Dallas Buyers Club and the Price of Living with Death

by Christopher Barr

Dallas Buyers Club is the true story about a Texas electrician named Ron Woodroof who is also a dirt-bag devious hustler.  The film opens with Ron having sex with two girls in a bull stall while looking through a fence at a bull rider getting bucked around by an angry bull.  We then see him taking bets on a bull rider at the rodeo, after losing he makes a run for it rather than paying the men who won the bet their money.  After a run in with a cop he knows, to avoid getting the piss beat out of him, Ron, feeling sick, is driven home only to collapse on his living room floor of his run down trailer.

Ron wakes up in the hospital and is told to his understandable disbelief, that he has the AIDS virus and is expected to die in 30 days.  He’s asked by the doctor questions about his sexual orientation, whether he has engaged in any homosexual activity lately.  Ron is a Texas cowboy coming from a long line of homophobes, so hearing the doctor ask him if he’s gay freaks him out and he storms out.  He goes and does what he does best, drinks lots and snorts lines of cocaine because this man is a bit depraved and destructive when we first meet him.

This film is many things but at first it’s about how a person deals with their own life in the face of imitate death.  This was a disease after all at the time in 1985, where the film starts off at, was widely believed to be a homosexually transmitted disease.  That ignorant way of thinking is likely the main reason it spread so quickly in the 80’s.  Ron, being your average hillbilly Texan, had good reason to be confused, until he did a little research to only discover that AIDS is not limited to homosexuals, as the conservative media led people to believe.

I think it’s quite unimaginable to truly know what Ron must have been going through.  Ron was forced to face some fears most of us would sooner never want to face.  His prejudice and thoughts about the world and how he perceived it all came crashing down.  These ignorant so-called friends of his wanted nothing to do with him, out casting him from the comforts of the group and his electrician job.  People were so afraid of this mysterious virus and Ron had it, so he had to leave and seek help elsewhere, alone. 

Ron was forced onto a sad and rough road to enlightenment, casting out all his beliefs about the world and the people residing in it.  Most importantly he had to grow up and stop doing what he’s been doing.  Ron had to become a fighter, he had to stop his selfish ways, but like most change, he had to fall a couple of times before he could successfully achieve it.  His views on homosexuality changed as well with the threat he once felt disappearing into a humorous but genuine friendship with a gay man that dressed in woman’s clothing.  

Dallas Buyers Club is also about people and greed.  It’s about people with AIDS and a variety of other diseases fighting to live another day.  All they wanted from their government was some assistants, but the government really didn’t help.  There have been scientists that have presented compelling evidence showing the HIV/AIDS virus is nothing more than a pseudo-science concocted by the very government claiming to eradicate it.   The real culprits are AIDS medications like AZT that do more harm than good to dying AIDS patients. 

The FDA, Food and Drug Administration, I’m certain started out as an organization set up to protect the American population from unhealthy food and questionable drugs, but now, like a lot of government sponsored programs, its fallen corrupt under the spell of multinational mega corporations, whose financial interests consist of mass production despite the health risks to the population.

Then there is the pharmacological/medical apparatus with the addition to virologists, researchers and clinics which can now receive huge grants and funding for research.  Like the Military Industrial Complex of the Unites States which is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidarity, the health agencies and pharmaceutical companies must present their research and products under the illusion of the highest standard expected in the world.  This is people’s lives after all, but the problem is these companies and institutions keep obfuscating the issues because they are in the business of illness, sick people are their customers.  Prevention therefore can only be temporary, the crave must return in the form of pain to maintain repeat business.  This is the reality of the World we live in; the financial and fiscal responsibility is for the shareholders of companies and not the people themselves.

These lies run so deep, but the population goes along with what they want to believe.  Their government is looking out for their best interests and the interests of their family.  According to the U.S. National Safety Council; ‘Americans are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist.’  But the government would have Americans believe that there is a real threat to their homeland by foreign extremists.  

The problem is people are not educated enough to know better, to think for themselves, investigate for themselves, because the purpose of the education system in America and elsewhere in the first world, is not to spread enlightenment at all, which is why we don’t see psychology and philosophy taught in schools, its purpose is to reduce as many free-thinking individuals as possible to standardize the citizenry, to prevent dissent and to discourage originality, to make people predictable consumers and workers.

Plato said, “Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.”  Ron became such a person, a person that saw the flaws in the hospital system of his country, he saw them for what they are, representatives of the global juggernauts know as BIG PHARMA.

Monsanto is a monstrous corporation that has massive economic and political strength over the system, so they are able to get away with forcing pesticide-soaked Franken foods on to the populace.  It’s all just business after all, the American dream is to build a future for yourself and your family, it doesn’t say anything about who you have to step on to make that dream come true.

Monsanto is a multinational chemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation who is the leading producer and front runner of genetically engineered plant cells and crops and many other artificial, organically-challenged foods.  But like those AIDS patients in Dallas Buyers Club in the hospital doing everything the drug testing doctors told them to do, we are also responsible for Monsanto when we stopped caring about where our food and produce was coming from, that was the day the first truly genetically engineered seed was planted, and companies like Monsanto have been growing like a Georgia weed ever sense.

Ron’s crime in the film is stepping on the bottom dollar of such corporations, he wanted to help himself and help some other people along the way, that ended up being his salvation, not in the biblical sense but in the human sense.  He finally saw beyond himself, beyond his point of view and how he once saw the world.

The system did end up failing him once he fully formed his dream to help others.  That San Francisco judge did say that a man should be able to do whatever it takes to survive but the law is above man and the law prevailed.  The law in all its wisdom protected Big Pharma thanks to their bought and paid for federal drug dealer representatives at the FDA.

Ron got beat by big business for selling vitamins and protein supplements to sick people.  Because they weren’t FDA approved, because they weren’t part of the acceptable products being marked up for an obscene amount of money.  

Ron died of his disease in 1992, 7 years after he was diagnosed to live only 30 days.