Brokeback Mountain

Posted to www.marxmail.org on January 7, 2006

“Brokeback Mountain” has been cited by critics as a breakthrough movie about gays. With a well-established director (Ang Lee is straight, as are the two male leads) and backing by Paramount studios, it achieved a much higher profile than the average gay film. Such films actually arrive with some frequency today in theaters geared to independent film. If you go to netflix.com and search on “gay,” you will discover that there are over 500 films in this category. But most of them are fairly obscure, including the great lesbian crime film “Bound” by the Wachowski brothers who went on to make the Matrix flicks. I should of course mention that the lesbian killers in “Bound” lived happily ever after, an outcome that Paramount might find too risky to portray--especially when it comes to gay men.

“Brokeback Mountain” is based on an E. Annie Proulx short story based in Wyoming, the locale for much of her work and where she has lived for the past 10 years or so. It tells the story of Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger), a couple of teenagers from impoverished backgrounds, who come together as sheepherders in the summer of 1963. That these two characters look, dress and act like the Marlboro Man will obviously have an unsettling effect on Red State audiences, which was clearly Proulx and Lee’s intention. It was also certainly the intention of screenwriter Larry McMurtry who adapted Proulx’s story. McMurtry has been the author of many ostensibly Western tales that more often than not subvert the expectations of the genre.

One cold night, after the two young men end up in the same tent, they make love passionately. For obvious reasons, Ang Lee decided not to represent in cinematic terms what Proulx wrote:

Ennis ran full-throttle on all roads whether fence mending or money spending, and he wanted none of it when Jack seized his left hand and brought it to his erect cock. Ennis jerked his hand away as though he'd touched fire, got to his knees, unbuckled his belt, shoved his pants down, hauled Jack onto all fours and, with the help of the clear slick and a little spit, entered him, nothing he'd done before but no instruction manual needed. They went at it in silence except for a few sharp intakes of breath and Jack's choked "gun's goin off," then out, down, and asleep.

(Proulx’s story can be read in its entirety at: http://ennislovedjack.blogspot.com/)

When the summer is over, the two men go back to their straight lives and become husbands and fathers. After four years they begin longing for each other and hook up once again for the first of a yearly “fishing trip” that is merely an excuse for them to go off into the mountains and have sex.

During one of these trips, Jack proposes that the two men leave their wives and run off with each other. They could start their own ranch and live happily ever after. Ennis turns him down with words that appear identical to those found in Proulx’s story:

Whoa, whoa, whoa. It ain't goin a be that way. We can't. I'm stuck with what I got, caught in my own loop. Can't get out of it. Jack, I don't want a be like them guys you see around sometimes. And I don't want a be dead. There was these two old guys ranched together down home, Earl and Rich -- Dad would pass a remark when he seen them. They was a joke even though they was pretty tough old birds. I was what, nine years old and they found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They'd took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp. What the tire iron done looked like pieces a burned tomatoes all over him, nose tore down from skiddin on gravel.

Since “Brokeback Mountain” is set in Wyoming, it is inevitable that the fate of young Matthew Sheppard will come to mind. This young gay man was beaten to death by a couple of men he met in a bar, who ironically shared Ennis and Jack’s class origins but not their sexual orientation.

I can certainly recommend “Brokeback Mountain,” especially for the performances of Ledger and Gyllenhaal. Its main flaw is that it is too long. In Proulx’s story, there is not a single word about mountain scenery. Everything is about the characters. Lee has decided to reupholster her lean tale with endless shots of the mountains that look like something out of Ansel Adams. I kept thinking of what Charles Bukowski told an interviewer once about driving to a poetry reading on a road surrounded by majestic mountains and redwood forests. After a while, he got bored, saying to himself, “Enough of the god-damned trees already.”

“Brokeback Mountain” has touched off some interesting discussions on the Internet, much of which is addressed on Doug Ireland’s blog (http://direland.typepad.com/). I find Ireland’s musings on gay issues first-rate even though he is susceptible to red-baiting tics from time to time. He has a link to an article that is positively unhappy with the film:

There are many reasons to dislike Brokeback Mountain -- the complete lack of chemistry between the male leads, the painful, groan-inducing dialogue, the energyless pacing -- but all of this seems nitpicky in comparison to an outdated, out-of-touch theme. Marketed as the first (although it isn't, really) mainstream cross-over homosexual love story, it seems strange that liberal urbanites would open their arms to the story of two closeted dudes who can’t deal with their sexuality, are made miserable by the secret, and die unhappy and alone. This is the stuff of progressive filmmaking? Some might argue that the film’s implicit message is that staying in the closet is a mistake -- that if these cowboys had “come out,” they wouldn’t have faced such a miserable end. But my guess is most blue-state straight people walked out of the theater thinking, “Gee -- what a shame to be gay. Those poor people. Glad I’m not!” Can you disagree with them? What a depressing, miserable vision of the gay experience.

full: http://www.thesimon.com/magazine/articles/getting_reel/01044_brokeback_mountain_brokedown_ideas.html

Although this is probably too harsh an estimation, there is something to be said about the propensity to cast gay love in such unhappy terms. From “Boys in the Attic” to the more recent films about AIDS, including “Philadelphia,” big-budget movies about gays seems to require tragic finales.

As gay sexuality continues to make headway against straight prejudice in capitalist society, we might expect a different kind of film to be made eventually. That of course requires unremitting struggle against the sort of bigotry that at one point would have made a film like “Brokeback Mountain” impossible to produce.