Brokeback Mountain

I t’s official. With eight Oscar nominations—including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actor— Brokeback Mountain is this year’s surprise hit. Yes, the gay cowboy movie is not only a relatively big box office hit, but it has also become the centerpiece of cultural anxiety about homosexuality. Jay Leno makes jokes about it, the New Yorker ran a cartoon, and even G.W. Bush fielded questions about it at a press conference. 

All this is quite odd. Sure, it’s a well made film and Ang Lee is a terrific director. But in ordinary times a film like this would have a small, but appreciative audience and would perhaps have won a best-of-something award. Instead, as of February 1, Brokeback Mountain had been nominated—with many wins—for 90 film awards, ranging from the Venice Film Festival to the Boston Film Critic’s Awards. Clearly this is a film that has touched many people. But why? Is it because it is a story about gay cowboys? A story about doomed love? A story about the impossibility of happiness? A story about homophobia?  

By now everyone knows the basic plot. Jack Twist (Jake Gyllen- haal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) are cowboys who get a summer job tending a flock of sheep on Brokeback Mountain. They are straight, poor, western guys who drink and joke and end up having sex with each other. But not just sex. Eventually they fall so crazy in love that they seem fated for one another. As the tagline puts it: “Love is a force of nature.” 

They eventually leave Brokeback Mountain and go on with their lives—getting married, having kids, and working jobs they hate. But they meet several times a year for intense love fests on Brokeback Mountain. After 20 years Jack dies and Ennis is left with his grief and loneliness. Not exactly your up-beat love story, but in the realm of tragic love, perfectly reasonable. 

All of the critics—in both the gay and straight press—have praised the film as a classic love story. But is it a gay love story? Here’s a sentence that appeared in a very positive review in Gay Chicago Magazine : “After their initial romantic coupling, both men make a point of proclaiming that they are not ‘queer,’ and indeed their sexual bond is born out of loneliness and isolation more than anything else.” Variants of this sentence appear widely in the mainstream. 

What strikes me as curious is that the message in the reviews seems to be that the passion between the two men is less about desire and lust and more about “loneliness,” “isolation,” and those cold nights out on the prairie with the sheep. But E. Annie Proulx’s short story, which inspired the film, gives no indication that the lust of these men is about isolation.  

They spend years cheating on their wives and can’t keep their hands off one another. Yet, in many reviews, their sexual encounters are described as urgent, yet incidental. Indeed, many of the reviews praise the film for its lack of explicit sexual content. For the first time in Hollywood history the lack of sex is being used to sell a movie. 

The film is being gingerly handled by publicists because, even in 2006, it was thought there would be no large audiences (heterosexual women are described by the studio as the film’s target viewership) for a gay male love story. Even as mainstream culture may be more accepting of male homosexuality, heterosexual viewers would still rather see the queenie antics of the Fab Five on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” than Ledger and Gyllenhaal. 

Why the enormous attention? I suspect the excitement is a response to the fight around gay marriage; that the mixed messages from the reviews is emblematic of how deeply divided our culture is, not only about gay marriage, but homosexuality in general. This ambivalence is part of Brokeback Mountain ’s basic narrative: gay love and passion exist and are valid, but also tragic and doomed and mostly not visible.