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Edited on Thu Mar-16-06 07:55 PM by 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
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