Home on the range, it's not.

The Idea of America
Notes Toward a Review
of Brokeback Mountain

1. The Negative.
Imagine a Ralph Lauren Polo ad. That costs $20 million. That moves. That lasts two hours. And has a sad ending.

Everybody calls it the gay cowboy movie. It should actually be thought of as the gay shepherd movie. The two leads actually earn their living taking care of sheep on a mountain. They just happen to dress, talk, and act like cowboys.

Make of it whatever else you will, it is a gay minstrel show. Everybody involved (except possibly the director, Ang Lee—his first big hit, remember, was this Taiwanese movie (The Wedding Banquet) about, well, a gay guy…) has more or less publicly established their heterosexual bona fides before, during, and after the filming.

Maybe an act of minstrelcy is necessary to get some hint of gay reality in front of the mainstream audience. (Or maybe not.)

Just as it took a Nixon to get to China, maybe it takes a Larry McMurtry to get to gay America.

Story tellers we shall always have with us. In spite of the baroque felicities of metafiction and the baroquer infelicities of literary theory, there's still no substitute for narrative (beginning, middle, end) to make sense (or nonsense) of the world. We rightly celebrate fabulists and in the novels McMurtry has been one of the best. But here his considerable story-telling skills seems stretched thin. Maybe the problem is the the carefully molded 5,000 words of the short story on which the movie is based just can't be expanded to 120 minutes of screen time. Or maybe it's Ang Lee's almost glacial pacing.

For all McMurtry’s skillful mining of and embroidery on the various stories and myths of the American West, homosexuals are notable by their absence from his books (and movies). On Larry’s range, never is heard a sibilant word.

So here he goes, plunging (with his female partner—bona fides alert!) into Annie Proulx's spare, intensely respectful, evocative short story, emerging with what is basically a blockbuster gay weepie on the hoary model of all great Hollywood weepies and "women’s films" of the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s and, latterly "chick flicks," or even more latterly, the Lifetime channel.

Think Dorothy Malone in "Written on the Wind." Think Lana Turner in "Imitation of Life." Think everybody in "Valley of the Dolls." Think the straight world gone tragically awry in, say, "Peyton Place." And so on.

Except here we’ve got two, well, hunks. Who, well, go at it. And, uh, then fall in love. Sort of. And stay in love, sort of, at least until, uh, same time next year, yes? As one reviewer on imdb.com put it, "Man if this is what Ang Lee calls a relationship, I would hate to see what he calls a "fuck buddy"!

Freudians (remember Freudians?) used to call what happens here "contingency inversion," which translates roughly as "hormones ueber alles," or "any hole in a storm." Isolate a bunch of young guys (in prison, on naval ships, in English boarding schools, etc.) and before long you’re gonna get a whole lot of, well, as they used to call it out on the prairie, cornholing.

Which is what this movie gives us. Bigtime. Maybe—maybe!—as the years pass in the story it morphs into something realer (this is much easier to believe in the short story than in the movie). But the movie keeps putting this stuff in our faces with a minimum of anything resembling love. I male, you male, we fuck, then have roughhouse horseplay. So to speak.

Plus of course the whole unaddressed issue of the utter sweetness of forbidden fruit (so to speak) that keeps its sweetness by being forbidden and by being tasted on now and then.

It ain’t real. It ain’t love. Just like in the old weepies. That wasn't real and it wasn’t love, but those fairy tales had a purpose: tell a story, get the viewer emotionally invested and then yank hard on the old heart strings. It worked then. It still works here, now, in this movie. The gay shepherd weepie movie.

What no one talks about is how Ang Lee makes clear in early, establishing shots that the Jack character has been around the gay block more than a few times and is in fact cruising hunk Heath/Ennis as soon as he comes into view. Anyone for seduction? (Be it ever so humble, there's no place like Eden.) Is this in the screenplay? In the short story? Or is it Ang Lee’s subtle, important addition?

Travel alert for unwitting would-be tourists: Do NOT go to Wyoming expecting to see the scenery that’s in the movie. For that, you’ll need to plan a trip to the CANADIAN Rockies. You’re welcome.

There is, sadly, considerable unintended humor here. It’s not a problem in the short story because on paper you don’t have images of a million sheep carpeting the mountainside constantly in your face. For example,  the movie puts the sheep (about a million of 'em, it looks like) up-front and it’s impossible not to think, even if fleetingly, of all the jokes about what shepherds do on cold nights. Except here, course, no sheep is needed…

If nothing else, Brokeback at least makes it much more likely that the mainstream audience will pick up on all sorts of homoerotic subtexts in Westerns past, present, and future. The masses will never be able to look at a John Wayne movie the same way again (and does this mean Orange County will re-think the name of their airport?).

To understand why intelligent critics went overboard, you have to realize that they see EVERYTHING that’s released. When ANYTHING comes along from Hollywood that doesn’t have $100 million worth of computer graphics backing up either childish or adolescent fantasy stories, they immediately give the movie three stars going in without having seen a single frame. When the movie turns out to have at least a smidgen of character-complexity and -growth, the movie automatically gets another star. Add at least an effort at taboo-busting minority-boosting and there comes star number five.

Over a long career Larry McMurtry has entertained and, on occasion, enlightened us about our humanity generally and, specifically, about the idea of America.

In the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, he and Diana Ossana took Annie Proulx’s intense, concise, vivid miniature and, with Ang Lee’s vision, expanded it to a small but epic telling of a story about one part of the large mosaic that makes up the idea of America. One important and virtually unknown part, the homosexual part.

Be brave and ask Americans to name the greatest American novelist. From the mass answers you’ll most likely most often get Mark Twain. From more educated answers you’ll get the name of a homosexual. Herman Melville.

Be really brave and ask Americans to name the greatest American poet. Chances are you’ll get the name of a homosexual. Walt Whitman.

Does it matter (that they were homosexual)? Yes and no. (Does it matter that Shakespeare wrote some of the greatest love poetry in English to a young man? Yes and no.)

Does it matter that the society pretends they weren’t homosexual? Does it matter that the society ostracizes and often condemns homosexuals to a ghetto life? Yes. Yes. Yes. If anything matters, this does.

Using his own money and his own considerable leverage, Larry McMurtry put a fair, if difficult, part of homosexual reality on the Hollywood screen. Big budget, big production values, big distribution.

To do that (whatever the shortcomings of the final work) is not so much to alter American reality as to bring an important part of the idea of America into such clear and prominent focus that the society can’t go on pretending it’s not so.

Homosexuals also we shall always have with us. And great homosexuals do great things for great societies.

Brokeback Mountain as Art:
Genre fiction is ghettoized. No Robert Parker mystery is ever going to win a Pulitzer or other major prize from the arbiters of art fiction.
Film genres are not so ostracized. Science-fiction, thrillers, and yes even weepies all stand a chance at an Oscar. Star Wars did it, The Silence of the Lambs did it.
And what of Brokeback Mountain? Weepie as art? Is it possible? Of course.
There are low-art weepies (Love Story [very low]) and high-art weepies. You can make a good case that one of the greatest movies is nothing but an extended high-art weepie: Gone with the Wind.
So too with Brokeback Mountain. It aims for the heart, pulls no punches, doesn't cheat. For the viewer willing to enter its brilliantly evoked world, the movie does what all great art does. Its reality engulfs, convinces, wrenches, and salves.

McMurtry gets credit, not just for his storytelling talent (which we already knew about), but for getting Brokeback Mountain to the screens of America (and the world).

The idea of America at least in part is a little clearer now than it was before this movie existed.

We’re here. We’re queer. None of your sermons, none of your laws, none of your de facto discrimination will change that fact. Not on a mountain in Wyoming. Not now. Not ever.

Thanks, Larry.

END

Two reviews that go intelligently against the tsunami of unadulterated praise:
Armond White in The New York Press,
and Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.