Neither of us connected with the film, emotionally, and I suspect this may be because neither of us connected with Ledger, emotionally. It wasn't that his acting was bad, he just.... Well, actually, apart from being closeted and queer, his character was kind of an asshole. I found Jake Gyllenhaal much more sympathetic and open, as a character to identify with, but we weren't 'allowed' to identify with him, he was the lost love object.
I don't think Lee set out to consciously allow or disallow identification with this or that character. You identified with who you identified with. I could readily identify with both leads and those around them. I can see the "kind of an asshole" thing, particularly if one takes the viewpoint that yes, he could transcend his upbringing, personality and social circumstances - and settle down with someone. I read it more as Ennis being unable to do these things, making him a tragic figure rather than simply an arse.
Jack's much more contemporary 'queer' in the sense of being able to at least conceive of a happy life with a male partner. That makes him more sympathetic.
Did people really think the sex scene was hot? My partner said she thought the film lacked a 'gay male gaze' -- by which she meant the shots didn't sexualise Jack's or Ennis' bodies at all, didn't linger on them, didn't track them to allow the audience to relate to them as sexualised. (This wasn't the case for the female characters.) In a way, it was like watching men fuck via the eye of a straight person. Almost like Ang Lee went back in the closet especially for the film. Eric Bana's body was sexualised more in Hulk. Why?
I suspect because he was trying to remain faithful to the novel, which doesn't dwell on male bodies either. I think the aim of the film was not to present us with "hot" male bodies or a gay male gaze, but to concentrate on the smaller, more subtle homoerotic details. I don't see it as Lee going "back in the closet" at all, more as Lee attempting to pull back and allow the camera to be relatively neutral (in terms of 'gaze'). That and focussing on the growing intimacy and passion between Ennis and Jack rather than the 'hott body' stuff.
I agree that female bodies were treated slightly differently - in that we saw a lot more of bedroom scenes, exposed breasts, etc. One could probably argue, however, that the extended near-reverie on Brokeback Mountain, with its glances and smiles and opening-out was the mens' equivalent of those bedroom scenes, initially sublimated/diffused, latterly more explicit.
Depends on one's expectations, I suppose, and what one finds "hot". For me, the homoerotic 'sideways glance' stuff is much more sexy than 'conventional' clothes-off skin-flick fare, so this particular gay male had much to gaze upon. It wasn't a 'sexy' film, though, overall; it aimed much more for emotional engagement and, with me, succeeded.
What bothered me most was the isolation of the main characters -- from any kind of 'queer' or homo cultural spaces, but also from the other characters, their wives, their kids, the people around them. No-one except Jack and Ennis ever have any kind of conversation about queerness that isn't either hostile/homophobic or betrayed.
Isn't this sort of the entire point? Or one of the central points: that Jack and Ennis, by dint of time, place and upbringing, lack the resources - even linguistically, and in Ennis's case, psychologically - to begin to build any sort of "homo cultural space". It isn't there, and they can't make it. Jack would try, but Ennis can't make the conceptual leap.
This means that the other characters -- particularly the women -- are almost presented as homophobic by default. They're figured as the incomprehending obstacles to love having its way.
They're presented as obstacles, certainly, merely by existing. I don't see this as mapping automatically onto "homophobic by default", unless you mean 'phobic' in the sense of feeling afraid of losing a partner or bitter/sad about having lost a partner to something they haven't encountered, know little about and don't understand.
And I guess I don't really agree that the women in the film are presented as understanding or condoning anything.
You don't think Ma Twist tacitly understands Ennis's distress in that final scene?
So the heroism of just 'pushing through', necessarily closeted, 'hostage to fate' in the way Ennis talks about it (and their heroism as sympathetic characters) depends largely on that isolation and separation between the queer bubbleof Ennis and Jack, and the outside straight world. Life isn't like that.
I'm sorry, but that's bollocks. Life is like that, or at least can be like that. I've never grown up working class in 1960s Wyoming (and neither have you), but I've grown up in 1970s small town Scotland - and there a load I can relate to in terms of feeling utterly isolated, separate from the rest of 'normal' masculinity, knowing little or nothing about 'queerness' and being terrified of the label and what it might mean for me and my life.
For many, life was - and possibly still is - like that.
Indeed, we don't get to know the rest of the characters, what they're thinking, what they're feeling. We see them mostly through Ennis' and Jack's eyes, apart from Alma, who doen't do anything but cry ineffectually.
That's an oversimplification. We don't get to know the other characters fully, no, because they're secondary to the relationship at the centre of the story and thus relevant only inasmuch as they influence and are influenced by that relationship. This doesn't mean we see them only through the prism of Jack and Ennis, however. We're given glimpses of Lureen's mixed feelings about the abrasive relationship between her father and husband - and, in the final 'phone call, we see her distress at the realisation that Ennis meant more to Jack than she did (we very literally don't see this through either man's eyes). We're shown Alma's relationship with her sympathetic male boss, and left to wonder whether her subsequent marriage to him is a compromise. We see Ennis's daughter as an independent young woman who loves her father but expects little or nothing from him. Heart-breakingly, we see Ma Twist's wordless emotional intelligence, and speculate on her life with Jack's father, and the compromises she's made.
We're not shown a huge amount explicitly about each of these characters - because they're secondary characters - but they're nonetheless rounded enough to be more than simple ciphers or mirrors of Jack and Ennis. They're absolutely not uniformly "homophobic by default"; every secondary character differs in the extent and degree to which they accept (or don't accept) that their partners/fathers/sons are not the same as other men.
And Ennis, at least, doesn't even change throughout the film. He's not trandsformed, dramatically, he doesn't go on a journey. He gets old and drinks more. Where was the suspense, the tension, the drama, all the elements of good film-making?
Again, the fact that Ennis doesn't change is central to the story's tragedy. He can't change; it's his flaw, a flaw which leads to his hardening and the unravelling of those around him. There's a brief window in his life when he's free of context, of the things that chain and drag him down - but it's insufficient to make him change forever. It's a tragedy. Ask Shakespeare.
One could certainly argue that Brokeback Mountain lacks suspense in an OMG!1 edge-of-seat kind of way; one is invested, to an extent, in the men's dilemma and how/if they might resolve it - and I think it's 'suspenseful' in the sense of wondering what's going to happen next. Tension? I think there's erotic tension aplenty, particularly in the extended sequence of unfolding leading up to Jack and Ennis making the implicit explicit (this gay's gaze, again). Drama? I found it emotionally dramatic in the extreme.
So... I don't really agree at all with your suggestion that it's not "good film making". If you remained completely unengaged emotionally, then I suppose you'd see it all very differently, though.
I really like Proulx's story, and I think as a short story it works, but as a film, and a period piece at that, Brokeback Mountain is kind of decontextualised. Somewhere else in the USA during the 60's, Gay Liberation was happening, the Stonewall riots were happening, and men, possibly even cowboys, were loving each other in states like Wyoming and Texas. There were bars you could go to, if you found out where and on what night and who to pay.
This is a variant on the 'well, why didn't they just move to San Francisco' argument. In my opinion, it misses the point. Whether or not "Gay Liberation" is just around the corner is irrelevant - to Ennis, certainly, who doesn't identify as gay, and possibly to Jack, who, if he weren't specifically in love with Ennis might or might not identify as gay. Neither man has embraced a gay or queer identity. We could doubtless spend a while speculating as to why this is the case, but it's not simply because they don't know which night Kylie's playing the O K Corral.
Where is that in the film, given that some of the plot depends on it? How does Jack Twist know to go to Mexico to buy sex, and how does Ennis Del Mar know about it too?
Presumably it's well-known that one can get whatever one wants, sexually, over the border. For Jack, Mexico's a sort of bastardised form of Brokeback Mountain in that it's a place where he can forget his social ties and have sex with men. We don't know Jack's sexual history but, as I mentioned upthread, there's the suggestion that he's both 'gayer' (in terms of good ol' Kinsey) and more sexually experienced than Ennis. It's perfectly plausible that the subject of Mexican prostitution - of all sorts - has come up in his conversations. As a kid, I was aware that this or that place was where the queers hung out, even though I'd never encountered one. It was playground lore.
And Ennis, while emotionally crippled is not unperceptive, particularly when it comes to Jack. Jack keeps suggesting they move to Mexico, and it doesn't take a huge amount of speculation on his part to hypothesise why. It's not unlikely that Jack has talked to him about how certain things are more accepted in Mexico.
I don't get why people are saying this is a breakthrough film. Apart from that it's a Hollywood production, which means what? It was okay. Hollywood has produced queerer films.
I'm not sure about "breakthrough", but Brokeback Mountain is a bit of a first in at least some ways. It's not 'queer', no, but I don't think it set out to be - certainly not The Queerest Hollywood Film Evar. It set out to tell a love story in which the lovers were male, and their relationship was not played for laughs. It succeeded. It used big-name actors, who've become bigger-name actors as a result of the film, and far from being marginalised, it's been all over the mainstream and won a clutch of awards.
It proves to me that gayness is no longer enough, as a plot feature, to transport me, and that seems a sign of where culture is at (or perhaps just my small corner of it) -- the bar is now raised. To impress me and win my heart, queer films have to make deeper comment than individualistic narratives about failed love affairs.
Perhaps it's worth looking at what you expect from a "queer film", and how you'd define one in the first instance. If winning your heart means an affirmative story of how embracing "gayness" changes people for the better and makes them happy happy happy, then I'd agree that Brokeback's not that film (although Queer As Folk might be). If you're after explicit sexiness, then no, it's not "hot" in that sense (although I daresay that's largely a matter of personal preference). If you wanted a film about 'queer issues', then it wasn't that either. I thought it was something of a breakthrough in that it was Hollywood tackling an explicitly sexual long-term loving relationship between two men in a serious, fuss-free manner. That's something we generally don't see very much.
I didn't see it as a "queer film" particularly but a straightforward tale of two rather different men falling in love and trying - ultimately unsuccessfully - to make that love fit with the rest of their lives. Whether that makes it a "failed love affair" is up for grabs. Although it's a love affair which, in the end, devastates both lovers, I'd say otherwise. |
