The Times of Harvey Milk (1984): You Can Kill the Man, But You Cannot Kill the Spirit (Review)

Released on Criterion Blu-ray this week is the Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk, filmmaker Roger Epstein’s 1984 documentary about a true, political trailblazer, Harvey Milk.

For many people, and certainly those of us on this side of the pond, Harvey Milk only really came to our attention thanks to Milk, the 2008 Gus Van Sant biopic starring Sean Penn, who won an Oscar for his titular performance as the outspoken human rights activist and first openly gay man ever to be elected to US public office. But Milk’s story was a long time coming to the big screen and wider public appreciation. Indeed, Van Sant was initially slated to direct an Oliver Stone produced biopic entitled The Mayor of Castro Street (the title referring to Milk’s San Francisco neighbourhood ward) as far back as the early 1990s, with Robin Williams, James Woods, Al Pacino, Daniel Day-Lewis and Richard Gere all at one time or another set to portray Milk. Ultimately, The Mayor of Castro Street spent the 1990s and early ’00s stuck in development hell with Bryan Singer being one of the last directors attached to the project. It was left to Van Sant, who never forgot Milk’s story or his ambition to get it told, to strike out with a new script from Dustin Lance Black (who also subsequently won an Oscar for his work), and bring Milk to the big screen in 2008, just in time for the Californian referendum on same-sex marriage. Until that point, it looked likely that Epstein’s then twenty-four-year-old documentary would be the only film dedicated to the life of Harvey Milk. But you know, as sad as that would be, it would have also been more than OK, because The Times of Harvey Milk really is an exceptional documentary that does justice to a great man.

So who was Harvey Milk? Well, on the surface, he appeared to be a product of middle-class America. Born into the Jewish faith in the Woodmere suburb of New York, he did well at school and was popular for his natural charisma, sportsmanship and practical jokes. He attended New York State College for Teachers and majored in Math, before enlisting with the US Navy during the Korean War, serving in submarines and rising to the rank of lieutenant, junior grade. In civilian life, he worked as a researcher on Wall Street but the 1960s saw Milk grow restless and wanting something different, something more. Much of this dissatisfaction can perhaps be explained by his rather closeted homosexuality. By the end of the decade, Milk had abandoned ‘respectable’ New York to ‘drop out’ in San Fransciso where, according to a 1969 Kinsey report, more gay men lived per capita than any other American city. Growing his hair and changing his politics, Milk opened up a camera store on Castro Street; the heart of San Francisco’s LGBTQ community.

There, he quickly became engaged with local, grassroots politics and became an effective and respected organiser and activist, building coalitions on everything from LGBTQ rights to workers’ rights, senior citizens’ rights and renters’ rights. In 1977, after three prior campaigns ended in failure, the self-proclaimed ‘Mayor of Castro Street’ was finally elected to the city’s Board of Supervisors, after adopting a more superficially formal and clean-cut image. Though he served just under a year in office, Milk’s actions were undeniably responsible for the shift that was to follow in San Francisco politics. Providing a voice for the disenfranchised and sponsoring a bill banning discrimination in public accommodations and employment on the basis of sexual orientation. Milk’s last political battle was his opposition to John Briggs’ Proposition 6, a proposed law that would have made the firing gay teachers—and any public school employees who supported gay rights—mandatory. Briggs’ stance was especially heinous and ignorant; he repeatedly argued that gay teachers were abusing their students and intended to ‘recruit’ them into homosexuality. Despite several losses for gay rights elsewhere that year, Milk found widespread support and often in the unlikeliest of places, including then-president Jimmy Carter and his soon-to-be-rival and successor, Ronald Reagan. In November 1978, Briggs’ proposition lost by more than a million votes. In San Francisco, an astonishing 75% had voted against it. Just a couple of weeks later, Harvey Milk was dead. Assassinated alongside San Francisco mayor, George Moscone, by a disgruntled ex-supervisor, Dan White.

The decision by Epstein to name his documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, rather than the more traditional ‘The Life and Times…’ is a telling one. A good documentary ought to bring an audience within touching distance to a past and a situation they were not themselves privy to. Epstein certainly does that. The Times of Harvey Milk manages, with great atmosphere and a compelling approach, to give us a flavour not only of the vibrant social and political climate of 1970s San Franciso, but also of the more staid, traditional and buttoned-up climate of America that Milk himself had perceived and was indeed party to before his true coming out at the age of 40. This was the claustrophobic atmosphere that produced the dangerous disorientation that rose to the surface within Milk’s killer Dan White. As one of Milk’s friend colleagues remarks here, the Dan Whites of this world, were educated from birth that ‘The Done Thing’ was to promulgate and continue the Christian American nuclear family and that anything that strayed from this way of life was wrong. By the 1970s, as the counterculture of the 1960s broke through to become culture itself, such people saw that another way had indeed been possible all along and was now being progressively accepted as OK.

Van Sant’s subsequent biopic alludes to the possibility that the reason why family man Dan White was so opposed to gay rights was because he himself was a closeted homosexual, but Epstein’s documentary explores no such theorising. Instead, it simply considers the unarguable mental and emotional instability at the core of the man, an instability that his own defence team used in his subsequent trial, and which, despite its tendency to lean towards ridiculousness — the decision to blame his imbalance of mind on too much junk food has entered public infamy now as ‘the Twinkie defence’ — was such a success that he received a sentence reduced to outrageous proportions. Though released after just five years in 1984, there was no happy ending or indeed future for White, who took his own life just a year later.

It is the acceptance of the lives of others, or that another life is indeed possible, that makes up the content of The Times of Harvey Milk. Epstein provides a voice to those who knew Milk via the talking head interview format to encourage them to discuss how someone as inspiring and openly out as Milk had impacted on their lives, from Teamsters Union leader, Allan Baird, whose natural homophobia was quashed by his ability to see not only how effective and empathetic an activist Milk was, but also how they were not so different after all, to gay schoolteacher Tom Ammiano who would go on to enter politics himself, becoming a member of the California State Assembly. Archive footage such as constituents of all ages proclaiming how Milk is getting their vote to the heartbreaking and peaceful well attended candlelit vigil following his death, all attest to the man’s impact too. But in the end, it’s as if the actual life of Harvey Milk becomes secondary to the times he existed in and the times he helped to create. The implicit message of Epstein’s film is a potent and inspiring one; you can kill the man, but you cannot kill the spirit. In these polarised political times, where it is easy to become disenfranchised, it’s important to remember that change can happen, even when faced with stiff and confrontational resistance. Now more than ever we need to remember the times that Harvey Milk represented, to embrace them and hold them close, taking from them the inspiration that may embolden us further for the fight.

This Criterion release includes, among others, an audio commentary track from Epstein and other production personnel, footage that was ultimately not used in the film, along with excerpts from Epstein’s research tapes, rare footage and audio of Milk himself, a look at the trial of Dan White, a new critical appreciation from documentary filmmaker Jon Else, and a featurette exploring both this documentary and the biopic by Gus Van Sant.

Thanks for reading our review of The Times of Harvey Milk

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