March 08, 2006
Brokeback Mountain
Straight Outta Brokeback
My grandmother told me that when she was younger, she could see Mount Rainer in the moonlight whenever on a nighttime return home to Auburn from Seattle. That always fascinated me, because the light pollution of the cities is too strong to see Rainer these days. But then again, that's something I've always just assumed. I've never actually looked for Rainer at night, so it just might be that I'm not looking hard enough.
In the pop culture world today, the mountain everyone is trying to get a bead on is called Brokeback. What is the true Brokeback Mountain? Like Rainer, I wonder if light pollution from all the fanfare could be getting in the way of a clear view. Or is that I just haven't been looking hard enough?
Suffice to say, Brokeback is in everyway as omnipresent a mountain in the American cultural landscape as Rainer is in the Pacific Northwest. Opinions on the film are like the Lance Armstrong bracelets from a while back: everybody's got one, for every possible issue or angle. Some are worn for vanity, some for a genuine cause. I still haven't chosen which Brokeback bracelet to wear. If there really were Brokeback bracelets for every possible opinion on the film, I imagine my arm would be covered from its pit to my palm.
For one, I would need a bracelet appreciating the film for all its technical aspects: the cinematography, the pacing, the editing, the music. Brokeback is beautiful on its face (thanks due, I think, to director Ang Lee). Speaking of faces: I would also need a Heath Ledger bracelet, whom I could not take my eyes off of through the entire picture. He is really is a hunk when he is not playing an overconfident asshole. I also would need another bracelet to indicate that the film left me in tears at its end, and that I left the theater thinking it was the best new film I had seen in years.
I have a feeling these bracelets would be the most popular, top-sellers. But they would have to vie on my arm for space with some more, much less popular, but far more important ones, which put my immediate reaction of "best new film" in doubt. Honestly, a part of the film I could relate to was its depiction of longing, longing for better futures denied by an authoritarian, hyper-masculine society. This is what left me stricken with emotion in my theater seat. But the film ultimately denies these better futures to its characters, and in doing so it joins a long tradition of Hollywood films whose ultimate message is "To be gay is to be tragic. Be gay and you will suffer." The film never pushes farther than asking you to empathize about this tragedy — it does not present alternative notions of love or gender as being viable, only likely to be snuffed out. The film might be liberal then, but hardly radical. It never tells us that you can be gay and be empowered at the same time. This relates to the larger issue of how gay the film actually is, written and performed by a troupe of straight people as it is.
This is what makes Brokeback Mountain a dangerous one to climb. It is a slippery slope for straight people, as it fills a lot of straight fantasies of what gay life is or isn't — fantasies as tired and as played out as these mountain metaphors I keep using. For instance, I was telling two different groups of straight people at two different times, in two different settings, about My Beautiful Laundrette, a 1985 film that explores the experience of several generations of Pakistanis in England. The film happens to contain a gay relationship, which the film doesn't necessarily revolve around, but it is important to the story. Whenever I got to this point in my description of Laundrette, the response was "Like Brokeback?" The comparison couldn't more be farther off if the two films were made in two different decades on two different continents, about two completely different issues — oh wait, they were! But the people I was talking with made the comparison, because Brokeback is the ubiquitous gay frame of reference.
Like the Rainer of my grandmother's memory, when I think Brokeback Mountain I long to see a beautiful movie — and it is, on its face. I will admit Brokeback was immediately affecting to a straight male like me, but how far that affection goes remains to be seen. In all honesty, I have not looked hard enough to completely pass judgment — I have not, for instance, done my homework in queer studies. Until I have done that homework, my arms will be immobilized by a string of contradicting and unsettled opinions, and my longing for a better futures — and clearer views — will amount to little.
