Stan Brakhage | Interim / 1952

doomed love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stan Brakhage (scenarist and director) Interim / 1952

 

Stan Brakhage’s first from 1952, Interim, might easily be sloughed off as a minor love story featuring a short series of on-screen smooches. But, in fact, this short work is a far deeper study in social and cultural strictures and class differences, as well as a kind of exploration of a first heterosexual encounter from a sexually unsure man.

      The obviously bored and confused boy (Walter Necomb) stands on a busy bridge built over an industrial wasteland of a city. In the distance we can see a few skyscrapers, obviously suggesting the heart of the city, which he has, at least temporarily, left behind. Cars speed back and forth across the bridge as the youth looks over the barren landscape, apparently having an unsettling effect, particular given the music score by Brakhage’s friend James Tenney.

      On the bridge, one driver, perhaps districted by the handsome blond-haired boy, screeches to a momentary stop, waking the teenager up from the trance-like state of so many early experimental works, obviously influenced by Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950)—although expressed even earlier in Joseph Vogel’s 1947 short work, House of Cards and the several gay “coming out” films of Curtis Harrington, Kenneth Anger, and Willard Maas of the late 1940s and early 50s.

     A bit confused by his possible endangerment, the young man determines to follow the many-tiered stairway attached to the bridge to the unknown world below.

     In this barren, but architecturally fascinating underworld, the young man wanders without having any apparent goa, simply following the kind of vaulted underground “hallway” the bridges’ support system provides, which at moments suggests the inside of a vast cathedral.

     Without even knowing it, a young girl (Janic Hubka) is standing alone await in this wasteland. Why she is there, and who she might be waiting for is not revealed; but it is clear that in this lower world there are also nearby streets and homes, to which probably she belongs.

     Seeing the handsome boy enter her world, she follows along with him on a parallel course, without his being able to discern her presence. Yet when he comes to a barrier that holds back passersby from the railroad tracks, he suddenly notes her existence, and she quickly comes toward him. Within moments they have together ducked under the barrier, but just as quickly return to the arched “hallway,” where they wander now together.

     Suddenly the industrial wasteland is slightly transformed into a kind of untamed natural world, as Brakhage shows us a small stream, popular trees, birds, and other insects. As the two enter this “natural” world, strangely existing simultaneously with the junk dropped there by the society above, they perceive that a storm is brewing, and the rain quickly begins its steady beat.

     In this world, moreover, we observe Brakhage’s camera focusing on the minutiae of water ripples, clouds, peeling paint, and other phenomena that will a few years later become the subject matter of his films as opposed to people in a landscape.

   At first, the couple seems to have nowhere to go, as they try to wait out the storm beneath a tree. But they soon spot a barren shack into which they hurry as the rain grows more fearsome. Within the shack, they reach out to one another, briefly touching, and, finally, in a short and sudden frenzy intensely kiss.

     Soon after, the storm passes and they break away from one another, the young man taking the lead in moving out of the darkened spot in which they had momentarily taken refuge. The girl, a bit shaken, follows, but clearly realizes that the brief moment of passion between them—and anything it might have offered her regarding a way out of the world in which she is entrapped—is over. It was a mere interim, something between another, temporary and disposable as her world seems to be. Brakhage, in fact, has made this clear from the beginning by presenting both figures in a slight blur, their reality even for one another being somewhat under question.

     Afterwards, she leads the young man, taking him once again to the barrier, under which, this time, she ducks, before being forced to wait between the tracks for the passing of a train.

   As she looks back with a wistful smile, she observes that the boy turned to leave, making his way gradually back to the stairway and returning to his obviously socially superior world where his entire life seems much less determined and committed.

     The brief relationship between them, quite obviously, has been doomed before it started. If the girl might have wished for something more, for the bored and slightly confused boy it was nothing but a moment in his life, which gives this early version of speed dating almost a tragic quality. Did he even like what he briefly tried out?

     The poor girl, moreover, is doomed by the world in which we find her, a society apparently inferior to that to which the bridge leads, an urban space with people with the financial means to live in high rises atop one another. Where the boy stands in relation to these two worlds is indeterminate, apparently even in his own mind.

     The film announces its end. Yet it continues, repeating the original title frame and the earliest scenes with the boy on the bridge staring down into the wasteland, another image of him making his way down the staircase, and yet another repeat of the automobile that comes to a crash near him, all of which makes the experiences he have just witnessed even more ephemeral as if they might be a thing of his imagination or, perhaps, an event he wishes to repeat.

     It is particularly disturbing when we experience the car coming to squeal of a halt once more, stopping near him without moving just before he had, in the original scene, descended into the world below. Why has the car stopped so ominously close to him? Does the person or people inside know him? Have they stopped to pick him up or abduct him? Brakhage provides no answer, but in repeating the incident, he obviously wants us to think about what made this young man undertake his actual or imaginative voyage. Was it a temporary escape? And if so, from whom and what? From a different kind of life, a way of behavior, a sexuality? All we know is that he does return from the interim reality or fantasy to the bridge where he now must face whoever has come to a halt before him. Has he, all along, been waiting for the car to arrive, just as the girl in the world below must wait for the train to pass so she might return to wherever it was she had come.

    Like Orpheus he turns back, once again, to observe the car. Perhaps, it is not the wasteland that is hell, but the world connected to the bridge, and like Orpheus he has lost his Eurydice forever. Or perhaps the director is using the word “interim” in its archaic meaning of “meanwhile,” indicating something occurring at the very same time as another. Meanwhile…we’re back into the real world where there is no girl waiting for him, no possibility of encountering the remnants of a natural world, no love possible, at least not of the innocent kind that the girl represents.

 

Los Angeles, July 4, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2016).

 

 

Douglas Messerli | Four Early Films of Stan Brakhage (Note)

four early films of stan brakhage

by Douglas Messerli

 

There is nothing overtly gay or homosexual about any of these four early films by the heterosexual director Stan Brakhage.

     But these works, the earliest Interim made when he was only 19, present a very tenuous and intense relationship between males and males and females in general, and at moments seem to engage with characters who are not yet quite sure what to make of sex or even gender. All of the central figures of these works are outsiders to the worlds in which they suddenly find themselves and to one another.

     Moreover, there is a strange sense of alienation, both social and sexual, in these works that leave us with a sense of the figures attempts in their various gatherings to explore their sexualities, whether or not they perceive themselves as heterosexual, homosexual, asexual, or in the case of The Extraordinary Child simply confused by the macho world into which he has recently been born.

    There is also a strong sense in these clearly juvenile works (a couple of which Brakhage at various times as to be removed from his list works) of exploring some of his major influences which include Myra Deren, Marie Menken, Willard Maas, John Cage, Robert Duncan, and other poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. Both Deren and Menken, deep experimentalists, explored the body and sexuality, both straight and gay in their works; Maas, Cage, and Duncan were actively gay. These were the very figures with whom Brakhage was meeting and, in Deren’s case, actually living in her apartment during the years, 1953 and 1954, in which these films were made. Brakhage himself cited Menken: "If there is one single filmmaker that I owe the most to for the crucial development of my own film making it would be Marie Menken.” Menken was married to Maas and is said to have taught Andy Warhol how to use the Bolex camera.

    Perhaps even more importantly, we see in these works the influence of another 1950s experimentalist, the French writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, particularly his Orpheus of 1950.

    If nothing else, these very issues of societal and sexual norms would become major themes of s in Brakhage’s later films, although rarely approached so ambiguously.

    What these works generally have in common is a recognition of the enormous anxiety and angst among the young men and women of the early 1950s, which compels them into often temporary and uncomfortable sexual and social relations. These early films, despite Brakhage’s own dismissal of them, are important because they show us those very issues which would later become even more apparent in his later, resolved through art itself, an art free from storytelling and reportage, an art that sought to completely transform these more everyday worldly problems. It one truly wanted to see, he must perhaps blind himself to what he had been taught to see, discovering a whole new world in the process.

 

Los Angeles, November 8, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

John Foster and Mannie Davis | A Romeo Robin / 1930 [animated cartoon]

one for the birds

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Foster and Mannie Davis [directors] A Romeo Robin / 1930 [animated cartoon]

 

Before their far more surrealistic cartoon series, Tom and Jerry, the Van Buren Studios major claim to fame was the animal-based Aesop’s Fables series for RKO.

    There are also many strange moments in these picaresque syncopated stories such as that in A Romeo Robin, which is one for the birds, except for a starved cat who can’t even seem to trick the kid canaries later in the work.

     Frankly, this is such a disjointed piece that I found it difficult to get up the energy to describe the various song and dance routines of the first part of this 8-minute movie, and Rik Tod Johnson, writing on his Cinema 4: Cell Bloc has already done it so precisely, I will simply quote him:

“The film opens with a quartet of blackbirds of assorted sizes and a lone owl, all dressed in shabby castoffs, and sitting along the top rail of a fence while whistling a merry little tune (which might be The Man in the Flying Trapeze; it is too short and offkey for me to tell). A sixth bird sits off on a post to the side: he is small and wears lederhosen and a Tyrolean hat with a tiny feather in it. He stretches out his stick-thin legs until he is about four times his previous height, and starts to perform The Swiss Yodel, with the other birds performing backup to his loopy warblings. As they proceed with the song, two birds are spotlighted in a demented little stomp n' shuffle: wearing top hats and sporting cigars, the birds have overly large feet on the long legs that sprout from their squat black bodies. As they cavort, one of their legs ties itself in a knot but then continues its course until each is unknotted again. After they each repeat this action, their bodies transform until they bear a striking resemblance (not fully, though) to Clampett's Dodo Bird from Wackyland. Bells looped around their now shoe-clad feet jingle insistently as they leap, flap their arms and turn their heads about in circles. Suddenly, another transformation is made, and we see only their skeletons, their ghostly bones making some of the same motions as they literally dance themselves to death. Finishing a tap dance with Shave and a Haircut, the two avian skeletons grab some grass, pull it over themselves, headstones with wreaths pop up, and they are buried for good.”

    The macabre bird parade continues with two crows performing, one on a large kernel of corn as if it were a piano, the second turning his pipe into a trumpet. The cat, pretending to be a bird with the intention to prey on three dancing canaries follows, the fledglings quickly escaping his attack. Two storks to a quick-step across a couple of frames.

     The next sequence actually brings us a little narrative as a remarkably effeminate duck takes his young duckling “protégé” on a trip through the woods to teach him, with effusive hand gestures pointing up his constantly limp wrists, the wisdom of the old song:

 

“Listen to the mockingbird! / Listen to the mockingbird! / Oh, the mockingbird is singin' in the tree. / Listen to the mockingbird! / Listen to the mockingbird!”

     The mockingbird, who a couple of times has dared to stick his head out of the inner tree to see what all the fracas is about, finally blows the singing duck a raspberry, in response to which the sissy goes off in a huff, lisping out “Oh, for goodness sake!”

     I do suggest the folks at the IMDb site go back and examine this cartoon so that they might correct the episode that is also described on their “official” film page, changing the singing conversant from being a “lady duck” to a 1930s “panze.” Some young intern on their staff, evidently, doesn’t get out in the world very much.

    Finally, half way through this short cartoon, we meet up with the titular Romeo, a joyful Robin, stethoscope around his neck apparently out to listen to and catch the worm, in this case, the second non-avian figure in this animated work, named Willy Worm.

     He lures the worm out with his beak which contorts into a flute, Willy snaking up a fireman’s pole to surface at Romeo’s feet. The robin attempts to grab the worm, who quickly escapes, apparently not being named Willy without reason.

     No matter, our “hero” quickly dons a high top hat, an overcoat, and a beard, becoming a Hassidic Jew who obviously attends more to G-d than to a worm. But this time, Willy’s outsmarted as the Robin quickly conks the worm over the head, puts him into a can, and hurries off to his Robin chick who’s impatiently waiting.

   If we thought this worm might be an edible gift for his lady love, however, we’d be mistaken. What he intends is to use it as a rudder hooked to the propeller of his two-seater plane. Almost immediately the propeller is spinning away, and they take to the sky. Why birds need a plane to fly is not explained. But then Van Buren films never truly bothered, fortunately, to take logic into account.

     Flying along, the robin couple seem to be almost in heaven until a much large bird lands on the plane’s tail, pulls the worm from the engine, and flies off fully fed.

     Below the now quite starved cat who previously tried to eat the canaries, mews out its sad situation:

 

 “Oh my gosh, I'm hungry, me-yow-yow-yow!

Oh, my tummy's empty, me-yow-yow-yow!

All I want is a bird, sparrow or quail, me-yow-yow-yow!

All I have is a very sad tail, me-yow-yow-yow!”

 

     Now, without power, the plane begins to plummet, the cat looking up in expectation of a feast.

The plane does indeed crash right into his mouth, but its passengers have escaped and are still alive, proving it with a quick kiss as the camera iris curls to close.

 

Los Angeles, November 8, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

Dave Fleischer | Dizzy Dishes / 1930 [animated cartoon]

bimbo’s nervous breakdown

by Douglas Messerli

 

Grim Natwick and Ted Sears (animators), Dave Fleischer (director) Dizzy Dishes / 1930 [animated cartoon]

 

In this, the very first of the Betty Boop cartoon appearances, the singing sensation was represented with dog’s ears since she was intended to be the “love interest” to the Fleischer Studio’s character Bimbo, the dog. She sang and looked mostly like a human, but contained elements of a Cocker Spaniel, with a droopy face, oversized eyes, and a button nose. But when she sang and danced, with the voice of Margie Hines, she became a kind of sex sensation which would mean that within just a few films later, she would be transformed almost entirely into a human being, despite the fact that her films still often contained Bimbo and animal friends.

   This cartoon begins with four anthropomorphic dancing flappers, singing “Crazy Town.” The club’s chief chef, Bimbo waits on a hungry gorilla who orders up a roast duck. Bimbo returns to the kitchen to prepare the duck, but almost immediately besieged by other customers ordering up “one beef stew,” and adding, “make that two.” Yet a third queries, “Why don’t you wake up and chop that steak up.” A sissy, emphatically batting his eyes orders up “One cup of custard,” and is immediately pulled away by another customer demanding, “plenty of mustard,” while yet another insists the chef “Change those potatoes to French-friend tomatoes,” and so it goes.

    The frustrated chef finally just ignores the other’s orders, pulling the turkey out of the oven, setting it atop the counter beneath of which he drapes a white barber’s cape, and applies what looks to be shaving lather, all with the intention to cut away any bits of feathers still remaining on the cooked bird.

     The orders continue to come in, but he simply ignores them.

     Meanwhile, our gorilla customer is growing more and more impatient, growling in hunger.

    Finally finished with the turkey, Bimbo puts it upon a platter and proceeds to dance it across the room, but as Betty begins her performance, is so taken by her song that he stops before the stage and begins to join in, dancing along with the headless turkey, and adding to her song verses the now-common “Boop, boop-ye-doo,” which soon Betty will add to her repertoire.  

     Betty quickly enchants him, as he finds it difficult to even keep his heart from leaping out of his waiter’s suit.

     Still waiting for his dinner, the gorilla salts a plate, inverts another plate atop it, and consumes the dinnerware as if it were a sandwich. Bimbo has now begun to perform a new song, with the flappers in the background and the turkey joining once again in his syncopated taps.

     The gorilla begins now to eat “leg of table,” gnawing away at the furniture. But still hungry, when he spots Bimbo and his turkey on the stage, goes on the chase, Bimbo and the dinner bird.

     When the chef is finally cornered in the kitchen, he pulls down his pots and pans and taking up two cleavers goes mad as he chops up everything in sight, finally whittling it down to a child-size choo-choo train upon which he sits as it chugs off, breaking through the wall of the club and taking him away into an escape in the surrounding natural landscape.

 

Los Angeles, November 7, 2025 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025). 

Tommy Lee Jones | The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada / 2005

point of no return

by Douglas Messerli

 

Guillermo Arriaga (screenplay), Tommy Lee Jones (director) The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada / 2005

 

Despite its receiving the prestigious Cannes awards for best actor (Tommy Lee Jones) and best screenplay (Guillermo Arriaga), Jones’ directorial feature, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, is one of those films that seems destined to become forgotten over time. I might have never seen it were it not that my companion, Howard, one day brought home a copy of the DVD of the film which he’d seen in the theater. When I found that DVD still unwrapped in 2015, I wondered why Howard bought this film, since even he had not bothered to watch it in all these years. One afternoon, I sat down to discover its secrets.

    Like its rather cumbersome title, Jones’ film may put off some potential viewers simply by the fact that the name of it’s character is difficult for many non-speakers of Spanish to say and that its genre is not readily apparent.

      If anything, it might remind the astute viewer, as it did several critics, of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, the movie filmed in Mexico in 1974 by Sam Peckinpah, the director who many commentators felt could have made this film or, at least, might have wanted Tommy Lee Jones to star in his strange Western. As Spanish language commentator Fernando Santoyo Tello wrote on Letterboxd (translation mine), “In fact, it's very similar in several ways to one of Peckinpah's masterpieces, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. In both, a character finds redemption through a dead body that accompanies him on a journey marked by revenge.”

     Several other critics noted the similarities between Jones’ work and Peckinpah’s as well as its relationships to the fictions of Cormac McCarthy, John Sayles’ film Lone Star, and, in particular, the 1989 TV miniseries adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. In the Stopsmiling internet site, Nathan Kosub, siting that TV series, reminds us that “Everyone, it seems, missed the first time a cowboy played by Tommy Lee Jones hauled the decaying body of his closest friend a long distance. Which is odd, since that ghost is the soul of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.”

     So much of Three Burials is in Spanish, moreover, that it might even be described to being close to a foreign film directed by an American. At many times the work, particularly in its second half seems closer to a Richard Linklater-like satire of Texas life such as his Bernie, even though Jones’ work is far more macabre than even burying a mean old lady in a freezer which the character Bernie does.

     Some critics reminded us that Jones’ BA dissertation at Harvard was on Flannery O’Connor, whose writing has a great deal in common with Three Burials. In on the online publication Pundicity, Thomas Hibbs argues, “In its peculiar manner of combining humor, violence, and hopeful gravity, the film comes closest to the sensibility of Flannery O'Connor. Along the way, it has us laughing as we ask: Who's crazy? What constitutes folly? And can enduring violence and abject humiliation be a path back to God?”

    And, finally, it’s impossible to watch the second half of this film, wherein the central character Peter Perkins (Jones) carries the body of his dead friend Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cedillo) on a long trip back to his hometown in Mexico without being reminded of the long voyage that Anse Bundren and his children take from their isolated rural Mississippi home to bring their wife and mother to her birthplace in Jefferson in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, yet another Southern gothic and grotesque masterwork. Michael R. Neno, writing in Film Review Central, suggests that just “as [Mexican director] Alejandro Iñárritu and [Three Burials screenwriter] Guillermo Arriaga’s film Amores Perros (2000)…was influenced by the time and perspective-fragmenting methods of William Faulkner, The Three Burials uses as its template Faulkner’s 1930 novel, As I Lay Dying. As Addie Bundren’s dead body was trundled across Mississippi by her poor family, fulfilling her request to be buried where she was born, so Melquiades Estrada’s body is similarly carried, though treated by various people in such bizarre and uncaring ways the film sometimes veers toward wicked comedy.”

    Certainly, the way that the voyage in Faulkner’s fiction is most often interpreted as ending in a kind of resurrection would be highly appropriate for Jones’ work, which is also seen by most critics as permitting what commentator Josh Lewis describes on Letterboxd was a “spiritual, restorative grace.”

     In my 2008 essay on As I Lay Dying, “The Dreadful Hollow,” I argued that Faulkner’s fiction, in reality, does not allow for a restoration or resurrection for Anse and his family since they are actually vampires, and Faulkner’s tale, admittedly influenced by Dracula (both the US and Mexican versions being shot throughout 1930, and very much in the news), is an American vampire tale. When Howard I first shared some of my ideas about this essay, mentioning my comment about the two men having “bonded,” he joked, “Yes, bonded by necrophilia,” without his having ever read my essay on Faulkner’s work. If nothing, else, this interpretation would very very much support the feeling among numerous critics that the second half of the film is simply macabre. Certainly it would help to explain the symbolic importance of the three burials, the necessity of bringing the dead back to the living again and again.

     Yet, for all the influences that I have just named, which reveal the difficulties of trying to locate Three Burials in one or another genre, this masterful work of cinema is simply unique.

     Although I’ve hinted at the plot, perhaps it would useful to briefly recount some of the narrative so that I might explain some of my later conclusions.

    The hard-working, straight-thinking ranch manager, Pete Perkins, unlike many of his border-town Texas neighbors, seems to have a close kinship with Mexican culture, speaking the language fluently and being unafraid to hire on the illegal alien Estrada, with whom he immediately bonds, sharing a kind of bromance with him as they ride horses (Estrada offering up his own special horse as a gift to Perkins), rustle cattle, and sexually engage with a couple of local women, Rachel (Melisa Leo), the wife of the local diner owner, Bob (Richard Andrew Jones), and the new woman in town, Lou Ann Norton (January Jones), who has recently moved from Cincinnati with her husband Mike Norton (Barry Petter) who works as a border guard.

     These women aren’t really prostitutes, just women who are bored with the stultifying emptiness of Vernon, Texas where the most exciting thing is the nearby shopping mall. Rachel clearly enjoys Perkins’ gentle company, yet she is hardly particular about the men in her life, claiming to truly love her elderly husband while also regularly having sex with the town Sheriff Belmont (Dwight Yoakam).

     In the only sexual encounter we see between the Sheriff and Rachel, Belmont fails to get an erection, but when Rachel suggests he should try Viagra, he responds “I’ll turn truck-stop queer and blowjob-giver before I use that shit.” In short, he’s so afraid being seen as having lost his libido, that he’d even become a gay man if it kept his cock erect.

   Similarly, the rookie-border patrolman, Norton is having sexual problems. He needs the magazine Hustler to keep his sex life alive. Clearly his wife has become disinterested in his lame sexual attempts. As we observe her slicing up the food for their dinner while watching a soap opera, Norton rises, goes over to her, pulls down her denim skirt and sticks his cock into her for all of about 2 minutes. She hardly registers the fact that he is attempting to engage in sex.

     What these sexually incompetent men have in common is anger expressed in hate and violence. One of the earliest scenes in the film reveals just how Norton is having a hard time of separating his duties from excessive violence, as he runs down two escaping Mexican illegal immigrants, beating both the man and the woman, breaking the nose of the latter. The old timer head of the border patrol looks at those few who escape with some tolerance—“Somebody got to pick the strawberries,” he admits—while clearly Norton feels those who get away indicate his failure. His commander sums it up, “You were way overboard there, boy.”

     We soon discover just how “overboard” Norton truly is when older border patrolmen, observing a coyote eating something, discover that it’s gnawing on a recently shallowly buried body, that of Perkins’ Mexican friend Estrada, who Pete has previously promised to take back to the small Mexican village of Jiménez if Melquiades died of this side of the border.

     Perkins soon perceives that Belmont has no intention of seeking out the murderer. Confronting Belmont, he is told that they have already reburied Melquiades Estrada in the public cemetery without even consulting Pete who has specifically asked them to notify him of any action taken with the body.

     After being shown the bullets which probably killed Melquiades, however, he perceives that they are the same size and brand as used by the border patrol. Rachel, overhearing the border patrol Commander confiding that one of their men has unintentionally killed the Mexican, reports what she heard to Perkins, who having his fears confirmed, takes direct action of his own.

     In two different scenes presented out of chronological time we witness the full reality of the situation, that Melquiades, while standing on his own small sheep farm, shot at a coyote, an event which forces Norton to believe he’s being shot at and causes him to lift his rifle, aim, and shoot the Mexican dead. 

    Waiting until it gets dark, Peter kidnaps Norton, after tying up his wife so that she cannot immediately report the event to the police. Even here, despite the almost total madness of his actions, the gentle cowboy, places a blanket around her body so she won’t get cold and turns on the TV set so that she will remain entertained until someone arrives to free her.

    The remainder of this complex film becomes, as I have suggested above, a kind of pilgrimage of purgation, wherein Perkins ritualistically forces the seemingly unredeemable Norton to take a voyage not only with him but into the world which his friend formerly inhabited. After demanding that the hand-cuffed border patrolman dig up Melquiades from his second grave, he takes the body and Norton back to Melquiades’ squalid home, insisting he sit at his place at the table, drink from his cup, and, soon after, put on the dead man’s own clothing, before setting out with Norton and the body to find his friend’s small Mexican hometown.

    The forlorn beauty of the landscape and their adventures along the way now take this film into almost mythical territory, as they are tracked, first by Belmont and later by the border guard soldiers. Fearing for his life and terrified by the difficulties of their travel, Norton is forced by the elder to suffer the same indignities as the immigrants like Melquiades have.

      If sometimes these lessons in empathy seem a little too pat and even mawkish—as when the two men come across some young Mexican cowboys huddle around a broken television set watching the same soap opera which Norton’s wife had been watching while he attempted to fuck her—others are spot on.

     Like a scene out of Frankenstein (with their own Frankenstein-like monster in tow), the two come across an old blind American (Levon Helm) who sits near his shack listening to Mexican music, the words to which he cannot comprehend. Like the blind man of Mary Shelley’s tale, he offers them everything he has, which includes coffee and an evidently unpleasant tasting gruel. And since the corpse they are carrying is quickly rotting, the stench almost unbearable, he provides them with anti-freeze which Perkins gruesomely pumps through the dead man’s mouth into his veins.

     When they ready to leave, the blind man—having previously told them that his son visits once a month to bring him food and necessities—admits that his son has not visited now for more than a year, and, since he believes his son has died of cancer, begs them to kill him. He would gladly kill himself, he explains, but as a religious man he cannot disappoint his god. Perkins, so we perceive, is also a man of belief, if not a man of god, and refuses the task.

     Soon after, when Perkins is temporarily trapped under his fallen horse, Norton attempts to make an escape, running off into the desert which they have been attempting to cross. The old cowboy may be tempted to pick up his gun and shoot the fleeing reprobate, but realizes the young murderer will soon tire, that he has nowhere to go and no experience to take him anywhere he might be saved. Norton’s “freedom” quickly ends when he is bitten by a rattlesnake, saved by Perkins who carries him, like a second corpse across the Rio Grande to an illegal crossing spot into Mexico in search of a native herbalist who might be able to save Norton’s life.

    In one of the film’s numerous intentional coincidences, the woman curer turns out to be the very same woman whose nose Norton has broken earlier in the film, and recognizing her attacker, she refuses to offer her help. Perkins’ gentle Spanish pleas for his survival changes her mind, and she draws out the venom with herbs, saving the young man’s life. The next morning, however, she seeks her revenge, breaking his nose with a coffee pot.

     By the time the two corpse-bearers finally reach a larger town near to where Melquiades has mapped out as his hometown, Norton has suffered such traumatic experiences the he begins to seem like a changed man, without even knowing that back in Texas his wife has left him to return to their hometown Cincinnati. In the small village they find the woman Melquiades has reported to be his wife in his photograph, but she denies even having known Perkins’ friend, only accidentally revealing that she may be lying when she pleads with him not to pursue the matter for fear of destroying what is clearly her new marriage.

     The entire town seems to be suffering from amnesia when they mention Jiménez, Norton reacting with near madness after his hallucinatory voyage. Perkins insists, however, they move forward, as they finally discover a building of fallen stones overlooking the very mountains and river Melquiades has described. Together, the two men—in a scene that seems to be more symbolic than real—patch up the walls, rethatch its roof, and lay the stinking corpse into its grave below.

      Perkins demands a final obsequious confession from Norton, who, after a few bullets are sent flying near his face, breaks down in utter sorrow for his murderous act, resulting in the older cowboy offering him freedom and a horse to take the sinner back to his empty space in “civilization.” Ironically, it is Norton who asks the question, “Are you going to be okay?” when we perceive that Perkins will surely survive the trip back to sanity, a place where Norton may never be able to return.

     While watching this profoundly intelligent work, I kept feeling that it should be required viewing for those numerous intolerant US citizens—Donald Trump in particular—who wish to keep out all the immigrants who define us as a nation. I not only wish that some of these unfeeling men and women might be led, as was Norton, on just such a journey. I wondered, moreover, how anyone might even imagine building a wall across the vast panoramas of mountains, deserts, and ragged terrain Jones and his cinematographers, Chris Menges and Hector Oretega, revealed in this film, with the intent to protect us from such strawberry pickers, sheep herders, and gentle cowboys as we encounter in this film.

 

Los Angeles, December 8, 2015 / Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2015).

 

 

*

 

I wrote the above essay on December 8, 2015. Today, I uncovered this review of nearly a decade earlier with curiosity and utter frustration. For I still clearly recalled the film and was now reminded that I had purposely left a huge hole in my discussion of this picture, partly out of fear, but mostly out of sheer laziness, not wanting to once again take my readers’ hands and lead them through a territory which many of them didn’t want to be led, explaining why it was important that they consider my point of view, while knowing that a great number, if not most of them, would simply be unable to comprehend or might even in resistance refuse to accept.

    This time, after watching the film once again, and reading all the reviews I could muster up from the time the film was first released (some 55 reviews, long and short), I realized that I had excused excuses myself for offering up a deeper discussion in the manner that almost all of these reviewers unknowingly or purposeful had chosen to do. In some ways, I had been even more negligent in refusing to even failing to mention a comparison that almost half the reviewers had brought up in passing, the then-recent film about cowboys who also shared a deep “bond,” Brokeback Mountain, which was released the very same year. I specifically refused the comparison because I knew where it would have to take me. But the vast majority of the others just tossed it into their essays because it was at that moment being discussed everywhere. The reviewer from the Miami Herald presented the majority logic:

          

“Its social consciousness aside, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is really a simple love story between men set in the American West, although unlike Brokeback Mountain, this love is purely platonic—nothing more than the bond of brotherhood between two dear friends, a classic Western theme.”

 

    Erik Samdahl, writing for the online Filmjabber, was for coyer than the Miami Herald critic in his allusion:

 

“Gay cowboy movies dominated 2005, yet it was Brokeback Mountain that got all the glory. While Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal are up for Academy Awards, Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper and Julio Cedillo are nowhere to be found—and that's a three-way relationship!

     Okay, so The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada has nothing to do with homosexuality, nor is it even remotely similar to Brokeback Mountain in any way, but it caught your attention, didn't it? How about this: Three Burials is a better movie than the Oscar-nominated film.”

 

     Yet I did basically agree with Samdahl’s final evaluation, yet another reason why I hadn’t brought up the subject of Ang Lee’s movie. I’ll come back to than matter later.

     And at least these two critics dared to really point to the issue at hand, to begin to question what precisely was the relationship between the two cowboys, Perkins and Estrada. Most of the reviewers and commentators described the two as “friends” (Roger Ebert, for example, who begin with describing Estrada simply as an employee of Perkins, but later in the essay admits their friendly relationship), while others such as Alex Bean for the International Cinephile Society suggests that “Pete is bereaved beyond reason by the senseless loss of his compadre [italics mine]….”  Dean Kish, writing in Showbizmonkeys.com also sees them as “best friends,” and explains Pete Perkins as falling “to pieces after…[Estrada] is suddenly murdered.” For Philip Concannon in his review in Phil on Film, Estrada, a “eponymous illegal immigrant,” is Pete’s “close friend.” Manhohla Dargis in The New York Times seemingly qualifies even the simple friendship by describing Estrada as Pete’s “Mexican Friend,” while arguing they live in a borderline world that separates “poor from rich, men from women, [and] friend from stranger.” I would argue, that since Pete doesn’t accept these separations, why do it for him?

     Rob Fraser, writing in Empire Magazine, puts the two just a little bit closer by describing them as “best pals.” David Carter in David Carter Books takes Fraser’s relationship just a little further, by describing the “Mexican cowboy” and Pete’s “drinking and whoring pal,” pushing them just a little closer to the relationship between the cowboys Jake (Ethan Hawke) and Silva (Pedro Pascal) in Pedro Almodóvar’s 2023 film, Strange Way of Life, where even years later, the bisexual cowboys found themselves still in love.

     Melquiades may be just a “friend” in David Lee Simmons’ brief essay in Gambit, but he noticeably moves closer to also being something else in Simmons’ extension of what a friend might be when he describes it as a “friendship between two not-quite-as Brokeback Mountain-gay cowboys.”

     And in Tim Brayton’s piece in Alternate Ending, the friendship is clearly elevated to another level when he locates their friendship within the large picture:

     

“The movie kicks into gear at this point, and all of the praise you've been reading about how the film taps into the mythos of the Western starts to make sense. Despite what conservatives have decried about the blasphemous Brokeback Mountain, the Western is a uniquely homoerotic genre, packed with depictions of men bonding in the wild, forming deeply codependent relationships, and viewing women as a great destructive force (domesticity is always the enemy of manly friendship in Westerns). Three Burials pushes that into a sort of ultimate by giving Pete a homosocial fixation on a dead body. It's creepy, but more than a little touching. If the Western is ultimately about the relationship between men, Three Burials is a perfect Western: it is about a man going basically to the ends of the earth to fulfill his duty to his friend.”

 

    Notably, Brayton not only locates their relationship within the homosocial world of cowboy friendships, but also recognizes that Pete’s performance of what most of his fellow critics described as simply the cow herder’s “promise” to return Melquiades to his homeland is actually “creepy.” Alex Bean, who I mention above, contextualizes the journey as being “conceived under the strain of madness.” And for critic Aaron Silverman, Pete’s voyage represents “a rather odd and quite morbid tale of loyalty, friendship, and frontier justice” that eventually transforms into “a captor-hostage situation that borders on bloody revenge.” To Chris Panzner, writing in Stylus, the accidental murder of Estrada “wakens the demonio oculto in vigilante Gringo rancher Pete Perkins.”

     In short, although none of these critics can quite explain Pete Perkins’ relationship to Estrada or his motives for the long mad voyage he makes with the murderer Norton in tow to Melquiades’ previous home, most of them inherently recognize that something is going on in this movie that is more than simply a friend or even, as described it, a man who has deeply bonded with another man, living up to a promise.

    Christopher Borrelli openly wonders in The Toledo Blade “What’s with that far-off gaze of hurt that drove long, weathered crevices into Tommy Lee Jones' great face? Where do the resignation and those bottomless barrels of sympathy in his eyes come from? Why does he always look like he's about to cry? And how did it all harden into a landscape of wide reservoirs of bitterness and wisdom?”

     You just have to look into the tearing eyes of Pete when he hears of Mel’s death to realize that his feeling for Estrada is something more than a good buddy for whom justice will not prevail. The deputy sheriff who visits Pete, reminding him that that he’s been holed up for more than two days in a sort of catatonic trance, begs him to find a way back to life, full-well knowing that the relationship between the cowboys was far more than simply that of being good friends.

    There is no evidence of, and given the world in which they were raised and in which they must survive, it is highly unlikely that they have manifested that love in male on male sex. But the film gives us plenty of clues that they may have thought about it. Even the demented Sheriff Belmont, as I mention in the first part of this essay, has contemplated queer love.

    And Pete himself is hardly of the marrying kind, as the nice, well-bred people used to describe queer folk. Critic Jonathan Rosenblum puts it quite bluntly: 

 

“Jones leaves social and family skills almost entirely out: Perkins seems capable of being sexually comfortable with Rachel only because they hardly ever talk — his cluelessness when he calls her from Mexico leads to an unforeseeable turnaround — and all the characters, even Estrada’s widow, seem to see sexual betrayal as an everyday fact of existence. But Jones also makes much of the rapport in the same-sex friendships, including one between Lou Ann and Rachel.”

 

     And when the sympatico feeling between the two men get a bit too intense, Pete immediately grabs the masturbatory hand of the younger man and takes him into town for some manly sexual relief and fun with the two bored women. It’s clear, that despite his claim that back home he was married, Estrada is not at all sure he wants to hook up with a woman. Even Pete teases him about it, and when they move into their respective motel rooms for their afternoon entertainment, Melquiades keeps looking back at Pete, clearly uncomfortable about leaving his side. When Lou Ann gets him alone in the room, even she recognizes his ineptitude regarding the opposite sex, attempting to turn on the TV to relax him (failing because it shows only porno movies) and finally providing him some radio music. The only way she can get him into his arms is to ask him to dance.

      These men use women, not so very differently from how Lou Ann’s husband uses her merely as a momentary relief; but at least they’re not pretending to have a real relationship with these women, but are simply out for a bit of momentary fun, which is, after all, what Rachel and Lou Ann are seeking as well.

    You don’t offer up your most prized procession, in this case a horse, to another man just as a friendly gesture. Estrada’s insistence that his friend take his beloved horse is as good as a gold ring for celebrating their love for one another.

       I know this is lonely territory to claim that these two “straight” seeming men are deeply in love, but we’ve seen this kind of love between two basically heterosexual men in many a war film from William Wellman’s great 1927 masterpiece Wings on, and witnessed the same kind of love in numerous coded westerns from the 1920s to the present, including, of course, the most obvious of these Brokeback Mountain.

      Fortunately, I’m not the only one who recognizes this reality. Writing in Film Freedonia, Richard Heath takes a long look at both films, comparing the characters and their behaviors in Brokeback Mountain and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and placing them firmly into the tradition of western movies like Red River and, to a lesser degree, in the context other films that deromanticized the western mythic scene such as George Stevens’ Giant, Arthur Miller’s The Misfits, David Miller and Dalton Trumbo’s Lonely Are the Brave, and Martin Ritt’s Hud, the later like Brokeback Mountain and the earlier film in which Tommy Lee Jones suffered a similar voyage with a corpse, Lonesome Dove, all based in Larry McMurtry fictions.

      Not all of these can be described as concerned with male-centered love. In fact, I even doubted whether Brokeback Mountain could be described as truly a gay film. As I wrote in my review from this same year (printed above), it should come as no surprise that from time to time lonely cowboys and sheepherders, without recompense to women, have sex with other men—just like sailors, soldiers, and jailed prisoners. And in the case of Brokeback Mountain Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar truly enjoyed it, so much so that they couldn’t wait to do it again and again throughout the film. But as Tina Turner surely would loudly proclaim, “What’s love got to do with it?”

     And that, in fact, was what made me so ultimately dissatisfied with that film. There was no there there. Twist, in particular, would surely have liked there to be something more between them, but Del Mar just wasn’t interested in pursing anything more than his lust, and even Jack was perfectly happy to compartmentalize his gay sexuality by, as the critic Heath puts it, sleeping with Mexican male hookers and keeping on “the lookout for another partner who will adapt to his part-time vision of love.” And Meanwhile, “Ennis lives in justified fear of frontier morality, which eventually claims Jack.”  

     As Heath quite brilliantly summarizes the links between these two films:

 

“Both films are remarkably rich tapestries that extend well beyond the specifics of their plot to take in an almost epic, yet expressively minimalist vision of whole cultures in a state of flux, and the people within them in a state of crisis. Although Pete and Melquiades are not homosexual—though it’s easy to imagine Pete as Ennis, 20 years after the end of Brokeback—their bond, as well as Jack and Ennis’, demand almost mystical commitment to notions beyond the visible, or even factual. For Ennis, it is to accept permanent emotional exile: our last vision of him, a reverse of the end of The Searchers, is gazing out on an eternal plain whilst living with dreams and memories in his shabby trailer. For Pete, it is to reject his country, his livelihood, even his sanity, to give Melquiades a true resting place, and extract from a man with no terms of reference beyond bad daytime soaps and suburban plasticity a true contrition.”

 

     But the irony he points out about Brokeback Mountain is what makes me less interested in that film about two sex-driven cowboys than the two love-driven cowpokes of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Heath writes:

 

“It’s ironic, perhaps, that Brokeback Mountain, concentrating as it does on a gay romance, offers its most biting and memorable moments in observing the men’s heterosexual lives—the kitchen confrontation where Alma, having left Ennis, lets slip her simmering loathing of him and Jack sets Ennis off like Krakatoa, is one of the most convincing moments of marital spite ever filmed. Similarly, when Ennis spurns vibrant barmaid Cassie (Linda Cardellini) and apologises, “Sorry, I can’t have been too much fun,” she responds in anguish, “Dammit, Ennis, girls don’t fall in love with fun,” I suspect a lot more men than the bisexual cowboys of this world might recognise themselves….

    The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a messier, less compressed tale, and overdoes its early portrayal of Mike Norton’s baseness, but then Three Burials has an edge of wryly surreal comedy and deliberate morality tale at its heart, not the lightly poetic realism and heart-dulling tragedy of Brokeback Mountain.”

 

    I strongly agree, moreover, with Heath’s assessment of Ang Lee as having “the stuff of a great filmmaker,” who “has yet to make a genuinely great film.” Heath observes, “His work on Brokeback is as meticulous and measured as always, almost too much so. It is often so over-posed in its desolate beauty as to look like the world’s first animated Andrew Wyeth painting, and his feeling for the West is never quite convincingly raw. Since the warm inclusiveness of his early films, a frost has gilded Lee’s heart, and he finally seems to mistake emotional stinginess for detachment.”

     Heath continues, “In comparison, Tommy Lee Jones’ work on Three Burials is much less refined and skilled, particularly some clumsy scene interchanges where music starts blaring without reason and static camera set-ups. Yet Jones knows his subject more truly, and at his best, he captures with almost surreal intensity his locale and characters, particularly when he gets to the Mexican side of the border, and Pete lounges drunkenly in a cantina that’s ancient but with modern appliances. Guillermo Arriaga’s screenplay is as humane and fine-threaded as his work for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, and retains two of his singular qualities: his love of moral fable and his tendency to go on too long.”

     But in the end, at least for me, Three Burials, a love story between two men who don’t have sex with one another is a far more profound gay film than Brokeback Mountain, a story about two men in love with male-on-male sex but who cannot fully imagine truly getting to know and living with one another. In fact, neither Jack or Ennis seem to know how to really love anyone of either sex. Jones’ film was precisely what I felt was missing in the so-called gay hit of the year, which even today queers and straights can’t stop talking about as a break-through work of art. Somehow, I feel, we have lost our focus.

    Of course, sex very much matters, and as I have argued with great fervor throughout these Queer Cinema volumes, queer life, for the most part, is unapologetically centered in sex; but for me it is a sex of joy the way Pete goes to town with Mel to find some old time pleasure, not the kind of sex Norton attempts to find in the pages of Hustler, that characterizes gay sex. Even Sheriff Belmont knows that a queer truck-stop blow job is far better than a Viagra-popping heterosexual—or homosexual for that matter.

      But then love is something special, that happens rarely between men and women, women and women, man and man, or between even those who don’t quite know where they stand in connection to gender. People get married every day, but love…Ennis and Jack never truly experienced love except as a kind of nostalgic collage of memories, the way, strangely, Three Burials screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga attempts to conjure it up in his cut-up narrative of the first part of his film. Cowboys being such verbally inexpressive beings, however, require that we have to take it on faith and the long camera pans of Jones’ chiseled face and tearful eyes—that is until Pete proves it by playing a modern day Virgil who ruthlessly guides his mindless Dante through the Inferno until he finally puts his boy* to rest—maybe even transforming the world in the process into a kind of patched-up version of heaven? Pete surely ain’t no Beatrice; but one has to wonder after seeing his version of beatific Mexicans whether heaven really matters.

 

*Scholars basically concur that Virgil was homosexual. He writes about a male lover named Alexis his Eclogues. Aelius Donatus, the Roman grammarian and author of Life of Virgil argues that the great poet loved only boys, and had long relationships with two boys, both previously slaves, one in particular named Cebetes, who also became a poet, and the other named Alexander.

 

Los Angeles, November 6, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).