Brokeback
I finally got to see “Brokeback Mountain” today and I was surprised at what a cold film it is. The two main characters, apart from being somewhat nice to their kids, are pretty aloof, selfish, and uninteresting when they aren’t with each other. There are two possible explanations for this, one more generous than the other. The first one is that the film is deliberately anti-heroic. The real message of the film being that the life of a cowboy is not an easy one or a glamorous one, and they are lucky if they can squeeze out a few drops of meaning out of their miserable lives. The second explanation is that the film really is about being gay, not about class at all, and the only way to show the main characters as trapped in their false heterosexual lives is to show them as being not very nice people when they aren’t together with each other. (Children excepted, although even there they aren’t exactly model parents.)
I went to the film expecting it to be fairly mainstream hollywood fare, albeit in the hands of a director who seems to get more confident with each film (although “The Ice Storm” is still my favorite). And it was. There wasn’t really anything unexpected. In a Counterpunch article, John Scagliotti writes:
I know Annie Proulx, the heterosexual on whose short story the film is based, thinks she has captured a reality in her heroes’ doom, but what she has tapped more powerfully is straight women’s fantasies of primal sexuality and impossible love: “O, Heathcliff! O, Cathy!” A real Ennis and Jack might have said screw this place and moved to the Castro, opening an antique shop, or taken any number of paths to an authentic life, like thousands of Western gay boys did in the seventies and eighties. But that would upend the romantic convention, so Proulx, and the screenwriters after her, relied on what has been a running joke in the gay community …
The joke itself is a spoiler, so I’m putting it below the fold (although anyone whose seen a few films will spot this one a mile away):
“Why does the homo always have to die?”
A good question indeed. Lakshmi Chaudhry makes a similar point:
Epic love stories have always been the stuff of great Hollywood movies, and the movie’s PR machine is selling Brokeback Mountainas just that, doing its best to play down the fact that this particular version involves two penises.
… But herein lies the irony: only a “gay cowboy movie” can meet the literary requirements of grand passion in 21st century America.
Unlike these two critics, what disappointed me was not that the film was ultimately just a Victorian romance wrapped up as a (gay) cowboy film. That is what I was expecting. What surprised me was how un-epic and unsentimental the film really was. Like I said, it seemed quite cold. It may be that this coldness was the film’s real genius, or it could be that it was a result of the film’s failure to conceive of gay love as anything but tragic.
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Why does it have to be “failure to conceive of gay love as anything but tragic”? Why can’t it simply be a tragic story? Do all gay stories have to have happy endings? The “all gay stories are presented as tragic” complaint had some basis back in the era of “The Boys in the Band,” but I think we’re past that now. It seems to me you’re complaining that Proulx chose to tell a story you don’t approve of rather than pointing out flaws in the actual story/movie. Personally, I welcome a touch of coldness in chronically overheated overheated Hollywood.
I did say: “The two main characters, apart from being somewhat nice to their kids, are pretty aloof, selfish, and uninteresting when they aren’t with each other.” That kinda spoiled the film for me. The rest is an attempt to explain why I think the characters were so badly written, rather than simply parroting the complaints of the two critics I quote. I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear from my post. I do leave open the possibility that the characters were written this way for a reason, but my feeling right now is that it was cliche, rather than genius.
Let me add that I don’t think it is necessary to like the main characters in a film, or even identify with them – but that’s assuming the film isn’t a tragic love story. Then I think it is a requirement of sorts (for the formula to work).
Speaking of coldness, the Ice Storm is cataclysmically good. I use it in my Listening Classes, and we go over the film shot by shot. The kids generally get really into it. The film is so powerful that even among my severely immature 19 year olds the sex scene at the end is so agonizing that there was not a single titter, only gasps of pain. Many heads turned away from the screen. That one I find new things in every time I watch it.
Kerim, I just finished watching the movie and here are my thoughts.
I do feel it was genuinely a class statement or at least that a genuine class statement is contained in the film. I grew up in a small logging town, and I have met real cowboys and rodeo athletes. I thought the portrayal of this personality type was dead on: the material bleakness of rural life, the way that characters talked to each other, the kinds of things they boasted about, all brought back childhood memories. Before I had seen the movie, I was skeptical that it would have much to say to me. But one of my childhood friends who now works in Tokyo as a corporate recruiter describe the movie’s message as, “Imagine the troubles that 2 gay loggers would have to struggle with discovering their love for each other.”
It is a kind of urban pride to assume that everyone wants and can live life in the The Big City. But making that kind of move just isn’t possible for everyone who grew up in the kind of lives portrayed in Brokeback Mountain. It may be true that the, “thousands of Western gay boys” that took up urban life in the 1970′s and 80′s included some cowboys. I’m sure this is true. But I am just as sure that if you grew up a cowboy in a place like Merritt, British Columbia, you’d better not talk about homosexuality unless you’ve got something negative to say. And it may be that homosexuality is one of the few remaining aspects of life that makes it possible to talk about this kind of life clearly.
One final point. Am I the only one who finds it strange that our ‘cowboy’ anti-heroes are shepherd? I have never met a cowboy shepherd, although the film crystallized the fact that they must exist. I have never spoken to a cowboy about this, but my guess is that this is low class ranch work. But it could very well be that the introduction of factory beef farming has changed the reality of ranch work. Does anyone know anything about this?
Thanks, that’s an interesting point. I’d add that this is true even in cities. My friend who works with poor blacks with AIDS in Philadelphia – a city with one of the most openly and active gay populations – says that they rarely self-identify as gays.
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An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
Kerim at Keywords as a review up aboutBrokeback Mountain. It sounds to me more like this movie made it as far as it did on the strength of the controversy. Which is a legitimate means of marketing a film, but that’s doesn’t mean it deserves Best Picture