2005’s great film about a doomed, socially impossible love affair that ends in death and despair is not the Oscar front-runner that prompted prominent queer commentator B Ruby Rich to write of “a grand romantic tragedy, [that joins] the ranks of great literature as much as great cinema” , and which prompted gay activist Tom Gregory to spend over one hundred thousand US dollars on eBay last week to purchase two shirts that were used on the set. The grand romantic tragedy of the past year’s films was King Kong, while B Ruby Rich’s “great cinema” with the very expensive souvenir shirts is the fine but greatly over-rated Brokeback Mountain.
Every one I know who ‘s seen Brokeback Mountain has said pretty much the same thing: quality film … no big deal. I agree. It’s a superbly-filmed drama that hints at making an impact, but doesn’t. A couple of film critics - all from outside the gay press - have expressed reservations about what so many others have praised as the “film of the year”. Stephanie Zacharek, from salon.com, described Brokeback Mountain as “inert and inexpressive”, Richard Schickel of Time magazine said that it “fails to fully engage our emotions” and Andrew Sarris, of the New York Observer said he was never moved and not even overly excited by the film. Gene Shalit, of NBC’s today Show provoked a backlash from GLAAD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) when he said, amongst other things, that the film was “wildly over praised, but not by me.” GLAAD labeled Shalit “anti-gay” and even censured NBC for giving Shalit a platform to air his “gratuitously offensive comments”. Is this the kind of scuffle suggested by Phil Villarreal, from the Arizona Daily Star, who described Brokeback Mountain as “an above-average film overpraised for its social significance"?
Are Zacharek, Schickel and Sarris talking about the same film that Rich claimed “changes our perceptions so much that cinema history thereafter has to arrange itself around it”, one that signals “a shift in scope and tenor so profound as to signal a new era”? Do you know anyone who’s really, truly raved about the film? The grandiose canonisation of Brokeback the gay-cowboy-movie-phenomenon seems to be out of proportion to the merits of the actual film.
And, can a film that has made just over sixty million dollars in two months of general release at the American box office (Emma Thompson’s completely ephemeral Nanny McPhee made about two-thirds that in two weeks) be the film that the Advocate – America’s leading gay glossy – said was “deeply moving millions nationwide … communities sitting together in the dark and emotionally connecting with this story” ? Brokeback Mountain is not a blockbuster - it's an art house film marketed towards a cosmopolitan audience. For it to be changing the world it would need to "break out" and become a phenomenal hit, like My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Lots and lots of people from different demographics would have to actually go and see it. There simply aren't the box office dollars to support the claims that Brokeback Mountain is "changing cinematic history" and so on.
We might start with the wobbly idea that Brokeback Mountain is a revolutionary object, a breakthrough – something unprecedented. Rich believes that Brokeback Mountain takes on “the most sacred of all American genres, the western, and queer[s] it.” Does it do this? All I can think of is Christian Haren, the model who appeared in print advertisements in the 1970s as the Marlboro Man, who was gay and who died of AIDS in San Francisco in 1996. Or, the quasi-romantic relationship between Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Or, the ride-em-cowboy video clip for “Life At The Outpost” by the Skatt Bros, Canada’s suede-chaps answer to the Village People. Or, innumerable gay porn films that are set in a cowboy/ranch milieu. Or, 1969's Midnight Cowboy, where John Voight turns tricks with guys in toilets then takes a lonely trip to nowhere with bosom buddy Dustin Hoffman dead in his lap, or 1954's Johnny Guitar, where Joan Crawford plays Vienna, a drag-queeny Wild West saloon owner, or 1953's Calamity Jane, a comedy-musical where Doris Day plays a butch little cowgirl who sings "Secret Love", a gay anthem. As a letter writer to salon.com pointed out, “I thought the western was inherently a homoerotic genre. [Brokeback Mountain]’s probably a bit more explicit, is all." The gay-clone Marlboro Man cowboy aesthetic is older than my mother, and speaking of the Village People, wasn’t one of them a gay cowboy? Brokeback Mountain traces a lineage to “YMCA” or “Macho Man”, not to cutting-edge 21st century queer culture. In the movies, the travails of thwarted unrequited quasi-lovers who romance women but who think of other men are the crux of scores of films from Ben Hur to Victim.
We could also look at the degree of Brokeback Mountain’s gay tilt, something that even star Jake Gyllenhaal underplayed when he suggested that the film was about lovers prevented by their current circumstances from being together, and not about being gay. Following Jake’s lead, we see that the film is less about mainstream gay life – something that by definition is limited geographically to the inner suburbs of very big cities and which is marked by discos rather than rodeos – and more about the conflicting needs and wants that turn us every which way but loose. In this sense, Brokeback Mountain’s tale of thwarted love is more aligned with “Romeo and Juliet” than “Queer as Folk”. This timeless sense of romantic tragedy is what should be applauded about the film – not its potential to boot-lick 2005-06 American big city gay culture.
Or, the attractive manliness of Jack and Ennis, Brokeback Mountain's lovers. Rich links Matthew Shepard - a posthumously fictionalised quasi-cowboy figure who was bashed to death in Wyoming in 1999 – to our fictional cowboy country heroes with a highly romanticised, almost children's fairy-tale version of Shepard's identity. Ignoring the facts that Shepard had lived abroad for years and had only recently returned to Wyoming to escape the fast-lane gay life of big city Denver, Rich describes a Huck-Finn style waif "who loved to fish and hunt" and who was cruelly murdered "for the simple sin of being gay". She implies that via Shepard's fate, Brokeback Mountain is a timely story of homophobia, but she neglects to mention that the only reference to Matthew’s alleged outdoor pursuits was made by his father, who in a statement to the court during sentencing at his son’s murderer’s trial, reflected sentimentally on how he’d taught Matthew how to fish when Mathew was a child. Rich doesn’t mention that Dennis Shepard went on to talk, in the same speech, of his disappointment that Matthew hadn’t grown up to be the athletic type, but had pursued acting instead. And how come Rich doesn’t talk about more recent findings about Shepard’s background, that he was a crystal meth addict, and that his murder may have had everything to do with drugs, and little to do with homosexuality? What if one of our cowboy lovers had been a hairdresser, and the other, an overweight effeminate playwright drug-addict? Would we be slightly disappointed in them, like Mr Shepard? Some homosexual men are landscape gardeners, plumbers, even cowboys, but they are exceptions. How many gay bricklayers do you know? Vito Russo noted that "no-one likes a sissy ... even gay men" and we see with Brokeback Mountain that even highbrow gay film critics like their gay men to be masculine icons: blue collar, handsome and gruff. The alternative is a frail, James Dean (also mentioned by Rich) style martyr who would happily go about quietly grooming his ponies and casting a line into the creek if it wasn't for all those evil, lurking violent homophobes. Note that the equally excellent film Capote is about a gay man, but he's queeny, and so for every gay word spoken excitedly about Capote, there have been ten thousand about Brokeback.
What interested me in the story of Brokeback Mountain was the lead character’s struggle between his love for another man, and his desire to lead a regular life and fit in with the main. Ennis (Ledger) is the film's cursed free spirit, doomed to a life of loneliness when he chooses to avoid any kind of orthodoxy. As exemplified by Rich's hyperbole, gay cultural precepts are iron-clad and obligatory. Just as homosexuality is forbidden in cowboy culture, certain things are prohibited in gay culture, and opposing ideas or arguments are dimissed out of hand. (For example, if you want to see someone go red in the face and become instantly angry, ask a gayist about those dark shadows trailing behind halo-topped Saint Shepard.) Shoe-horning Brokeback Mountain into a predigested dialogue about homophobia and the politics of representation, critics such as Rich who are ostesibly enraptured by the film pay its core themes considerable disrespect. Complex and contradictory human conflict is the core of Brokeback Mountain, but it seems to go unnoticed by the shrill fan club of the film, who appear to view things only in primary and politically correct gay-friendly colours.
Brokeback Mountain may win awards, but it will not change the world. It’s a good film, but not a great one. Further, it's a small film, along the lines of American Beauty or Million Dollar Baby, and its impact will be in proportion to this. The most interesting piece of spin-off shrapnel is the now-obligatory rush of gay commentators to throw cliche petals at the clay feet of McIcons, rather than grapple with interesting, contradictory realms of thought.
