Brokeback Mountain: To Be and Not To Be

Yay! Found the missing post from two days ago.




This article from the New York Review of Books almost makes a point that I've not managed to pin down, although the writer actually doesn't pin it down either. But at least it got me thinking.

The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really homosexual-that they're more like the heart of America than like "gay people"-you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed.

There's a connection there that I missed -- or rather, that I was looking for and never quite managed to clarify. No, those who say Brokeback Mountain is not a gay movie are not wrong, whatever their motivations. As I said at one point, its reach is far beyond that. However, the blanket statement that it is a gay movie strikes me as somewhat akin to saying that West Side Story is about gangs.

Yes, of course there is a lot of relevance to gays, and a lot of identification there. Correspondent I.S. Ball noted:

I will say no movie has ever captured what being gay in small town America is like until this movie. Ennis was like so many guys in the South, Midwest, and other rural areas of America. Who learns that they are but have it pounded into them that this is not right to find out in their heart and in their bodies that it is right and true. I have seen very few movies that have touched me like this movie and how a lot of it is true to life.

It's this very slippery thing that people do of using words with various shades of meaning as though they didn't have those nuances. If it were a "gay" movie in terms of identity and culture, of course, it would not have the reach it has. The writer's own example of a love story about two interior decorators in New York in the 1970s nails that one. At the same time, its overt subject matter is "gay" in normal parlance.* What happens, and what I was trying to say in a number of places and didn't quite manage, is that the film goes beyond that easy idenfication. (But then, we all do.) I came close with the comment that maybe it tood a straight woman to have enough distance to write the story and make it real. A gay man could not have done it, I think.

So, Brokeback Mountain is and is not a gay movie.

See, you can have your cake . . . .

(*Stray thought, speaking of nuance: I wonder if creationists have thought about the ramifications of trying to reduce their inerrant Scripture to "only a theory.")

(Another stray thought -- "nuance" itself might be worthy of being blogged. We'll see. It's so totally unfashionable that I really am attracted to the idea.)


Foonote: We Don't Need No Stinkin' Culchah:

So now a teacher in Colorado is in trouble for introducing children to opera:

Tresa Waggoner showed approximately 250 first-, second- and third-graders at Bennett Elementary portions of a 33-year-old series titled "Who's Afraid of Opera" a few weeks ago.

The video features the soprano Dame Joan Sutherland and three puppet friends discussing Gounod's "Faust." Waggoner thought it would be a good introduction to opera.

. . .

Another parent, Casey Goodwin, said, "I think it glorifies Satan in some way."

Casey Goodwin needs to remove head from inside butt and figure out what's going on. It's really just another Christianist tactic -- the idea that the mere portrayal of something is somehow an endorsement. Of course, from the level of commentary on phenomena like this, I find it hard to believe that some of these people can walk and breathe without close supervision, much less deal with questions of how something is portrayed.