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An Affair to Remember
B
rokeback Mountain—the highly praised new movie as well as the
short story by Annie Proulx on which the picture is faithfully
based—is a tale about two homosexual men. Two gay men. To some
people it will seem strange to say this; to some other people, it will
seem strange to have to say it. Strange to say it, because the story is, as
everyone now knows, about two young Wyoming ranch hands who
fall in love as teenager in 1963 and continue their tortured affair, fur-
tively, over the next twenty years. And as everyone also knows, when
most people hear the words “two homosexual men” or “gay,” the image
that comes to mind is not likely to be one of rugged young cowboys
who shoot elk and ride broncos for fun.
Two homosexual men: it is strange to have to say it just now because
the distinct emphasis of so much that has been said about the movie—in
commercial advertising as well as in the adulatory reviews—has been
that the story told in Brokeback Mountain is not, in fact, a gay story, but
a sweeping romantic epic with “universal” appeal. The lengths to which
reviewers from all over the country, representing publications of vari-
ous ideological shadings, have gone in order to diminish the specifically
gay element is striking, as a random sampling of the reviews collected
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on the film’s official Web site makes clear. The Wall Street Journal’s
critic asserted that “love stories come and go, but this one stays with
you—not because both lovers are men, but because their story is so full
of life and longing, and true romance.” The Los Angeles Times declared
the film to be
a deeply felt, emotional love story that deals with the uncharted,
mysterious ways of the human heart just as so many mainstream
films have before it. The two lovers here just happen to be men.
Indeed, a month after the movie’s release most of the reviews were
resisting, indignantly, the popular tendency to refer to it as “the gay
cowboy movie.” “It is much more than that glib description implies,” the
critic of the Minneapolis Star Tribune sniffed. “This is a human story.”
This particular rhetorical emphasis figures prominently in the advertising
for the film, which in quoting such passages reflects the producer’s
understandable desire that Brokeback Mountain not be seen as something
for a “niche” market but as a story with broad appeal, whatever the
particulars of its time, place, and personalities. (The words “gay” and
“homosexual” are never used of the film’s two main characters in the
forty-nine page press kit distributed by the filmmakers to critics.) “One
movie is connecting with the heart of America,” one ad that’s part of the
current publicity campaigns declares; the ad shows the star Heath
Ledger, without his male costar, Jake Gyllenhaal, grinning in a cowboy
hat. A television ad that ran immediately after the Golden Globe awards
a few weeks ago showed clips of the male leads embracing their wives,
but not each other.
The reluctance to be explicit about the film’s themes and content
was evident at the Golden Globes themselves, where the film took the
major awards: for best movie drama, best director, and best screenplay.
When a short montage of clips from the film was screened, it was de-
scribed as “a story of monumental conflict”; later, the actor reading the
names of nominees for best actor in a movie drama described Heath
Ledger’s character as “a cowboy caught up in a complicated love.” After
Ang Lee received the award he was quoted as saying, “This is a univer-
sal story. I just wanted to make a love story.”
Because I am as admiring as almost everyone else of the film’s many
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excellences, it seems to me necessary to counter this special emphasis
in the way the film is being promoted and received. For to see Brokeback
Mountain as a love story, or even as a film about universal human
emotions, is to misconstrue it very seriously—and in so doing inevitably
to diminish its real achievement.
Both narratively and visually, Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy about
the specifically gay phenomenon of the closet—about the disastrous
emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression and of the
social intolerance that first causes and then exacerbates it. What love
story there is occurs early on in the film, and briefly: a summer’s idyll
herding sheep on a Wyoming mountain, during which two lonely youths,
taciturn Ennis and high-spirited Jack, fall into bed, and then in love, with
each other. The sole visual representation of their happiness in love is a
single brief shot of the two shirtless youths horsing around in the grass.
That shot is eerily—and significantly—silent, voiceless: it turns out that
what we are seeing is what the boys’ disgusted boss is seeing through his
binoculars as he spies on them.
After that—because their love for each other can’t be fitted into the
lives they think they must lead—misery pursues and finally destroys the
two men and everyone with whom they come in contact, with the
relentless thoroughness you associate with Greek tragedy. By the end
of the drama, indeed, whole families have been laid waste. Ennis’s mar-
riage to a conventional, sweet-natured girl disintegrates, savaging her
simple illusions and spoiling the home life of his two daughters; Jack’s
nervy young wife, Lureen, devolves into a brittle shrew, her increas-
ingly elaborate and artificial hairstyles serving as a visual marker of the
ever-growing mendacity that underlies the couple’s relationship. Even
an appealing young waitress, with whom Ennis after his divorce has a
flirtation (an episode much amplified from a bare mention in the original
story), is made miserable by her brief contact with a man who is as
enigmatic to himself (as we know but she does not) as he is to her. If
Jack and Ennis are tainted, it’s not because they’re gay, but because they
pretend not to be; it’s the lie that poisons everyone they touch.
As for Jack and Ennis themselves, the brief and infrequent vacations
that they are able to take together as the years pass—“fishing trips” on
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which, as Ennis’s wife points out late in the story, still choking on her
bitterness years after their marriage fails, no fish were ever caught—are
haunted, increasingly, by the specter of the happier life they might have
had, had they been able to live together. Their final vacation together
(before Jack is beaten to death in what is clearly represented, in a
flashback, as a roadside gay-bashing incident) is poisoned by mutual
recriminations. “I wish I knew how to quit you,” the now nearly middle-
aged Jack tearfully cries out, humiliated by years of having to seek sexual
solace in the arms of Mexican hustlers. “It’s because of you that I’m like
this–nothing, nobody,” the dirt-poor Ennis sobs as he collapses in the
dust. What Ennis means, of course, is that he’s “nothing” because loving
Jack has forced him to be aware of real passion that has no outlet, aware
of a sexual nature he cannot ignore but which neither his background nor
his circumstances have equipped him to make part of his life. Again and
again over the years, he rebuffs Jack’s offers to try living together and
running “a little cow and calf operation” somewhere: he is hobbled by
his inability even to imagine what a life of happiness might look like.
One reason he can’t bring himself to envision such a life with his
lover is a grisly childhood memory, presented in flashback, of being
taken at the age of eight by his father to see the body of a gay rancher
who’d been tortured and beaten to death—a scene that prefigures the
scene of Jack’s death. This explicit reference to childhood trauma
suggests another, quite powerful, reason why Brokeback must be seen as
a specifically gay tragedy. In another review that decried the use of the
term “gay cowboy movie” (“a cruel simplification”), the Chicago Sun-
Times’s critic, Roger Ebert, wrote with ostensible compassion about the
dilemma of Jack and Ennis, declaring that “their tragedy is universal. It
could be about two women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic
groups—any ‘forbidden’ love.” This is well-meaning but very seriously
misguided. The tragedy of heterosexual lovers from different religious
or ethnic groups is, essentially, a social tragedy; as we watch it unfold,
we are meant to be outraged by the irrationality of social strictures that
prevent the two from loving each other, strictures that the lovers
themselves may legitimately rail against and despise.
But those lovers, however star-crossed, never despise themselves.
As Brokeback makes so eloquently clear, the tragedy of gay lovers like
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Ennis and Jack is only secondarily a social tragedy. Their tragedy, which
starts well before the lovers ever meet, is primarily a psychological
tragedy, a tragedy of psyches scarred from the very first stirrings of an
erotic desire that, beginning in earliest childhood, in the bosom of their
families (as Ennis’s grim flashback is meant to remind us), the world
around them represents as unhealthy, hateful, and deadly. Romeo and
Juliet (and we) may hate the outside world, the Capulets and Montagues,
may hate Verona; but because they learn to hate homosexuality so early
on, young people with homosexual impulses more often than not grow
up hating themselves—they believe that there’s something wrong with
themselves long before they can understand that there’s something
wrong with society. This is the truth that Heath Ledger, who plays Ennis,
clearly understands—“Fear was instilled in him at an early age, and so
the way he loved disgusted him,” the actor has said—and that is so
brilliantly conveyed by his deservedly acclaimed performance. On
screen, Ennis’s self-repression and self-loathing are given startling
physical form: the awkward, almost hobbled quality of his gait, the
constricted gestures, the way in which he barely opens his mouth when
he talks all speak eloquently of a man who is tormented simply by being
in his own body—by being himself.
So much, at any rate, for the movie being a love story like any other,
even a tragic one. To their great credit, the makers of Brokeback Moun-
tain—the writers Larry McMurtry and Kiana Ossana, the director Ang
Lee—seem, despite the official rhetoric, to have been aware that they
were making a movie specifically about the closet. The themes of
repression, containment, the emptiness of unrealized lives—all ending in
the “nothingness” to which Ennis achingly refers—are consistently
expressed in the film, appropriately enough, by the use of space; given
the film’s homoerotic themes, this device is particularly meaningful. The
two lovers are only happy in the wide, unfenced outdoors, where
exuberant shots of enormous skies and vast landscapes suggest, tellingly,
that what the men feel for each other is indeed “natural.” By contrast,
whenever we see Jack and Ennis indoors, in the scenes that show the
failure of their domestic and social lives, they look cramped and
claustrophobic. (Ennis in particular is often seen in reflection, in various
mirrors: a figure imprisoned in a tiny frame.) There’s a sequence in
which we see Ennis in Wyoming, and then Jack in Texas, anxiously
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preparing for one of their “fishing trips,” and both men, as they pack for
their trip—Ennis nearly leaves behind his fishing tackle, the unused and
increasingly unpersuasive prop for the fiction he tells his wife each time
he goes away with Jack—pace back and forth in their respective
houses like caged animals.
The climax of these visual contrasts is also the emotional climax of
the film, which takes place in two consecutive scenes, both of which
prominently feature closets—actual closets. In the first, a grief-stricken
Ennis, now in his late thirties, visits Jack’s childhood home, where in the
tiny closet of Jack’s almost bare room he discovers two shirts: his and
Jack’s, the clothes they’d worn during their summer on Brokeback
Mountain, Ennis’s protectively encased within Jack’s. (At the end of that
summer, Ennis had thought he’d lost the shirt; only now do we realize
that Jack had stolen it for this purpose.) The image—which is taken
directly from Proulx’s story—of the two shirts hidden in the closet,
preserved in an embrace which the men who wore them could never fully
enjoy, stands as the poignant visual symbol of the story’s tragedy.
Made aware too late of how greatly he was loved, of the extent of his
loss, Ennis stands in the tiny windowless space, caressing the shirts and
weeping wordlessly.
In the scene that follows, another misplaced piece of clothing leads to
a similar scene of tragic realization. Now middle-aged and living alone
in a battered, sparsely furnished trailer (a setting with which Proulx’s
story begins, the tale itself unfolding as a long flashback), Ennis receives
a visit from his grown daughter, who announces that she’s engaged to
be married. “Does he love you?” the blighted father protectively de-
mands, as if realizing too late that this is all that matters. After the
girl leaves, Ennis realizes she’s left her sweater behind, and when he
opens his little closet door to store it there, we see that he’s hung the
two shirts from their first summer (Jack’s now encased protectively
within Ennis’s) on the inside of the closet door, below a tattered post-
card of Brokeback Mountain. Just as we see this, the camera pulls back
to allow us a slightly wider view, which reveals a little window next
to the closet, a rectangular frame that affords a glimpse of a field of
yellow flowers and the mountains and sky. The juxtaposition of the two
spaces—the cramped and airless closet, the window with its unlimited
vistas beyond—efficiently but wrenchingly suggests the man’s tragedy:
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the life he has lived, the life that might have been. His eyes filling with
tears, Ennis looks at his closet and says, “Jack, I swear. . . .” But he never
completes his sentence, just as he never completed his life.
One of the most tortured, but by no means untypical, attempts to suggest
that the tragic heroes of Brokeback Mountain aren’t “really” gay
appeared in, of all places, the San Francisco Chronicle, where the critic
Mick LaSalle argued that the film is
about two men who are in love, and it makes no sense. It makes
no sense in terms of who they are, where they are, how they live
and how they see themselves. It makes no sense in terms of
what they do for a living or how they would probably vote in a
national election. . . .
The situation carries a lot of emotional power, largely because
it’s so specific and yet undefined. The two guys—cowboys—are in
love with each other, but we don’t ever quite know if they’re in love
with each other because they’re gay, or if they’re gay because
they’re in love with each other.
It’s possible that if these fellows had never met, one or both
would have gone through life straight.
The statement suggests what’s wrong with so much of the criticism of
the film, however well meaning it is. It seems clear by now that
Brokeback has received the attention it’s been getting, from critics and
audiences alike, at least partly because it seems on its surface to make
normal what many people think of as gay experience—bringing it into
the familiar “heart of America.” (Had this been the story of, say, the love
between two closeted interior decorators living in New York City in the
1970s, you suspect that there wouldn’t be full-page ads in the major
papers trumpeting its “universal” themes.) But the fact that this film’s
main characters look like cowboys doesn’t make them, or their story, any
less gay. Criticisms like LaSalles’s, and those of the many other critics
trying to persuade you that Brokeback isn’t “really” gay, that Jack and
Ennis’s love “makes no sense” because they’re Wyoming ranch
hands who are likely to vote Republican, only work if you believe that
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being gay means being some specific, essential thing—having a certain
look, or lifestyle (urban, say), or politics; that it’s anything other than
the bare fact of being erotically attached primarily to members of your
own sex.
Indeed, the point that gay people have been trying to make for
years—a point that Brokeback could be making now, if so many of its
vocal admirers would listen to what it’s saying—is that there’s no such
thing as a typical gay person, a strangely different-seeming person with
whom Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar have nothing in common—thank-
fully, you can’t help feeling, in the eyes of many commentators. (It is
surely significant that the film’s only major departure from Proulx’s
story are two scenes clearly meant to underscore Jack’s and Ennis’s
bona fides as macho American men: one in which Jack successfully
challenges his boorish father-in-law at a Thanksgiving celebration, and
another in which Ennis punches a couple of biker goons at a July Fourth
picnic—a scene that culminates with the over-the-top image, familiar
from the trailer, of Ennis standing tall against a skyscape of exploding
fireworks.) The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it
tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but
that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that
any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have,
that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with
because they’re not really homosexual—that they’re more like the heart
of America than like “gay people”—you’re pushing them back into the
closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collabo-
rators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed.
—The New York Review of Books, February 23, 2006
