Distance

Y'know how, after you see a movie or read a book or anything like that, after a while it sort of recedes and you put it in perspective? The opposite seems to be happening with me with Brokeback Mountain. Or maybe not: when I left the theater, like most of the audience I didn't have much to say. I was thinking that it was just the impact of the movie and I needed time to digest it, but I'm having the opposite reaction to what I expected. I seem to be getting closer in, rather than farther away. Maybe it's just emotional trauma -- I won't deny that the film hit me really hard, for a lot of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with the film and which I'm not going to discuss here, except to note that one of the things a work of art in any medium should do is connect with your own experience. Brokeback does, at least for me. In 1963 I was only a couple of years younger than Jack and Ennis are when the story starts; my small Midwestern town was, while not potentially as violent about homosexuality as the West, not what you'd call sympathetic. And I was in love for the first time and couldn't tell anyone -- especially the boy I was in love with.

Distance plays a role in the impact of this movie, big-time, if only because of the way it removes it. As audience, we are more-or-less used to maintaining some separation from whatever it is we are seeing. That's part of the effect of art, it seems: It's a little bit removed from us so that we can absorb the ideas it presents with some mediation -- ideally. Perversely, we place higher value on a work that diminishes that separation. That's why, thinking on my reaction, I start to realize that I'm like someone recovering from a severe emotional trauma: first the emotional numbness, then as it fades, the obsession about the events of the trauma -- in this case the constant replay of scenes from the movie -- the ability to feel pain again, and eventually, I hope, the distance. (I had, now that I think of it, a similar but less extreme reaction to the story. Film is, indeed, much more immediate than the printed page.)

Of course, part of this effect is tied into our own emotional histories. I think any gay man over forty is going to have a reaction similar to mine. I suspect that younger men will not understand the need for secrecy, not on a gut level, unless they grew up someplace that's still back in the 60s. I think this is where straight men and women are not going to connect -- they've never had to hide like that, they've never been in a situation where the most important thing in their life had to be kept secret. I think they will have a reaction, the same way they react to Romeo and Juliet or West Side Story or Tristan und Isolde -- doomed love, for whatever reasons it's doomed, has a great appeal -- but it's not going to be the same kind of reaction.

A slight tangent, but not really -- Spencer Windes made that comment about the power men have over each other -- power over each other, and to my thinking, power with each other. Each variety of love has its own unique qualities, and men, especially the way we train them here, create something that's at the same time awkward, intense, sometimes brutal, while at the same time holding the possibility of infinite tenderness and caring, while remaining mostly inarticulate. That's the impact of Ennis del Mar for me. As verbal and articulate as I am, I hit places where words fail (and that's one of the big ones, loving someone). A thought about that: I wonder if, like me, even very articulate men tend to try to make the spaces around the words do the work, using the words as steering points. Maybe that why we, as a group, are so physical: words don’t work for us very well.

But what we make together, as men, is something that is not really obviously delineated in the movie, or in the story, but it's something that's there. Maybe that's why this story couldn't be placed anywhere but in the High Country of Wyoming: it's a merciless place with the kind of poetry in it that no one has really managed to capture very well, intensely spiritual, as Spencer pointed out in his essay about the movie and being raised a Mormon. It seems that no one except some gay men worry about gay men and spirituality -- in fact, from the rabids (and I number the current pope among those) we hear a great deal about how intrinsically sinful we are, when so many other cultures have recognized us as having a special and unique kind of spiritual power. Maybe that means they are worried about it after all, even if not in the sense that I meant. "Frightened" is probably the word I'm looking for: our power is a threat to their power, and they are, after all, about power, not about belief.

I think this comes back in a way to what I said about who gets to define who we are, which is one of the central themes of Brokeback Mountain as I see it. Jack and Ennis have a chance for something very strong, very good, and very beautiful, but because he's accepted the way the world has defined him. Ennis cannot take it in his grasp. That's really what the Wildmons of the world want for us: never to become what we can be. Maybe that's a goal for us: to bring that power, that spirit to our lives and our relationships with each other. Spencer's point at the end of his Mormon essay is a good one, I think -- they had the chance to share that moment on the mountain -- but placed against what their life together could have been, living that moment every day, it's a poor second.