"Getting It": First Thoughts on the Politics of Brokeback Mountain

I'm starting this new site off by revising and reposting my previous thoughts on the politics of Brokeback Mountain. I may interweave some of the other comments I've made on the movie from the Writer's Blog at Hunter's Eye. Bear with me.

There is, inescapably, a political message to Brokeback Mountain. Releasing that movie at this time has to be taken as a political act, not because it's a "gay" movie (on which question I'm reserving judgment, although I suspect it's "gay" only in the most rudimentary sense), but because of the way it subverts the whole discourse on gay. A lot has been written about the frontal assault on stereotypes, and the way that Jack and Ennis are, ultimately, dead ringers for any straight guy you want to pick. In that sense, I see it as a tremendously positive force: the message is simply that gay men are just like anyone else in all respects that really matter.

It was enlightening to see some comments by "real" cowboys in that regard, from "Good Morning America":

What do real cowboys think? To find the answer, "Good Morning AmericaWeekend Edition" traveled to the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas.

Seven-time world champion cowboy Ty Murray, who is straight, actually welcomes the movie.

"I think it's something that's now just being more understood," Murray said. "Hopefully, this movie helps people further understand it."

. . .

Although people don't readily think of gay cowboys, one woman at the trade show said, "You have to kind of look past that and see what the whole story is about."

There's a deeper meaning here, too, that is in a way also political, but leads also to the personal, that I think Lee's comment (as noted in my Writer's Blog entry at Hunter's Eye) about the fact that Jack and Ennis don't recognize love and so spend the next twenty years trying to get a grip on it encapsulates very nicely. That, I think, cuts two ways, and is a critical point in any dialogue that might go on (and for thoughts about that issue, scroll down a bit). I think, in the face of both the movie and the story, we all have to recognize that love is not subject to outside definition. Most of us can understand that in the abstract, but when it comes to actualities, we get a little lost. The story brings that home, even as it points up the nightmare of falling into something like what Jack and Ennis fall into and not having any framework to hang it on. Ennis can't say to himself that he loves Jack -- the concept is completely missing from his arsenal.

Annie Proulx, who wrote the original story, came out with a comment very close to a couple that I have made about Ennis and Jack, as quoted in NYT:

In an interview in a Wyoming newspaper, Annie Proulx, who wrote the original story on which the Ang Lee film is based, corrected the common misconception about her two characters. "Excuse me," said Ms. Proulx, "but it is not a story about 'two cowboys.' It is a story about two inarticulate, confused Wyoming ranch kids in 1963 who have left home and who find themselves in a personal sexual situation they did not expect, understand nor can manage." Jack and Ennis are not cowboys (if anything the two are shepherds), but they are, in Ms. Proulx's resonant words, "beguiled by the cowboy myth."

She also says that the adaptation of the story was a perfect fit. If so, I think that people will come away from it with some new thoughts -- hell, I have new thoughts after reading the story, and I've been living this one for my entire life, although I at least had the option of leaving an environment in which I didn't exist in any recognizable form and finding a vocabulary and context. They didn't fit very well, but at least I had something to work with. It will lead in some quarters to dialogue. In other quarters, unfortunately, it won't, because in those quarters, no dialogue is possible.

To have a dialogue you have to speak the same language, and that is something that is no longer true in public discourse in America as molded by the Christianists. I take it as a fundamental unwillingness to accept any possibility of compromise, not to mention a complete disdain for objective reality. From Focus on the Family:

"If you're not looking at this through the eyes of someone caught up in the 'love affair' between these two men," Baehr said, "then the movie appears to be twisted, laughable, frustrating and boring Neo-Marxist homosexual propaganda."

If you approach anything from a closed mindset, you will have pretty much the same reaction -- approaching that remark from my mindset, you wind up with "twisted, laughable, frustrating and boring Neo-Fascist heterosupremacist progaganda." ("Neo-Marxist"? Excuse me? That must have been thrown in just in case someone wasn't already angry and paranoid enough. Can't have enough buzzwords, after all. And, given the comment about "anger strategies" later in this article, it becomes part of an obvious and quite cynical strategy.) At any rate, the commentator gives it all away in the quote above: he doesn't get it, and what's more, he has no desire to get it. It is not in his world view and is therefore, a priori and without examination, bad. (I find it highly instructive that FoF's website has no way for you to contact them, except to get a subscription to regular distortions.)

And frankly, in the quote that follows, take a look at the tactics: claiming responsibility, even in a negative way, for results (I'm reminded of the American Family Association's Donald Wildmon claiming success for their nine-year boycott of Disney, during which Disney had record revenues, not to mention the demands for payback from the preznit because, after all, it was the Christianists who gave him the election; I rather thought it was Diebold); the demonization of "Hollywood," which has somehow become a monolithic entity bent on destroying America; the deliberate call to use Christianist followers as a weapon, but very carefully, since it backfired last time (the fact that it usually backfires hasn't quite penetrated; I don't know that it ever will); the claim, implicit, to speak for all Christians (they don't even speak for all evangelicals).

It's important to let people know the truth about this film, according to Dick Rolfe of the Dove Foundation, but evangelicals shouldn't overreact. Hollywood would love to see Christians object to "Brokeback Mountain" the same way they did to "The Last Temptation of Christ."

"If Christians protest too loudly," he said, "they can end up making the mistake of calling attention to a movie that otherwise may not do very well at the box office."

That's exactly what happened with "The Last Temptation of Christ," a blasphemous film which was protested in the 1980s.

"Any success that that movie had at the box office," Rolfe said, "has been attributed to the amount of attention and protesting that Christians did exhibit toward the film. So we have to be very careful not use our anger strategies to a point where they boomerang on us."

Horse's ass -- of course if you make a stink about something, people are going to want to smell it for themselves. Not everyone believes your crap.

(By the way, given the emphasis on "it will flop if we ignore it" in the FoF propaganda, it's worth noting this, from Box Office Guru:

Exploding in platform release with one of the most spectacular grosses ever seen for a limited release bow was Ang Lee's cowboy love story Brokeback Mountain which debuted in only five cinemas but grossed an estimated $545,000 for a jaw-dropping $108,910 average per theater. The Heath Ledger-Jake Gyllenhaal drama has been showered with praise by critics and is already one of the top contenders for the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, and other prestigious prizes. This weekend, it was selected by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association as the best picture of the year with Lee also winning the director's trophy..)

They either have a completely inflated sense of their own importance, which assumes a shaky hold on reality, or they are -- how shall I put it? -- deliberate liars.

Thinking back on the reaction so far from the Christianists to Brokeback Mountain (the movie; I wonder indeed how many, if any, have read the story), to their repeated attempts to discredit Darwinism, trying to "take back" Christmas (and who else, after all, wants it?), their general assault on anything that smacks of independent thinking, there is only one possible conclusion: there is no hope of dialogue here. I hope the movie troubles people like Wildmon and his ilk, but it won't trouble them in any constructive way, won't make them think anything new, because they will reject it out of hand without ever seeing what's actually there. As a reviewer of books and music, I come to each new work with the idea that there are certain general forms that will most likely be adhered to, there are, in a very general way, certain expectations that are justified in terms of formal considerations, but the treatment, content, world view are not something I get to dictate. I can accept them or reject them, but I need to try to understand them if I am to maintain any visible integrity. That attitude obviously is not in play with the likes of FoF. Officially, at least, new thoughts are not part of the recipe. But then, from all available evidence, neither are compassion, generosity, charity, tolerance, simple humanity, or anything else that Jesus taught.

The historical parallel that keeps coming to mind in all this is Dmitri Shostakovich, who elected to stay in Russia and to try to please the Stalin regime, with lamentable results. (It's interesting to note that his chamber music, which did not receive widespread exposure in the USSR, is in general far superior to his symphonies.) In fact, look at Soviet art in general, or the art under any authoritarian regime: art in the service of ideology, banned if it strays outside the strictly defined bounds of acceptability, and if it does stay within those bounds, excrutiatingly boring and empty. That is really what the Christianists are trying to do here. Think about this the next time some "Christian" demands that a book be removed from the school library.

C. J. Cherryh, in The Chanur Saga, says "Don't shoot at something you can't talk to." It seems to me that if the something in question not only refuses to hear you, but is determined enough and aggressive enough to bend all its efforts toward destroying you, you have no other choice.

More on Brokeback Mountain:

Here are some of Spencer Windes' comments from Left Coast Breakdown, and a sensitive and thoughtful essay on his reaction as a gay Mormon

Andy Towle at Towleroad has extensive coverage, updated frequently.

And some screencaps, from which comes the image at the head of this post (when I figure out posting photos).

My own first reaction to the story is in the Writer's Blog at Hunter's Eye.