Identity: Subverting the Archetypes

There are interviews with both Heath Ledger and Ang Lee in this week's Windy City Times (vol. 21, no. 15, December 14, 2005). In the piece with Lee, the interviewer, Richard Knight, Jr., makes the comment that he (meaning "we") wants to own the film. I can understand that -- I want some ownership here, too, but I think making that attempt would be a mistake, in a way. In a big way. I don't think the community (and by that I don't mean the alphabet soup that calls itself "the community," I mean specifically gay men, who once had a community and a culture of their own) should fall in with what the media have christened the film: it's not a "gay" movie except in the most rudimentary sense -- the lovers are both men. "Gay" means a lot more than that, and in this instance that's the crux of the whole thing: these men are not "gay" in the sense that they are participants in any cultural or even personal identity that bears that label. In fact, a major part of the power and depth of the story is that they reject that identity. They are just men who fall in love with each other, which is actually, I suspect, much more the way things were before nineteenth-century psychologists decided that "homosexual" was not only a pattern of behavior but a personality type. (I think that the current attempts to identify Lincoln, Washington, etc. as "gay" are missing the point entirely, and the energy would be better spent debunking the whole mythology of "personality types" and specifically the idea of a "gay" identity as anything other than a cultural phenomenon, developed, I think, much more as a defense against a hostile society than as an outgrowth of a specific pattern of personality. One might as well say that "Jewish" or "Black" identified a personality type outside of participation in a distinct subculture. I can certainly understand the urge, but think about it a minute. Our credibility starts to go down the toilet.)

So, it's not a gay story. It's a story, more than anything, about men. I'm making no guesses as to whether Proulx put that there deliberately (and actually, after running across that quote from her about Ennis and Jack that I put in the last post, I more than suspect she did), but that's what I found, after thinking about it a while. Like all good stories, it tells about men by telling about two specific men, and if you can pull yourself past the fact that they are two men who love each other (and that's a whole topic in itself), perhaps you can start to see the larger story about what we have done to men (and, insofar as men can be blamed for our culture, which I don't take as a settled question, what men have done to themselves.) It's the inarticulateness, the necessary recourse to physical means of expression, the inability even to identify feelings -- it's an American icon, the Marlboro Man (who, incidentally, was gay -- at least the actor who portrayed him was). It's lacking the resources to identify yourself. This is not something that has to do with sexual orientation. It's the traditional male role in America, the strong silent type. (I have to admit to a particular weakness for that type, since I don't really like to talk much myself. I do insist, however, that he have some means of expressing himself other than a left hook.)

That's the up side of the liberalization of attitudes that has been happening over the past couple of generations, giving people the means to identify themselves in some way that means something to them. We can make jokes about it, but if you can't come up with an identity and a context that mean something to you, what have you got? And if, like Ennis, we are forced to identify ourselves by someone else's criteria, all we can expect is heartache, that nagging suspicion that our lives have been wasted. It's really become an expectation, I think, that we have a certain freedom to determine who we are and that no one has the right to abrogate that freedom.

There are, of course, potent forces in American society today who want nothing more than that very abrogation, to make sure the only means we have for self-identification are the definitions they provide. Hence the ludicrous quote that I posted from the Focus on the Family article. (I'll say it again: not only did he not get it, he didn't want to get it, he had no intention of getting it, because it conflicts with his preconceptions, which I consider really warped to begin with.) I realize that I'm about to lose my liberal, politically correct credentials here (what tatters of them are left), but I can't think of any way that anyone can convince me that the likes of Donald Wildmon and the rest of the rabid right are hitting on all cylinders. They're shrewd, resourceful, and very clever, but they're crazy, which is what you call anyone who is trying to impose their subjective reality on the collective reality that we've all worked out together. That collective reality, the consensus-in-the-making, is that gay men also deserve recognition of their humanity and that an intrinsic part of that humanity is their sexuality. That's one reason that it's so important that this movie not be seen as a "gay movie." It's not, really, it has none of those cultural tags, it's a story that quite explicitly rejects that identification, and one big mistake that I think a lot of commentators are making is to accept that terminology without examination. We really need for it to be seen as a universal movie -- think about it for a second.

We're not only men (speaking from myself as a more-or-less representative example of that group), but we're human beings. I recently had a coworker comment to me that there is universality here for anyone who has ever felt deeply toward someone and found external obstacles that precluded developing any sort of real relationship. In her case it was Mexican-American co-ed meets Scotch-Irish boy who couldn't get past his upbringing to meet her as an individual human being. In the context of this movie, does that sound about right? We need something that is going to pull us, as a category, out of the PC window-dressing area and into the thick of the human mix.

So what about straight men? Aside from their being a category at porn sites, what about them? I know straight men who are going to be able to see Brokeback Mountain and understand it very, very well. I also know straight men who are not going to be able to get far enough past their own insecurities that they will be able to see what the movie is saying. So what else is new? (The downside of marketing to target audiences is that they're never monolithic. I suppose it works well enough, though.)

Perhaps part of my take on this (OK -- a big part of my take, the very foundation of my take) is that I see this kind of romance as perfectly normal. Two men fall in love -- what could be more unremarkable? It should be unremarkable. Maybe someday it will be.