Climbing Brokeback Mountain
Well, I finally saw Brokeback Mountain over the weekend, and I'm happy to report that a) it's really quite a good movie, and b) it did not make me question my own sexuality.
(Before everyone gets mad, I'm just kidding!)
I was actually more worried that I'd find it hard to take the movie seriously, as it's become such an object of cultural discussion that it's hovering on the verge of self-parody.
(Michael Musto, the very bitchy—and I mean that in the nicest way—and very gay columnist for the Village Voice went to the Golden Globes parties and asked the actors what they thought of "Bareback Mountain." He cornered Phillip Seymour Hoffman and asked him who was sexier, the guys in "Bareback Mountain" or Truman Capote. Hoffman didn't quite know what to say. He then asked Hoffman who was sexier, Capote or the
Memoirs of a Geisha crew. "I have no idea," Hoffman said, "looking horrified." Pretty funny.)
Anyway, I found myself drawn into the movie, which is a beautifully-told story of a doomed love affair. The essential decency of both men involved, and the tragedy of the situation in which they find themselves, is heartbreaking, and I really do think that the film could be a watershed in the long, slow march toward civil rights for gays. It was a stroke of genius on Annie Proulx's part to embed a gay narrative within the most classically macho American myth, the cowboy. No one can call Jack Twist or Ennis Del Mar sissies.
I did have a couple of thoughts about the film. One is to question whether these characters are actually gay, or whether their relationship is a one-off, a unique result of their particular backgrounds, emotional needs, and the bonding experience of a summer on Brokeback Mountain. My answer: Jack yes, Ennis, I'm not so sure. Ennis, to my mind, is so emotionally limited that it would make a certain cultural sense that the person he bonds most closely with would be another man. Ennis just doesn't have the emotional self-knowledge to have many deep relationships, and you wonder if, if Jack hadn't happened along, he'd have had a loving relationship with anyone, male or female.
I also wonder why everyone is talking about Heath Ledger's performance at the expense of Jake Gyllenhall. (Also: Why is Gyllenhall pronounced with a soft "G"? But I digress.)
It seemed to me that Gyllenhall's was the braver of the two performances. Ledger gets to be all smoldering and conflicted; I suspect that, for professional actors, those are not different traits to manifest. (Grunt a lot, surround yourself with beer bottles, maintain a stony facial expression....)
Gyllenhall, on the other hand, knows what he wants and gives voice to his desires. He initiates the sex between the two men, and, in a choice that is surely not accidental, is the, um, recipient of it. His desires are more transparent...which is why, I think, his performance is so good. If he'd gone too far, Gyllenhall could have been incredible, laughable. He strikes a remarkable balance. I keep thinking of the scene in which he tries to buy a beer for a fellow rodeo performer, and the man, suspecting that something is up, rudely turns him down. Was Jack really hitting on the guy? Or just reaching out to him in a friendly, non-macho way which was, by itself, enough to run afoul of the cowboy code? It could have been either, and Gyllenhall plays the scene so subtly, he doesn't tip his hand...which, I imagine, is precisely what you would do if you were a gay man forced to live in the closet.
Finally, a friend and I had a discussion about how graphic was the sex that's shown in the film. She was surprised by how much was actually shown; I thought that, if director Ang Lee had shown any less, he'd have been pilloried for copping out.
In some ways, I wonder if the film didn't err on the conservative side. What would have been more shocking than what was shown, in my opinion, would have been to show one of the characters fellating the other. (My friend insisted that these two men would never do that; I disagreed.)
But I wonder if audiences really could have handled the sight of two men in love going down on each other. There's something about rough anal sex that's not so shocking; we've seen it to one degree or another in Deliverance, Oz, and other film scenarios of violent sex. It conforms to our expectations of the way men behave when giving in to a taboo desire—contradicting the implications of the sexual act by infusing it with violence.
But tender gay sex...I have a feeling that would have made people much more uncomfortable than the rough-and-tumble coupling that occurs between Jack and Ennis.
Regardless of all this, Brokeback Mountain is really a powerful and moving film, a serious work of art. I'm glad I finally saw it.
