I finally saw Brokeback Mountain. SPOILERS AHOY!

[Plaid Adder]

I just became about the last person in America to see Brokeback Mountain. This is partly a review of the movie, but mainly it's an explanation of what queer viewers are going to see in this film that straight viewers might not get out of it, which is how I come to be posting it here. I will warn you now that it gives away MAJOR plot elements, so if you haven't seen the film yet, put the post down and slowly back away.



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I liked the movie much better than I had expected to like it based on the fawning of the mainstream critics. Mainly I was surprised at how restrained it was, though given the fact that Ang Lee was directing I guess I shouldn't have been. I expected a lot more melodrama. In particular, I was afraid someone was going to commit suicide, and fortunately that didn't happen. Now you might say that having Jack beaten to death with a tire iron is worse, but I don't see it that way, partly because of the way the film handled it.

My emotional response to the film was also a lot stronger than I thought it would be, and by that I don't mean that I broke down crying, because I didn't. But it did make me deeply sad, for a number of reasons, which I will now try to explain.

The main thing about the film that just hurts is Ennis. He really is cursed, because in addition to having extraordinarily powerful emotions he's got absolutely no way of dealing with them. Everything has to come out physically because he doesn't have the language or the conceptual framework to let it out any other way. Watching him under the overpass letting out his grief at having that first summer on Brokeback cut short, you don't know whether he's trying to throw up or trying to cry, and he doesn't know either. The point at which the movie really got its hooks into me was the first time Jack comes to visit Ennis after he's married, when what was supposed to be the greeting hug turns into that desperate clutch that Alma witnesses. I have to give it to Ledger and Gyllenhaall--they made the physical stuff absolutely real, and at that moment, almost frighteningly intense.There's something about the way Ennis gets overwhelmed by suddenly having Jack there, the way whatever he was telling himself about what happened that summer and why he was so antsy about the prospect of seeing him again just goes up in flames and for one life-changing minute he doesn't care who sees or who knows, that hooks into something in my own experience of coming out to myself. Ennis remains stranded for 20 years in that painful stage of double consciousness that for most of us--lucky bastards that we now are--is just a phase we pass through before we Know and, eventually, Identify. I can look back now and see the phase in my life during which I was both straight and falling in love with a woman, and understand that I was flirting with Liza without realizing that was what was happening, and when I look back I am intensely grateful that I eventually got my mind around it and made my peace. Ennis, despite the 20 years, is never really able to do that because--thanks to the homophobes who killed the guy whose mangled corpse Ennis is taken by his father to view at the age of 9--he is convinced that Knowing is death. Whenever Ennis gets close to Knowing he tries to beat up whatever it is that's forcing him to Know--whether it's Alma, Jack, or himself. And yet, despite all that policing, he knows, and that's how hell gets built. For him, for Jack, and in less violent but ever-multiplying ways, for all of us.

As I said, I find the form of tragic ending that the film finally reaches--Jack getting beaten to death by the figurative descendents of the assholes whose crime shocked the 9-year-old Ennis into this state of permanent semi-paralysis--infinitely preferable to the various other options available to the typical Hollywood hankie film. First of all, presumably nobody is pretending that people are going to watch a movie about a m/m relationship set in Wyoming and not see a connection between what happens to Jack and what happened to Matthew Shepard. Given that, I was glad that the film dealt with it the way it did--by focusing not on the sensational violence of the murder but on the layers of denial, grief, and pain that enfold Ennis as he hears the Authorized Version over the phone from Loreen. You don't know for sure whether that flashback is what really happened, or Ennis's vision of what really happened. What you do know is that he's hearing stopped to change a tire, tire exploded, drowned in his own blood, and he's seeing his lover beaten to death. The film puts us in Ennis's position, unsure whether this nightmare is doing its only damage inside his head or whether it has really been acted out in the physical world on the body of the person he loves most. What is undeniable is that after he hears the story and goes out to see Jack's parents--the mother who loved him and got him, and the father who got him but may or may not have been able to love him--he realizes that in addition to (maybe) killing Jack, that nightmare robbed him of years of time that they could have had together. It's kind of like Henry James's short story The Beast in the Jungle, only with many fewer words.

That's what I came away with, more than anything else--the sense of time stolen, stolen from them and stolen from all of us, too, every day that we have to deal with all the bullshit that still gets thrown at us. At the end of the day it looks like Ennis loses more than he had to because of his fear--but who knows? Maybe if he had gone off with Jack to set up a ranch somewhere the end would have come faster and it would have been a double murder. You don't know. You trust that accepting it and being honest and living out and in the open is better, but you don't know. You don't know what you may be forced to sacrifice for it at any given moment of your life, you don't know how long it will be before the clock rolls backwards and the tire irons come out. You take the risk because you can't not do it, because if you don't you'll die, one way or another. And no matter how hard you fight, the world finds ways to steal from you. Of our 17+ years, how much time did I lose because I wasn't out to my parents for the first 2 1/2 years? How much time do I still lose because I still have to compartmentalize, because I cut myself up into different parts, some of which have to be able to exist in hostile territory, where no matter how out I am I still cannot be fully present?

Anyway. I can think of a lot of intellectual reasons why I should dislike this movie but I don't, because to me, that's what it was: a heartbreaking story about what gets lost and what gets stolen. I don't know jack about sheep, horses, bulls, or any of that cowboy shit. But there is part of me that is as scared as Ennis is of understanding and feeling what he's losing every day of his life, part of me that is afraid to touch emotions so big and unreasonable that you're afraid they'll kill you on their way out. I know what it's like when instead of speaking all you can do is shake. That must be the part of me that actually connects with masculinity--at least as it's represented in Brokeback Mountain. I haven't read the Annie Proulx story so I don't know at what point the different elements were introduced; but maybe there's something about this plot that maps out the overlap between women's emotional lives and masculinity.

Anyway. That's how I felt about Brokeback Mountain. I don't know whether it deserved the Best Picture Oscar and I don't much care. There are not that many films out there to which I have a genuine and potentially enlightening emotional response, and for that alone I would respect it, scenery human and chthonic notwithstanding.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

[LostinVA]

1. Excellent post -- I felt the same way, used some of the same words

and phrases. The movie haunted me for days, we talked about it for days...

[CBGLuthier]

2. Man, I want to read this

But no, must wait until I see the movie.

I have this rather strange compulsion that I must know how things turn out. I have watched the last 15 minutes of really bad movies (not saying that about this) just to see how they turn out.

I really, really, really am looking forwad to seeing this movie. Just have to amp down the expectations so I won't be disapointed.

Shit! couldn't help it. Saw your spoilers. My fault not yours. I kind of thought that was the way it may have gone.

Still will give it a viewing bcause I love great film and think this will qualify.

And goddamnit I plan on seeing Crash too because I think, from all reviews, that it may be a great film too.

This really was a great year in cinema history. Fuck all the whiners. There can be only one winner but that doesn't mean the rest aren't worth viewing.

[shaniqua6392]

3. Wow. What an awesome post.

You made me cry.

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

4. Beautiful summation of the power of this movie. I cared so much about

all the characters, however Jack and Ennis as the star crossed lovers evoked emotions worthy of Shakespeare.

Have you read the short story? If not, I highly recommend it, since the story focuses on the character's emotions in a way that resonates more than anything I've read in years.

I believe this movie will be a classic for decades to come. I still can't believe it didn't receive the Oscar for "Best Picture". MKJ

edited to add: Recommended, those of us who have seen it will appreciate your brilliant observations. MKJ

[ruggerson]

5. Thanks for the review

I didn't expect to be as moved by it either. But I was, and its profound emotional power is what separated it from the others in the Best Picture category.

Not to rehash the political controversy surrounding it's loss (oh well, ok, LET'S rehash it), what's amusing to me is that here at DU, anecdotally, I have read hundreds of posts from women who raved about the film, but had to see it with their friends, or alone, or with female relatives, because their husbands refused to go to the movie. Now, these are presumably liberal women with presumably liberal husbands, yet they couldn't get their spouse to go see the flick.

Yet, there are still many here who try to deny what anyone familiar with Hollywood knows as undeniable fact: this phenomenon (males refusing to see the damn movie) is what killed Brokeback's Oscar chances.

MPA Academy members are a far more conservative demographic than DU'ers, so, since we have the proof right here in our own backyard that lots of liberal men wouldn't go to see this movie, why is it such a stretch to understand that lots of sixty five year old Academy member wouldn't be caught dead seeing it either?

Thanks again for the review. You made me recall some of the most wrenching parts of the film and lit a desire for me to see it again, before it leaves the theatres.

[MuseRider]

6. My husband went.

I was proud of him for doing it too. I know that seems an odd statement. He is a liberal, he loved my brother who was gay. We set our wishes that if something happened to us our little boys would both live with that brother. We spend New Years Eve each year at a good friend of mines house at an almost all men's party. He goes, he has no problem, he supports my work here in this state. Still, he is not into "love stories" and whether he wants to admit it or not there is that whole "straight male" thing. While I am not into love stories either I had to see this movie. Neither of us were disappointed. I thought he was going to cry right along with me. He has come a long way in this journey although he would probably deny that it took a while.

I still have not been able to get the emotions of this movie to leave me. I sometimes wish I could because it was so painful. The journey of Ennis was so hard to watch and Heath Ledger was remarkable I thought, they all were. You could feel the pain and the giving over to something that neither could stop. An amazing film.

[TechBear_Seattle]

7. Great review, but...

You are incorrect in saying that Jack was beaten to death. In reality, all we see are Ennis' fears given form; we never actually see how Jack died. Little things confirm his suspicion -- the bored, over-rehearsed explanation given by Jack's wife, the barely veiled hostility of Jack's father -- but never any actual evidence. That, in my mind, is one of the biggest sad points the story makes.

[Plaid Adder]

8. Actually, I did talk about that.

Toward the end, where I talk about the film being like _The Beast in the Jungle_.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

[TechBear_Seattle]

9. Oops, my bad. n/t

[Plaid Adder]

10. 'Sok. n/t

[bigwillq]

11. Great post.

:hi:

Thanks for sharing your review.

[sui generis]

12. speaking as a guy

What touched me was the parallels of Ennis and Jack to some of the events we know in our own lives, when we didn't have a vocabulary to talk about the way we felt, or a reason to think we could "be allowed" to be happy, really happy, with the people who made us happy, who made us "normal". On that spectrum, I'm certainly closer to Twist than del Mar, except, I'm the one who has the bloody shirt, and more than one.

My SO grew up rural poor in a large family in Washington State, and my own American relatives in central Kansas are poor as church mice. I have BEEN in the Twist house, often, and I know Jack's dad personally. And his Mom, dispirited and quietly defiant. Most of us have been in the apartment with the greasy brown shag rug, the threadbare nylon couch, and the water heater out in the open, wooden kitchen drawers that don't quite close right and glossy white enamel paint that's faded to dusty olive, glazed with decades of bacon grease and cigarette smoke; the dull uneven linoleum floor of indeterminate color with chips and cracks and dents and whole missing tiles. We remember those turkey dinners in tidy little homes with parents having strained conversations, talking in code, but not what it was about. Why don't you kids go out and play. There is a lot in that movie for anyone who isn't city born and city bred to recognize; you've lived in that story, just didn't know it was around you.

Very few people understand real rural poverty, such as the poverty shown in Jack's family home when Ennis visited. Ennis the character was not a brilliant guy, did not have great expectations of life, or a surfeit of ambition, and he was a budding alcoholic. He settled his frustrations physically, not in words, and he was easily frustrated. He was a flawed human if you wanted a real hollywood story, but perfectly flawed for a real story. Jack was equally flawed in his own way, equally as realistic. What resonated to me in this poem of a story was how true to life it was to some of us, how it could bring my own dormant memories awake again, to see the dust, and the evasions, and the smell of whiskey, the bittersweet forbidden contact, to touch what the whole world despises, and love it, and feel normal for once, and to know it is still forbidden.

Society's expectations for the masculine role, especially in a rural setting in the sixties did not give men a lot of room to be vocal about their feelings, or even particularly to trust other men. Emotional honesty was considered weak and strange, not even "gay", because not only did WE not have the words for it, neither did they. Straight relationships on TV were still depicted as his & her twin beds, and Daddy did the work, and Mom vacuumed and made cookies in a dress and pearls. Gays were referred to as "not the marryin' kind, if ya know what I mean", wink. wink, and our only living role models were entertainers like Liberace and Truman Capote and famous various hairdressers and fashionistas.

The giddiness of going to see someone you really love and who you know loves you and to get to spend time with him - the anger and tears of frustration when plans go awry - these are not exclusively gay. The feeling of time wasted, of missed opportunities and missing heartbeats, of personal loneliness that can drive you to your knees, to bloody your knuckles on an unyielding wall, the little uglinesses we permit and tolerate and do when there is something we want but cannot have - none of that is exclusively gay.

So the story does resonate to those of us who are brave enough to let it, who have backstory ourselves, and maybe that's all that matters. The story. Not the movie, not the score, not the actors, not the "political message", none of that. Just the parts that give it meaning to us.

[Plaid Adder]

13. Thanks for your POV

One thing I did like about the movie, though I don't have your experience of it so I will not explain it as eloquently, is the fact that homophobia is not the only thing these characters are up against. Even for someone who didn't grow up with it it's obvious that poverty is one of the things that's robbing them. Ennis and Jack's first summer gets cut off because the rancher who's paying them has decided to pull the plug. The time they are able to scrape together over the next 20 years comes at the expense of whatever job Jack has to quit in order to get the time off; because he can't take time off without losing his job and having to start over from scratch, he's never able to rise above just barely making it, and that contributes to the breakup of his marriage as much as the affair with Jack does. The relationship looks emotionally asymmetrical because Jack is more willing to acknowledge and articulate his love for Ennis, but Ennis has to give up more to get the little time they do have.

The thing that interested me most about the opening of the film was how intensely shy both Ennis and Jack are. Without an opening, neither has the temerity to speak not just to each other but to the rancher who hires them. Both of them have traveled forever to get to this dump because they really need the work, and when the guy finally shows up after keeping them waiting forever they just sit and wait as if they expect to be treated with that kind of contempt. The way Ennis and Jack act in that scene gives you the clear impression that they are used to being kicked around a lot, and that's made them shy of other people. The only characters in the film who actually taunt Jack and Ennis for being gay are the rancher, who as the owner/employer has the luxury of saying whatever he wants to the man who's trying to get work from him, and Alma--but only after she's married the guy who runs the grocery store and is living in the nice house with the brown shingles. Before then she's as powerless and inarticulate as Ennis is. So there is this clear connection being made between money and what you might call emotional freedom.

And then of course there is the way Loreen's father treats Jack, which just about makes you want to reach through the screen and clobber him. But anyway.

The problem men have that women don't is that they are not supposed to want the things that their gender position denies them. We get vilified for wanting power, money, careers, independence, etc., but we don't have to explain why we want them. Men are not supposed to want things that are devalued as feminine--such as the ability to express emotion and the willingness to acknowledge vulnerability--which makes it that much harder for men to claim them.

Anyway. I guess my point is that I understand why this film would resonate with straight men, though it does not surprise me to hear that a lot of straight men would not be caught dead watching it.

The way you talk about how what made you feel normal was forbidden to you reminds me of something I read somewhere about the real meaning of the word "queer." Queer has been revalued by the gay community, but of course what it originally meant is strange/weird/sick/abnormal. It's been redefined by the GBLT movement to mean "that which our culture refuses to acknowledge or validate, but which to us is necessary, and indeed pretty cool when you think about it." The point this guy was making, and unfortunately I can't remember his name, is that a lot of stuff that's queered by American culture isn't necessarily, as you put it, "exclusively gay." The culturally celebrated standard of American heterosexuality is so restrictive and--especially for men--so narrow that if you take that as what's 'normal,' then virtually any _real_ person will in some sense and at some point in their lives be queer, whether they're gay or not. When I was living in North Carolina, for instance, the same law that prohibited homosexual sex also prohibited any form of sexual intercourse other than between husband and wife in the missionary position. It was just only ever enforced on gay people, because I guess everybody's queer but some queers are more queer than others.

Anyway, if you look at it from that point of view, then it becomes more interesting that what Ennis says after that first night with Jack is "I ain't queer."

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

[TechBear_Seattle]

15. I hadn't thought about what Ennis was giving up

"The time they are able to scrape together over the next 20 years comes at the expense of whatever job Jack has to quit in order to get the time off; because he can't take time off without losing his job and having to start over from scratch, he's never able to rise above just barely making it, and that contributes to the breakup of his marriage as much as the affair with Jack does. The relationship looks emotionally asymmetrical because Jack is more willing to acknowledge and articulate his love for Ennis, but Ennis has to give up more to get the little time they do have."

I think you mean that Ennis was the one giving up his jobs and starting over from scratch. You raise a good point, and one that I had missed.

[Plaid Adder]

16. Yeah, that should have been Ennis in the first sentence.

Ah well.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

[moose65]

17. Great post!

When did you live in NC, and WHERE? Just curious. I've always enjoyed your posts, Adder. You kinda remind me of another online friend, Joan the English Chick. Do you know Joan, by any chance? :-)

Peace....

[xchrom]

14. tennessee williams and william faulkner

have both written extensively about the american male and his economic condition and inner emotional state.

obviously others as well -- but i think there is an inherited thread that proulx has picked up that is connected to those two.

i have contended all along that this movie is as much about economics and maleness{not particularly gay in this case -- ennis and jack both would still be who they are in the book and movie if they were straight} in certain conditions.

[Divine Discontent]

18. great review

as a Christian, it was profoundly powerful for me. I hurt just like Jack does, and I pray I don't end up as sad about never keeping something you felt was special. thanks plaid...