This article is from the New York Review of Books. Be
warned that it contains spoilers about the film.
Volume 53, Number 3 · February 23, 2006
Review
An Affair to Remember
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Brokeback Mountain
a film directed by Ang Lee, based on the story by E.
Annie Proulx
Brokeback Mountainthe highly praised new movie as
well as the short story by Annie Proulx on which the
picture is faithfully basedis a tale about two
homosexual men. Two gay men. To some people it will
seem strange to say this; to some other people, it
will seem strange to have to say it. Strange to say
it, because the story is, as everyone now knows, about
two young Wyoming ranch hands who fall in love as
teenagers in 1963 and continue their tortured affair,
furtively, over the next twenty years. And as everyone
also knows, when most people hear the words "two
homosexual men" or "gay," the image that comes to mind
is not likely to be one of rugged young cowboys who
shoot elk and ride broncos for fun.
Two homosexual men: it is strange to have to say it
just now because the distinct emphasis of so much that
has been said about the moviein commercial
advertising as well as in the adulatory reviewshas
been that the story told in Brokeback Mountain is not,
in fact, a gay story, but a sweeping romantic epic
with "universal" appeal. The lengths to which
reviewers from all over the country, representing
publications of various ideological shadings, have
gone in order to diminish the specifically gay element
is striking, as a random sampling of the reviews
collected on the film's official Web site makes clear.
The Wall Street Journal's critic asserted that "love
stories come and go, but this one stays with younot
because both lovers are men, but because their story
is so full of life and longing, and true romance." The
Los Angeles Times declared the film to be
a deeply felt, emotional love story that deals
with the uncharted, mysterious ways of the human heart
just as so many mainstream films have before it. The
two lovers here just happen to be men.
Indeed, a month after the movie's release most of the
reviews were resisting, indignantly, the popular
tendency to refer to it as "the gay cowboy movie." "It
is much more than that glib description implies," the
critic of the Minneapolis Star Tribune sniffed. "This
is a human story." This particular rhetorical emphasis
figures prominently in the advertising for the film,
which in quoting such passages reflects the producer's
understandable desire that Brokeback Mountain not be
seen as something for a "niche" market but as a story
with broad appeal, whatever the particulars of its
time, place, and personalities. (The words "gay" and
"homosexual" are never used of the film's two main
characters in the forty-nine-page press kit
distributed by the filmmakers to critics.) "One movie
is connecting with the heart of America," one of the
current print ad campaigns declares; the ad shows the
star Heath Ledger, without his costar, grinning in a
cowboy hat. A television ad that ran immediately after
the Golden Globe awards a few weeks ago showed clips
of the male leads embracing their wives, but not each
other.
The reluctance to be explicit about the film's themes
and content was evident at the Golden Globes, where
the film took the major awardsfor best movie drama,
best director, and best screenplay. When a short
montage of clips from the film was screened, it was
described as "a story of monumental conflict"; later,
the actor reading the names of nominees for best actor
in a movie drama described Heath Ledger's character as
"a cowboy caught up in a complicated love." After Ang
Lee received the award he was quoted as saying, "This
is a universal story. I just wanted to make a love
story."
Because I am as admiring as almost everyone else of
the film's many excellences, it seems to me necessary
to counter this special emphasis in the way the film
is being promoted and received. For to see Brokeback
Mountain as a love story, or even as a film about
universal human emotions, is to misconstrue it very
seriouslyand in so doing inevitably to diminish its
real achievement.
Both narratively and visually, Brokeback Mountain is a
tragedy about the specifically gay phenomenon of the
"closet"about the disastrous emotional and moral
consequences of erotic self-repression and of the
social intolerance that first causes and then
exacerbates it. What love story there is occurs early
on in the film, and briefly: a summer's idyll herding
sheep on a Wyoming mountain, during which two lonely
youths, taciturn Ennis and high-spirited Jack, fall
into bed, and then in love, with each other. The sole
visual representation of their happiness in love is a
single brief shot of the two shirtless youths horsing
around in the grass. That shot is eerilyand
significantlysilent, voiceless: it turns out that
what we are seeing is what the boys' boss is seeing
through his binoculars as he spies on them.
After thatbecause their love for each other can't be
fitted into the lives they think they must leadmisery
pursues and finally destroys the two men and everyone
with whom they come in contact with the relentless
thoroughness you associate with Greek tragedy. By the
end of the drama, indeed, whole families have been
laid waste. Ennis's marriage to a conventional,
sweet-natured girl disintegrates, savaging her simple
illusions and spoiling the home life of his two
daughters; Jack's nervy young wife, Lureen, devolves
into a brittle shrew, her increasingly elaborate and
artificial hairstyles serving as a visual marker of
the ever-growing mendacity that underlies the couple's
relationship. Even an appealing young waitress, with
whom Ennis after his divorce has a flirtation (an
episode much amplified from a bare mention in the
original story), is made miserable by her brief
contact with a man who is as enigmatic to himself as
he is to her. If Jack and Ennis are tainted, it's not
because they're gay, but because they pretend not to
be; it's the lie that poisons everyone they touch.
As for Jack and Ennis themselves, the brief and
infrequent vacations that they are able to take
together as the years pass"fishing trips" on which,
as Ennis's wife points out, still choking on her
bitterness years after their marriage fails, no fish
were ever caught are haunted, increasingly, by the
specter of the happier life they might have had, had
they been able to live together. Their final vacation
together (before Jack is beaten to death in what is
clearly represented, in a flashback, as a roadside
gay-bashing incident) is poisoned by mutual
recriminations. "I wish I knew how to quit you," the
now nearly middle-aged Jack tearfully cries out,
humiliated by years of having to seek sexual solace in
the arms of Mexican hustlers. "It's because of you
that I'm like thisnothing, nobody," the dirt-poor
Ennis sobs as he collapses in the dust. What Ennis
means, of course, is that he's "nothing" because
loving Jack has forced him to be aware of real passion
that has no outlet, aware of a sexual nature that he
cannot ignore but which neither his background nor his
circumstances have equipped him to make part of his
life. Again and again over the years, he rebuffs
Jack's offers to try living together and running "a
little cow and calf operation" somewhere, hobbled by
his inability even to imagine what a life of happiness
might look like.
One reason he can't bring himself to envision such a
life with his lover is a grisly childhood memory,
presented in flashback, of being taken at the age of
eight by his father to see the body of a gay rancher
who'd been tortured and beaten to deatha scene that
prefigures the scene of Jack's death. This explicit
reference to childhood trauma suggests another, quite
powerful, reason why Brokeback must be seen as a
specifically gay tragedy. In another review that
decried the use of the term "gay cowboy movie" ("a
cruel simplification"), the Chicago Sun-Times's
critic, Roger Ebert, wrote with ostensible compassion
about the dilemma of Jack and Ennis, declaring that
"their tragedy is universal. It could be about two
women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic
groupsany 'forbidden' love." This is well-meaning but
seriously misguided. The tragedy of heterosexual
lovers from different religious or ethnic groups is,
essentially, a social tragedy; as we watch it unfold,
we are meant to be outraged by the irrationality of
social strictures that prevent the two from loving
each other, strictures that the lovers themselves may
legitimately rail against and despise.
But those lovers, however star-crossed, never despise
themselves. As Brokeback makes so eloquently clear,
the tragedy of gay lovers like Ennis and Jack is only
secondarily a social tragedy. Their tragedy, which
starts well before the lovers ever meet, is primarily
a psychological tragedy, a tragedy of psyches scarred
from the very first stirrings of an erotic desire
which the world around thembeginning in earliest
childhood, in the bosom of their families, as Ennis's
grim flashback is meant to remind usrepresents as
unhealthy, hateful, and deadly. Romeo and Juliet (and
we) may hate the outside world, the Capulets and
Montagues, may hate Verona; but because they learn to
hate homosexuality so early on, young people with
homosexual impulses more often than not grow up hating
themselves: they believe that there's something wrong
with themselves long before they can understand that
there's something wrong with society. This is the
truth that Heath Ledger, who plays Ennis, clearly
understands"Fear was instilled in him at an early
age, and so the way he loved disgusted him," the actor
has saidand that is so brilliantly conveyed by his
deservedly acclaimed performance. On screen, Ennis's
self-repression and self-loathing are given startling
physical form: the awkward, almost hobbled quality of
his gait, the constricted gestures, the way in which
he barely opens his mouth when he talks all speak
eloquently of a man who is tormented simply by being
in his own bodyby being himself.
So much, at any rate, for the movie being a love story
like any other, even a tragic one. To their great
credit, the makers of Brokeback Mountainthe writers
Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, the director Ang
Leeseem, despite the official rhetoric, to have been
aware that they were making a movie specifically about
the closet. The themes of repression, containment, the
emptiness of unrealized livesall ending in the
"nothingness" to which Ennis achingly refersare
consistently expressed in the film, appropriately
enough, by the use of space; given the film's
homoerotic themes, this device is particularly
meaningful. The two lovers are only happy in the wide,
unfenced outdoors, where exuberant shots of enormous
skies and vast landscapes suggest, tellingly, that
what the men feel for each other is "natural." By
contrast, whenever we see Jack and Ennis indoors, in
the scenes that show the failure of their domestic and
social lives, they look cramped and claustrophobic.
(Ennis in particular is often seen in reflection, in
various mirrors: a figure confined in a tiny frame.)
There's a sequence in which we see Ennis in Wyoming,
and then Jack in Texas, anxiously preparing for one of
their "fishing trips," and both men, as they pack for
their tripEnnis nearly leaves behind his fishing
tackle, the unused and increasingly unpersuasive prop
for the fiction he tells his wife each time he goes
away with Jack pace back and forth in their
respective houses like caged animals.
The climax of these visual contrasts is also the
emotional climax of the film, which takes place in two
consecutive scenes, both of which prominently feature
closetsliteral closets. In the first, a
grief-stricken Ennis, now in his late thirties, visits
Jack's childhood home, where in the tiny closet of
Jack's almost bare room he discovers two shirtshis
and Jack's, the clothes they'd worn during their
summer on Brokeback Mountainone of which Jack has
sentimentally encased in the other. (At the end of
that summer, Ennis had thought he'd lost the shirt;
only now do we realize that Jack had stolen it for
this purpose.) The image which is taken directly from
Proulx's storyof the two shirts hidden in the closet,
preserved in an embrace which the men who wore them
could never fully enjoy, stands as the poignant visual
symbol of the story's tragedy. Made aware too late of
how greatly he was loved, of the extent of his loss,
Ennis stands in the tiny windowless space, caressing
the shirts and weeping wordlessly.
In the scene that follows, another misplaced piece of
clothing leads to a similar scene of tragic
realization. Now middle-aged and living alone in a
battered, sparsely furnished trailer (a setting with
which Proulx's story begins, the tale itself unfolding
as a long flashback), Ennis receives a visit from his
grown daughter, who announces that she's engaged to be
married. "Does he love you?" the blighted father
protectively demands, as if realizing too late that
this is all that matters. After the girl leaves, Ennis
realizes she's left her sweater behind, and when he
opens his little closet door to store it there, we see
that he's hung the two shirts from their first summer,
one still wearing the other, on the inside of the
closet door, below a tattered postcard of Brokeback
Mountain. Just as we see this, the camera pulls back
to allow us a slightly wider view, which reveals a
little window next to the closet, a rectangular frame
that affords a glimpse of a field of yellow flowers
and the mountains and sky. The juxtaposition of the
two spacesthe cramped and airless closet, the window
with its unlimited vistas beyondefficiently but
wrenchingly suggests the man's tragedy: the life he
has lived, the life that might have been. His eyes
filling with tears, Ennis looks at his closet and
says, "Jack, I swear..."; but he never completes his
sentence, as he never completed his life.
One of the most tortured, but by no means untypical,
attempts to suggest that the tragic heroes of
Brokeback Mountain aren't "really" gay appeared in, of
all places, the San Francisco Chronicle, where the
critic Mick LaSalle argued that the film is
about two men who are in love, and it makes no
sense. It makes no sense in terms of who they are,
where they are, how they live and how they see
themselves. It makes no sense in terms of what they do
for a living or how they would probably vote in a
national election....
The situation carries a lot of emotional power,
largely because it's so specific and yet undefined.
The two guyscowboysare in love with each other, but
we don't ever quite know if they're in love with each
other because they're gay, or if they're gay because
they're in love with each other.
It's possible that if these fellows had never met,
one or both would have gone through life straight.
The statement suggests what's wrong with so much of
the criticism of the film, however well-meaning it is.
It seems clear by now that Brokeback has received the
attention it's been getting, from critics and
audiences alike, partly because it seems on its
surface to make normal what many people think of as
gay experience bringing it into the familiar "heart
of America." (Had this been the story of, say, the
love between two closeted interior decorators living
in New York City in the 1970s, you suspect that there
wouldn't be full-page ads in the major papers
trumpeting its "universal" themes.) But the fact that
this film's main characters look like cowboys doesn't
make them, or their story, any less gay. Criticisms
like LaSalle's, and those of the many other critics
trying to persuade you that Brokeback isn't "really"
gay, that Jack and Ennis's love "makes no sense"
because they're Wyoming ranch hands who are likely to
vote Republican, only work if you believe that being
gay means having a certain look, or lifestyle (urban,
say), or politics; that it's anything other than the
bare fact of being erotically attached primarily to
members of your own sex.
Indeed, the point that gay people have been trying to
make for yearsa point that Brokeback could be making
now, if so many of its vocal admirers would listen to
what it's sayingis that there's no such thing as a
typi-cal gay person, a strangely different-seeming
person with whom Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar have
nothing in commonthankfully, you can't help feeling,
in the eyes of many commentators. (It is surely
significant that the film's only major departure from
Proulx's story are two scenes clearly meant to
underscore Jack's and Ennis's bona fides as macho
American men: one in which Jack successfully
challenges his boorish father-in-law at a Thanksgiving
celebration, and another in which Ennis punches a
couple of biker goons at a July Fourth picnica scene
that culminates with the image of Ennis standing tall
against a skyscape of exploding fireworks.)
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 homosexualthat 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.
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copyright © David Levine unless otherwise noted;
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