Stasis vs. Change: Why the World Only Spins Forward

Tony Kushner’s Angels in America explores the tension between despair and transformation in a world collapsing under the weight of illness, politics, and fear. Taken place at the height of conservative revolution in America’s politics and culture under Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the irony is that, conservatism is to resist changes, and preserved traditional ideas and values, but Angels in America also taught us that changes is inevitable. Through a variety of characters who aren’t entirely “good” or entirely “bad”: a drug-addict wife, a gay man dying of AIDS, a closeted Mormon lawyer, etc., who struggle to find meaning amid chaos. The “so what?” of Kushner’s vision is that the “human thing” is our resilience, not about overcoming suffering, but about learning to live through it and finding meaning within that. For however painful, imperfect, or incomplete someone is, change is both inevitable and necessary for survival. What matters is really the willingness to confront loss and uncertainty rather than retreat from them.
What’s striking about Angels in America is that even characters who seem “liberal,” people we tend to think aren’t afraid of changes, like Louis and Prior, are also deeply afraid of change. Prior, when facing death, admits that “even drag is a drag now,” expressing exhaustion and fear in the face of his own change. And Louis, overwhelmed by his partner’s illness, abandons him rather than confront mortality and change directly. On the other hand, characters who initially resist change, like Joe Pitt, the closeted Mormon lawyer, eventually accept truths about himself that he can no longer suppress. And Harper, too, evolves from a frightened, drug-dependent woman into someone who ultimately embraces motion and possibility, saying “The world only spins forward.”
Because change is inevitable, Kushner shows it as one of humanity’s greatest powers of survival. In the motif of migration, we see changes as the unstoppable force of human movement which brought Prior’s family to America as well as Belize’s slave ancestors and Louis’s immigrant ones, and even carried the Mormons across the continent to Utah. All embody an inerasable drive toward progress and transformation. Change, Kushner suggests, is not only inevitable but the essence of human history.
One dialouge that resonates with me the most that captures this idea, was when Harper talks to her Mormon Mother:
“Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?
Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice.
God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching.
Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.
Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.
Harper: That’s how people change.”
Change is painful. Change is violent and excruciating, yet necessary. Through pain, through chaos, through persistence, the fragile hope of Angels in America is that the world, and the people within it, must keep moving forward.