what is this thing
called love?
by Douglas Messerli
Larry McMurtry and Dana Ossana (screenplay,
based on a novella by E. Annie Proulx), Ang Lee (director) Brokeback
Mountain / 2005
As I recently watched
the Academy Awards, I was struck again by just how weak the nominees of 2005
were. While it was true that this time around there were no elephantine
clunkers like Titantic, the movies all appeared a bit pallid. I found George
Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, for example, a very likeable
film with some very important ideas behind it, but it was hardly a great
masterwork of filmmaking. Capote is a well-crafted film, again
presenting some interesting concepts, but despite its excellent actors, it is
too long and a bit precious in its conceits. And the movie, which was the
favorite to win the Oscar, Brokeback Mountain, was in some ways the most
problematic of all the movies I saw.
Let me begin by laying my proverbial cards
on the equally proverbial table. As a gay male, who perceives that film often
traffics in larger-than-life images of desire, I like to see films with
handsome men, and it is fulfilling to occasionally see these beautiful men
enjoying the company of and, perhaps, even enjoying the sexual pleasure of one
another. I think most moviegoers recognize that—as “honest” and “real” as we
might like our movies to be—one of the greatest joys in watching them is to see
people behaving as we might in our romanticized dreams. As playwright Mac
Wellman once said to me, “I want my plays to be performed by beautiful people;
that’s one of the great things about art. It isn’t everyday life.”
On the other hand, I’ve never really cared
much whether a movie is “gay” or not.* Indeed, I feel the same way about
literature in general. I certainly wish more films dealt with homosexual
figures who lived lives closer to the ordinary world my companion and I
experience. But I also realize that that may not make for very interesting
viewing. Moreover, living primarily in a century in which many of the most
important writers include Marcel Proust, Mann, Djuna Barnes, Tennessee
Williams, Jane Bowles, Gertrude Stein, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Frank O’Hara, John
Ashbery, John Cage—the list could go on for pages—I don’t feel desperate for
gay-themed film or theater with which I might identify. Casablanca is just as
sexy to me as the bedroom scene with Terence Stamp and the young man of the
house in Teorema—well, nearly as sexy. I attended Brokeback
Mountain, accordingly, with some caution.
Perhaps it also rubbed me wrong that this
film had been so touted as a “gay” movie and was represented as
“groundbreaking” for dealing with cowboys. Where had these publicists and
critics been all these years? I thought it was common knowledge that in several
westerns (even John Ford movies) cowboys were often busy with something other
than cows, sheep, Indians, and guns. It isn’t accidental; after all, that among
the gay icons of desired manhood—right up there with policemen, sailors, and
fresh-faced frats—is the cowboy.
What also struck me about this
“gay-themed” movie was that hardly anyone involved with it was gay. I do not
know the sexuality of the director, Ang Lee (his second film, The Wedding
Banquet, was centered around a gay couple as well, and for reasons I have
expressed in my review of that film, I disliked the smug behavior of that gay
couple). The author, E. Annie Proulx, on whose novella Brokeback
Mountain had been based, was clearly not a gay male. The screenwriters
Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana are not gay; I took a course at American
University in script writing with McMurtry, and I can tell you that he’s so
straight that he might not even be allowed in a gay bar! The actors, Jake Gyllenhaal
and Heath Ledger, made sure that, despite what I read in a fan magazine, that
“they faced the issue head on by actually sharing a trailer during the filming
and eating meals together,” their fans knew they were not homosexuals. Of
course, that doesn’t mean that these individuals could not imagine what a gay
cowboy in 1963, when the movie is supposed to take place, might have felt. But
I think it is perhaps indicative of some of the problems inherent in the film I
finally saw.
The first part of the film, a long laconic
testimony to the lonely life of the sheep-herding cowboys and an evocation of
the beauty of the landscape in which they work, was perfectly reasonable. And I
think it is not at all illogical or even out of the ordinary that these two
lonely men, both of whom had come from dysfunctional families, would develop a
kind of unspoken bond, even be attracted to one another, and, upon that lonely
mountain, find themselves having sex. I don’t care how loud the Christian coalitions
yell, men—even straight men which both of these cowboys proclaimed themselves
to be—sometimes have sex in situations where they exist for long periods of
time without women. So their rather violent sexual outing—although we later
suspect that it is not the first time for the Jake Gyllenhaal character, Jack
Twist—is quite believable; and I think most open-minded viewers would even
comprehend why they might have wanted to repeat their sexual release on other
occasions. This was, after all, just sex.
However, the movie’s premise is more
complex, as it goes on to require one to believe that even after their
separation, marriages and families for both of them, that a deep love
relationship had magically occurred on that mountain—a relationship that
demanded that they see one another again and again over the years. If anything,
the extreme promiscuity of the gay life at the same period of the early and
mid-sixties—the period in which, soon after, I became sexually active—might
indicate that in the closeted world of the day, gay sex was one thing, long
term relationships quite another.
Other than their shared difficulties with
family life, we have little evidence of any personal relationship that might
have determined their sustained love—love that, despite Ennis’s fears of being
discovered, is made apparent enough that his former boss and maltreated wife
are witnesses. Perhaps the director and writers simply felt that projecting two
attractive male actors entwined in a kiss upon the screen would proclaim their
life-long love. However gay men, like heterosexual couples, have to have something
deeper between them than bodies and the urge. In Casablanca, for
example, the love between Elsa and Rick may have begun as sexual desire between
two beautiful individuals, but the viewer also understands that—even if it is
only vaguely portrayed—they have had an intellectual and experiential
relationship, they have had to undergo the shared experiences—if nothing
else—of being frightened, living in Paris as the Nazis take over the
countryside and march toward the city. They have had Paris—not just a sexual
moment in time.
Perhaps if the original writer and
screenwriters had been less satisfied with the smoldering and silent suffering
of their character-types and dealt more clearly with what might have drawn them
together, the audience would have more fully understood just why they couldn’t
“quit” one another and the characters themselves—through the writers’ fuller
development—might have found a way out of their predicaments. Even if living
together on a ranch were impossible, in 1963 they might have found numerous
other areas where their life would have been easier. Ennis may have wanted to
remain near his daughters, but there is little evidence that he did much for
them, other than planning to attend one of their weddings, by staying on. But,
obviously, that is another movie, one that Brokeback Mountain is
not. Unfortunately, as it stands, the portrayal of gay life in this movie is
almost as stereotypical, if less painful, as the hundreds of fag-joke-laden,
queerbaiting, winking movies we’ve had to encounter from Hollywood over the
century.
Let me add that I am not trying to make
light of the difficulties of rural gay life revealed in this novella and film.
We have only to think of the murder of Matthew Sheppard (an event that occurred
years later in 1998) to know that it was—and perhaps still is—dangerous living
as a gay man or lesbian for that matter in the “rugged” West. Jack’s death
hints at the continued violence against homosexuals who too openly reveal
themselves. Perhaps what the movie more succinctly portrays is the fact that,
like the cultures from which they had come, these men were too taciturn and
passive to escape their inevitable loneliness. Accordingly, Brokeback
Mountain seems less a movie about gay cowboys to me than a film about two
very isolated men. And the movie, although it means well, stands less as a film
about gay cowboys than serving as an iconic image of them.
*Obviously, today, after
reviewing more that 2,500 gay films I can no longer make this claim. And
clearly given the now iconic status in the LGBTQ+ world this film has achieved,
my comments sound puny and carping. But I still argue the case that their deeper
relationship outside of their enjoyment of sex is never fully established. If
the creators of the film had just argued that these straight men just loved gay
sex, I’d have no problem with this film, but I still have not been shown why
they have supposedly developed such a deep love for one another. Love takes regular
and long encounters over time, unless it is just an infatuation. 9/6/24
Los Angeles, March 13, 2006 (reviewed with The Producers and Matador
as “What Is a Gay Movie?”)
Reprinted from The New Review of
Literature, Vol. 4, no. 1 (October 2006).
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