What a Difference a Gay Makes

by Anna Pulley

I finally got around to watching the much acclaimed Brokeback Mountain, which won a bitchload of awards (most notably three Oscars for Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Score). And since I have altogether way too much time at work to spend on the internet, Ive been reading numerous reviews, checked out Annie Proulx's (which I found out is pronounced prooh and not prowlex, as I have been saying) short story version, looking up trivia on Wikipedia and IMDB, and even doing a Google Scholar search, which yielded mostly works I couldn't access, as I am sadly no longer a member of the cult of academia, but I was able to view four pages of a book called De-Centering Sexualities: Some Turgid Subtitle I Didnt Bother to Write Down edited by Richard Phillips, which had some interesting remarks about the metropolitan/rural dichotomy and how that influences, restricts and generalizes our notions of identity and sexuality.

Jack and Ennis are marginalized in several ways: geographically, economically, sexually, etc., which makes them that much more vulnerable to their circumstances and surroundings. At the same time they are afraid of discrimination and violence (Ennis more so than Jack), they are forever bound to Brokeback Mountain, to the land that comes to symbolize the timelessness of their relationship, and their inability to take possession/control of it. The paradoxical openness of the mountain is also restrictive. Jack and Ennis can only be together where no one can see them. Theirs is a kind of willing imprisonment to the mountain and to each other. An untranslatable, unstoppable force propels their relationship into a gritty and pulpy marathon of violent intensity. Neither their love nor the land are transferable, that is they cannot be constituted through language, which both generates and destroys the possibilities of interpretation. If there were words and categorizations that could articulate Jack and Ennis's relationship to each other, it would simultaneously construct borders that both hinder and unfurl an ever-widening expansiveness. As William New put it, "In the act of articulation, the endlessness of possibility is circumscribed" (1972: xii). I love paradoxes.

In the introduction, Phillips notes that the average metropolitan viewer would probably consider Brokeback Mountain to be "a sadly familiar story of repressed homosexuality and redneck homophobia." While I feel this is an oversimplification of the movie's themes and subtexts, I have to admit that there are certain elements of truth to this assertion, namely the common threads of repression, denial, and fear. Ennis is haunted by the vision of Earl, brutally murdered for living with another man. "They took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp" (Proulx 270). It is this fear that propels Ennis into a life of solitude, and of infrequent, clandestine rendezvous (what's the plural of rendezvous? Rendezvouses?) with Jack "once in a while way the hell out in the back a nowhere" (270).

Jack and Ennis do not belong to any codified form of gay identity that's recognizable to metropolitan and mainstream cinema. In fact, the movie constantly reminds us that Jack and Ennis are "real" men, not the feng shui, moisturizing, Banana Republic stereotypes that have sprung into popularity in recent years. Their laconic masculinity is demonstrated through dialogue (or lack thereof), their violent embraces, and the rough-and-tumble customs of ranch life. Each love scene is foregrounded with aggression and hostility. It's almost as if they're trying to transmit their own self-loathing to each other through broken capillaries, straight whisky, and stress fractures.

After Phillips applauds Proulx's ability to capture the contradictoriness of the protagonists' surroundings--the beauty and cruelty of ranch life and homophobia in rural Wyoming, he then disavows homosexuality as an element from the movie/book when he writes, "Brokeback Mountain, while not a gay story, is then a story about love between two men set in an almost exclusively masculine world" (5). This analysis was fairly consistent with most of the reviews I read. Like this one from Dark Horizons: "The result was a simple, powerful and universal fable of a beautiful but tragic love affair between two ordinary people in an unforgiving society--the fact that it's between two men became only a minor detail more than anything else." I'm not entirely sure why critics have attempted to eradicate the gayness out of the "gay cowboy movie." If it's to sooth straight audiences' fears of taboos and self-identifications, then I'm afraid they have failed, as the controversy surrounding this film reaches far and wide. Several political pundits on Fox News, including commentators Bill O'Reilly, John Gibson, and Cal Thomas, accused Hollywood of pushing an agenda, in addition to Fox News columnist/priest Jonathan Morris referring to the movie as "propaganda" that "glorifies homosexuality." What was Fox's pick for Best Picture of the Year, you ask? The Christian-themed Chronicles of Narnia! Clearly no agenda there. Also, the film critic for The Today Show, Gene Shalit, called Gyllenhaal's character, Jack Twist, a "sexual predator" who "tracks Ennis down and coaxes him into sporadic trysts." GLAAD countered Shalit's characterization of Twist by comparing Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Titanic to a sexual predator for his romantic pursuit of Kate Winslet's character. Shalit later apologized.

In an effort to promote "tolerance," many critics have applied the law of universality to the film. "This is a love story, people! Not a gay story." Yes it is! It's a goddamn gay love story. If you can't see the blatantly gay issues that ensconce this movie, then don't review it. The fact that Jack and Ennis are "victims of circumstance" is a moot point when you consider that homophobia, fear, and denial are the main circumstances they can't seem to overcome. Yes, their economic struggles are a part of their inability to get the hell out of Wyoming, but even if they could, where would they go? Ride their pack mules to San Francisco? I don't think so. They're two poor, high school dropout farmboys, bound to the land they were raised on almost as much as they're bound to each other. Denying the existence of gay identities and subcultures, especially those that exist in the margins of the sexual landscape, or minimalizing it to the point of ambiguous generalities and cliches is just as homophobic, if not more so, than making a movie about Fred Fucking Phelps. Are critics afraid that if they identify two men in a sexual and emotional relationship as "homosexual" in a movie that it somehow implicates them in enjoying, deriving pleasure from, identifying with, or voyeuristically consuming gay cultural practices and identities? A label like "universal appeal," aside from being an annoyance of Hallmark proportions, acts as a boundary keeping device. It's a reassuring tactic that allows those involved to safely avoid politically and sexually precarious statements and transgressions, while at the same time it reinforces the rigidity of sexual identities as mutually exclusive categories that cannot and should not be crossed.

Okay, I'm done. Go see the movie if you haven't, if for no other reason than to see Jake Gyllenhaal's ass.