Derek Jarman’s Blue: Requiem & Refutation
By Julia Smeaton
English filmmaker, writer and activist Derek Jarman’s final film, Blue (1993), is an abstract and atmospheric immersion into his final months living with AIDS in London in the early 1990s. Stylized entirely with narration and sound design, the only visual element is a blank blue screen. Jarman intimately documented his experiences in the film’s screenplay as well as in his diary, which was published in 2000 as the novel Smiling In Slow Motion. The novel chronicles Jarman’s life from May 1991 to his passing in February 1994, years which reflected the aftermath of Margaret Thatcher’s three consecutive terms as Prime Minister, subsequent Conservative victory, and marked a decade since the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United Kingdom. This essay will argue that Blue stands equally as an elegiac self-portrait of Jarman and his loved ones, as well as a rebuttal to the narratives pushed on people with AIDS in the latter half of the 20th century. Drawing from Jarman’s own testimonies and contemporary research on his work, it will analyse his place as a brilliant artist suffering from illness while also being as a highly visible member of a brutally othered community.
Born in 1942, Derek Jarman was born in Middlesex and graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in the late 1960s. He joined London’s burgeoning queer and alternative cultural scenes and began his career in stage and costume design. He entered into filmmaking with experimental narrative pictures such as Sebastiane (1976), Jubilee (1977), Caravaggio (1986), Edward II (1991) and many more. His films were unconventional, often graphic, and were some of the first to portray homosexuality on screen with outlandish, tender agency. Even before he became disabled himself, he cast disabled actors such as Nabil Shaban and Jack Birkett at a time where authentic disability was rarely represented. Jarman delighted in alterity and imbued his creative output, both fictional and factual, with trademark humour and political insight. In a 1990 entry from Smiling In Slow Motion, Jarman recounts his own sarcastic reflection on the prior decade in an exchange with a friend:
“'Mummy, what did you do in the 1980s?"
'Bought a house in deep suburbia, bought some clothes in Covent Garden, bought a Porsche and mobile phone. We didn't have the time for music. We watched the ads to inform our lifestyle, gave up smoking, took up drinking, cheered when Maggie sent the troops in and framed the unliked Arthur Scargill, cheered her through the Falklands, swilled the North Sea oil in trinkets” (p. 259).
In reality, Jarman spent the eighties working prolifically between his London studio and Dungeness cottage. He publicly announced his HIV positive status in December 1986. By then, as found by Matt Cook in his 2017 article ‘Archives of Feeling’: the AIDS Crisis in Britain 1987, the British press had cast homosexuals as the stigmatised face of the epidemic, as “they were already a demonised minority– and one which was developing a strident communal voice” (p. 52). It was this voice that Jarman faced restrictions against, even in typically left-leaning creative spaces. In Smiling In Slow Motion, he remarked on his frustrations regarding the censorship occurring under Thatcher’s leadership throughout the editing process of his antepenultimate film Edward II:
“George is to recut the boys fucking from the first sequence of Edward for the BBC's screening next week. We are hoping they will have a change of heart but we are trapped. The commissioning editors are allies, but above them are Mrs Thatcher's accountants” (p. 18).
Cook further described just how influential her beliefs had become by the onset of the 1990s. This had devastating consequences for the mainstream perception of homosexuals, with Cook discovering that the “The British Social Attitudes survey of 1987 found that seventy-four percent of their sample of 1,700 people thought homosexual relations were always or mostly wrong', up from sixty-two percent in 1983…” (p. 58-59). It was this environment in which Jarman was trying to create his final works– and he did not have the time to be ‘trapped’ by conventional filmmaking standards and disapproving producers. Such was the political, personal, and professional context that led him to Blue.
Blue encompasses a multiplicity of messages and metaphors, many of which are starkly personal and intimate to Jarman’s physical and emotional experience. In evoking the senses and symptoms felt by Jarman through poetic narration and sound design, the film insists that the audience immerse themselves in the reality of being in his body— All without ever showing the body in question. The film captures the tone of hospital waiting rooms and streets milling with taxis, and the first-person narration describes the discomfort of having an IV drip line, skin rashes, and night sweats. In her 2016 doctoral dissertation for Georgetown University, Queer Embodiments, Abstract Drag, and Derek Jarman's 'Blue', Hannah Calkins argued that
“Jarman’s refusal to show his body wasn’t purely motivated by vanity, of course;
He was pointedly undercutting the spectacle of AIDS. But he was also in some ways
escaping the bounds of his own mortal and afflicted and suffering body. Jarman
facilitated this escape with a score, a screen, and some text. He (and his co-narrators)
spoke that text into life, conjuring fleeting visions, dreamy memories, and epic stories, all
populated by a kaleidoscopic cast of characters. These characters vary in form, tone, and elusiveness, but they are all complexly immaterial, and all the more powerful for it.
Jarman himself is one of them” (p. 25).
There is a case to be made that instead of Jarman existing in the film as one of many characters, the film alternatively is its lead character— that character being Jarman’s body, and all that occurs in the film happening in and around him. He is Blue. This is emphasized by the radically immersive sole visual of the blue screen. This is due to the deterioration of Jarman’s eyesight caused by retinal detachment from CMV retinitis, a complication from the AIDS virus. By the time he began his work on the film, Jarman had retained some eyesight but was progressively only able to see in shades of blue. In her 2008 article Derek Jarman’s “Ghostly Eye”: Prophetic Bliss and Sacrificial Blindness in Blue, Kate Higginson described the symbolism of Jarman selecting for the film the specific shade of International Klein Blue, or IKB, which was mixed in 1960 by Yves Klein. Higginson states;
“Klein patented a vibrant shade of ultramarine…to convey his cherished qualities of boundlessness and immateriality….IKB is intended to be a joyful celestial colour that evokes states of reverie and produces ambiences beyond the phenomenology of time” (p. 78)
This was additionally commented upon by Calkins, who elaborated on the selection of IKB through her own findings on the significance of the colour:
“The International Klein Blue (IKB) screen is actually an image, and a hugely affecting one. It isn’t static, either–not only does dust and damage flicker and dance across the screen, IKB has a positively supernatural glow. It may be a trick of the eye, or of the light, but to me the screen looks alive, almost as though it’s breathing.” (p. 11)
This sense of the screen having a life of its own, and embodying something ‘boundless, joyful, celestial’ is further representation of the film’s manifestation as not only Jarman’s body, but also his soul. In documenting both his sensate experience and a visual symbol of his spirit, Jarman immortalised himself in his final form within the film. It is through this that Blue comes to be his personal elegy.
The grief and act of memorialising within the movie is not only for Jarman himself, however. The film also stands as tribute to Jarman’s beloved friends and community members who preceded him in death from AIDS. These friends are named multiple times throughout the film, initially within the first moments of the movie. Jarman’s narration states:
“I am walking along the beach in a howling gale ―
Another year is passing
In the roaring waters I hear the voices of dead friends
Love is life that lasts forever.
My heart’s memory turns to you
David. Howard. Graham. Terry. Paul…”
Recreations of these voices are weaved into the sound design, and these names are repeated enough throughout the film for the audience to become familiar with them. In his incorporation of the echoed voices of lost friends into the film, Jarman puts into action his own quotation of ‘Love is life that lasts forever’. There is a reassurance in this line, a promise almost, but also a desperation. This idea of immortalisation appears again in his conjuring of his friends and their stories, with a sense of urgency to share them before Jarman himself passes away and brings his memories with him. He recounts the virus’s progression and divulges his grief in this passage from a narration section of the film:
“The virus rages fierce. I have no friends now who are not dead or dying. Like a blue frost it caught them. At work, at the cinema, on marches and beaches. In churches on their knees, running, flying, silent or shouting protest. It started with sweats in the night and swollen glands. Then the black cancers spread across their faces ― as they fought for breath TB and pneumonia hammered at the lungs, and Toxo at the brain. Reflexes scrambled ― sweat poured through hair matted like lianas in the tropical forest. Voices slurred ― and then were lost forever. My pen chased this story across the page tossed this way and that in the storm.”
His pen is ‘chasing’ this story, but the ‘blue frost’ of the virus not only chased them as well, but caught them. This need of Jarman’s to capture for himself these voices ‘lost forever’ (which sounds phonetically very similar to ‘lasts forever’) is portrayed in his word choice, which feels in every sentence just as intentional as the symbolism behind the use of the IKB screen. The transmutation of himself and his loved ones into the artistic canon is an act of memorialization. In his structuring of the screenplay, he documents not only the end of his life, but the pre-epidemic youth enjoyed by his generation of homosexuals. He remembers it with honesty and sentimentality, conjuring up lost years for new generations to imagine. He recounts;
“Impatient youths of the sun
Burning with many colours
Flick combs through hair
In bathroom mirrors
Fucking with fusion and fashion
Dance in the beams of emerald lasers
Mating on suburban duvets
Cum splattered nuclear breeders
What a time that was”.
While the film’s narrative content itself is one of loss and summoning of times and people past, Jarman’s journal provides precious insight into the impact the film had upon its release. Jarman fortunately lived another eight months following the premiere of Blue and was able to receive the positive response to the movie himself. The summer it opened, he wrote in his journal of the impact it was having on not only those experiencing loss, but the preventative influence it held on a young viewer:
“Blue has been a great success; some of the reviews have been a bit over the edge for such a modestly conceived film; of course I'm thrilled. It's on today's front page of the New York Times Review: Everyone happy, not least a young man who told me it had stopped him committing suicide at a moment of great depression, something that had happened since he was the victim of a hit-and-run driver” (p. 376).
This anecdote is remarkably powerful proof of the ability of such a life-affirming art piece to save a life, something neither Jarman nor his pen seemed able to do in the past. With Blue, Jarman is both eulogist and eulogized, documentarian and subject. His unique perspective, or ‘ghostly eye’ as posited by Higginson, is “... a trait of Jarman as seer; it allows him to envision or call to sight the spectres of his friends, to look beyond the ontological divide of living and dead” (Higginson, 2008, p. 90). It is this very trait, imbued into Blue, that solidifies the film as an idiosyncratically human union of art and memorial.
It is these exact qualities of humanity and idiosyncrasy that also proffer Blue as a politicized work. Jarman spoke publicly about his diagnosis in 1986 at a time of heightened stigma which had been incentivized by Thatcher and her government. Upon unabashedly labelling himself as a person with AIDS, he was publicly discussed “in scathing queerphobic language, Jarman’s health was monitored and dissected as the subject of voyeuristic intrigue” (Myerson, 2023, p. 62). In more ways than one, Jarman twisted this on its head with Blue. He removed the access to the onscreen sight of his physical body to those who may be watching with the voyeuristic motivations mentioned by Myerson. This foil to the oft-expected spectacle of people with AIDS was further posited by Higginson as another very intentional choice:
“Branded in such representations as culpable, disfigured, and depraved, PWAs were caught in a Foucauldian “trap of visibility,” the dehumanising inspection of vulnerable groups considered sick, perverse, or criminal. It was in this context that New York’s ACT UP activists asked the public to stop looking at PWAs and start listening to them. A call to which Blue, its static blue screen augmenting the prominence of the accompanying soundscape, arguably responds” (p. 79)
Furthermore, Jarman’s decision to remove his image from the film is even more poignant when he had been for the past seven years, one of the most visible HIV+ positive public figures in the nation. Like him and his work, his activism was quite singular. He was unflappable in his critiques of the Conservative government and citizens engaging in the homophobic moral panic of the 1980s and ‘90s, but he was also hesitant to align himself fully with the larger groups of LGBTQ+ activists. He expressed in Smiling In Slow Motion a sense that the term ‘gay men’ was an attempt to usher homosexuals into a more centrist mainstream, writing instead, “I’m glad I’m queer” (p. 270). His qualms with the slogans and spectacle that had accompanied the AIDS activist movement were also incorporated into Blue, notably in the line
“I shall not win the battle against the virus ― in spite of the slogans like “Living with AIDS”. The virus was appropriated by the well ― so we have to live with AIDS while they spread the quilt for the moths of Ithaca across the wine dark sea. Awareness is heightened by this, but something else is lost. A sense of reality drowned in theatre.”
Jarman grapples with this loss of truth in theatricality several times throughout the narration in Blue. He lets out moments of impassioned condemnation towards charity and country’s leadership in angry, honest language, particularly in the section below:
“Charity has allowed the uncaring to appear to care and is terrible for those dependent on it. It has become big business as the government shirks its responsibilities in these uncaring times. We go along with this, so the rich and powerful who fucked us over once fuck us over again and get it both ways. We have always been mistreated, so if anyone gives us the slightest sympathy we overreact with our thanks.”
As a weaver himself of complex, poetic stories, Jarman had a very keen eye for narrative, particularly to distinguish who benefitted from which narratives and who was demonised. He used this line from the film to call attention to the pitying and yet somehow still unsympathetic narratives enforced by the privileged wealthy onto the queer community in a time of desperate need. In doing so, he identified the familiar roles of ‘us and them’, that, according to Anna Marie Smith in her 1994 journal The Imaginary Inclusion of the Assimilable "Good Homosexual": The British New Right's Representations of Sexuality and Race, had been purposefully distorted by the Conservative party’s messaging. She asserts that
“Thatcherite homophobia did not take the form of one-dimensional exclusion. Instead of aversion, the Thatcherites exhibited a symptomatic obsession and fascination with homosexuality. Instead of constructing a singular "us" versus "them" frontier, they made every effort to represent themselves as the "tolerant" centrists who were mediating between two extremist camps: the vociferous parents' groups, violent queer-bashers, and the whole moral backlash on one side, and the flaunting, disease-spreading child-seducing queers and their corrupt socialist allies on the other.” (p. 58)
Jarman had an acute awareness of this strange relationship between the vocal homophobes and queer people with AIDS. He echoed this narrative incredibly succinctly as part of a stanza from a poem read in Blue, where he speaks of “Blue blood and bad blood / Our blood and your blood”. The use of ‘our’ and ‘your’ enforces the separation between the sick and healthy, gay and straight, ‘blue’ and ‘bad’. Most fascinating is the use of the term ‘blue blood’, which typically means ‘aristocrat’ and holds heavy weight in a nation as class-divided as Britain. Combining these two words adds an entire new dimension to the choice of the colour blue for the film’s sole image, particularly when noting that blue is the Conservative party’s political colour. This also brings further significance to the final words of both Blue and Jarman’s filmography:
“I place a delphinium, Blue, upon your grave.”
The recurring use of ‘I’ and ‘you’ remains ambiguous, up for many different truths and interpretations, as is much of the film. The image of a blue delphinium on a gravestone holds space for both of the two analyses within this essay— Blue as an ideogram of the government’s culpability in the insurmountable loss suffered within its own queer population, and, Blue as a boundless incarnation of Derek Jarman himself.
Bibliography
Calkins, H. (2016). Queer Embodiments, Abstract Drag, and Derek Jarman's 'Blue' (Publication No. 10119147). [Doctoral dissertation, Georgetown University]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.
Cook, M. (2017). “Archives of Feeling”: the AIDS Crisis in Britain 1987. History Workshop Journal, 83, 51–78. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44645657
Higginson, K. (2008). Derek Jarman's "Ghostly Eye": Prophetic Bliss and Sacrificial Blindness in Blue. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 41 (1), 77-94. http://ezproxy.lib.torontomu.ca/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/derek-jarmans-ghostly-eye-prophetic-bliss/docview/205342875/se-2
Jarman, D. (Director). (1993). Blue. Basilisk Communications.
Jarman, D. (2000). Smiling In Slow Motion. Century Publishing.
Myerson, E. (2023). Derek Jarman’s mediaeval blood: Queer devotion, affective medicine, and the AIDS Crisis. Postmedieval, 14 (1), 61-88. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-022-00260-0
Smith, A. M. (1994). The Imaginary Inclusion of the Assimilable “Good Homosexual”: The British New Right’s Representations of Sexuality and Race. Diacritics, 24 (2/3), 58–70. https://doi.org/10.2307/465164
