriating. “These are very scary, powerful people,” P.A.I.N. member Noemi Bonazzi says in the film. “But what else can you do?”
That line of thinking is striking. I don’t think it’s untrue to say that most people right now feel helpless, at least to some degree. The average American is disenfranchised by the government that’s supposed to be working with their best interest in mind, and each day brings a swath of new, awful headlines and seemingly insurmountable struggles. Standing tall in the face of oppression is met with violence and danger. Hoping someone else will intervene isn’t cowardly; it’s a means of survival in constantly uncertain conditions.
But maybe we’re thinking too big, and maybe that’s the way nefarious forces who control the world want us to think. “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is irrefutable proof of the impact of activism, no matter what level it starts at. Institutions don’t crumble overnight, and they certainly don’t collapse from the top. In the span of a few years and a handful of organized protests, P.A.I.N. successfully drove several prominent museums to reject Sackler money. Soon after, the Sackler name was removed from the Met, the Guggenheim, the British Museum and more.
Of course, the story isn’t over. The opioid crisis hasn’t gone away, and the Sacklers have maintained their wealth despite the disgrace. But success can’t be measured in wins and losses. “Real experience has a smell and is dirty, and is not wrapped up in simple endings,” Goldin says at the beginning of the film. To achieve anything at all in the face of widespread, institutional corruption is worth celebrating. A win is only unprecedented until it finally happens, and “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is a testament to making things happen, no matter how difficult or intimidating they may seem.
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from Salon’s culture newsletter, The Swell
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