"The nature of this love was so rugged and hostile and also was so beautifully encompassing and grand and powerful," Tracy Lamb said, "just like the environments they were in."
I devote a paragraph in the Green Man Review piece to the role of the land. There have been a couple of comments about the cinematography in Brokeback Mountain, some to the effect that it is too "pretty." To each his own, I guess. Take the landscape as a metaphor for the love between Ennis and Jack. Pretty? No. Beautiful, with a hard-edged, elemental, uncompromising beauty that we seldom encounter. It's a passionate landscape, if one can ascribe that sort of feeling to geologic processes.
Spencer Windes at Left Coast Breakdown was kind enough to mention my last post on Brokedown Mountain, and he brought up a point that I only touched on: men have power over each other. The quote above actually comes closer to my feelings about that: we have power with each other. What we have, if we are dogged and stubborn and lucky enough to build a stable relationship, is something that is unique. We find the soft places in each other and if we are the men we should be, we shelter those soft places for each other, guard them with all our strength -- we can feel deeply, powerfully, and we can focus that feeling on each other. That's passion. That's the driving force behind anything that any of us has made that has any pretense at being "great." It's also something that can orient our lives. It's also what I saw in the movie between Jack and Ennis. They didn't have a vocabulary to articulate their feelings, but their physical resources were not only turned to violence and sex, but also to tenderness and gentleness. There are any number of layers to the politics of that, and I've barely skimmed the surface.
First of course, and most apparent in the movie, are the personal politics, the ways we reach consensus on what our relationships are to be. In the film of Brokeback Mountain, Ennis can't accommodate Jack's dreams; there is a deep fear there, not only of their probable fates, but also of losing what little sense of himself he has. He doesn't recognize the possibility of creating a new self. Jack makes the major concessions, and very quietly finds other ways to satisfy his needs, which are more than Ennis can allow himself to recognize. (I just had a lengthy discussion with a friend who felt that Jack had given up on Ennis and found his relationship with another man; I can't really see it. I think Jack was making do, and that his feelings for Ennis were so deep that they could never be lost.) Their negotiations are largely unspoken, except for one angry scene, and really take a form that most of us will recognize, once it's pointed out to us. It's those nuances we pick up from each other when we're closely in touch.
In a larger dimension, the necessary personal politics between Ennis and Jack are a result of the overriding social politics of their context: admitting to that kind of love is a death sentence. I find it very difficult to understand that, because I've lived in a fairly sheltered environment, at least since I came of age and started making an independent life. (When I was younger, I at least had the sense not to publicize my feelings; there are times and places where getting in touch with yourself and expressing what you feel is a big mistake.) A career in the arts, a liberal and supportive milieu -- but don't ever think it's really that liberal. There is tolerance with a fair, although variable, degree of indulgent condescension: yes, of course it's OK and I have no problem with it, with the ever-present subtext "but you're not a real man." (And when their own sons come out, watch the panic. Sometimes, to be sure, the panic is simply because they love their children and know what they're in for. This is not by any means a universal reaction, but I endured it enough to recognize it as a majority position.) I want those people to see this movie, and really look at it hard. They won't. They'll just be even more comfortable with their attitudes, because they won't see what they really are. It's perfectly safe for them: it's only a movie.
It's this not seeing that is at the root of the larger political rumblings. I've forced myself to read some of the articles put out by the Christianist press, and even those that recognize the validity of the film (which so far are in the minority of those I've seen) see it through a moral filter that I still can't recognize as any sort of true morality, made even more troubling by their complete inability to recognize the role that they and those like them played in creating this tragedy. The most common remark has been how this "perversion" shows how families are ruined by the illicit adultery of the two men. It obviously hasn't occurred to them that without their condemnation, Jack and Ennis would have been free to settle down together and there would have been no wives to be cheated on. If there is blame, they are holding it in their cold, cold hands.
I can't claim to be sympathetic to Christianity, at least to its most vocal proponents. It, like the other Abrahamic faiths, is built on hierarchy. Hierarchies are about social control: they are a political function, pure and simple. Historically, of course, in the age of god-kings and then priest-kings, the roles were folded together. (And apparently we are seeing an attempt to reinstate that condition.) The morality here is a set of rules, and fairly arbitrary ones, set up to define a particular culture in a particular cultural matrix: strongly patriarchal, women and children are property, authority is unquestioned. Mmm . . . I don't respond well to authority.
It seems to me that Christianity, particularly in its most aggressive forms, can't really be sympathetic to a pluralistic, democratic society: the cards are stacked against it. (I suspect that the same holds true of Islam; Judaism is not a proselytizing religion, and so Jews find it much easier just to let everyone else go to hell in their own way.) In the form of the Christianists, of course, it's been perverted as a means to political power -- the sort of regime that Hammurabi would be proud of. That sort of mindset just doesn't lend itself to much in the way of individual freedom. It relies on received wisdom and discourages inquiry. Even those who give their hearts wholeheartedly to the real lessons of Christ carry within them the sure knowledge that they are right and everyone else is wrong. For the more virulent examples, it devolves down to my earlier remarks about communication: if they won't hear you, you can't talk to them. And they won't see what's in front of them, which in this case means something beautiful and precious.
This may not seem to be about the movie, but it is.
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