Two Gay Cowboys Hit a
Home Run
By FRANK RICH, Op-Ed
Columnist, NYTimes on the Web, December 18, 2005
WHAT if they held a culture war and
no one fired a shot? That's the compelling tale of "Brokeback Mountain."
Here is a heavily promoted American movie depicting two men having sex -- the
precise sex act that was still a crime in some states until the Supreme Court
struck down sodomy laws just two and a half years ago -- but there is no
controversy, no Fox News tar and feathering, no roar from the religious right.
"Brokeback Mountain" has instead become the unlikely Oscar favorite, propelled
by its bicoastal sweep of critics' awards, by its unexpected dominance of the
far less highfalutin Golden Globes and, perhaps most of all, by the lure of a
gold rush. Last weekend it opened to the highest per-screen average of any
movie this year.
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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Frank
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Barry
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Those screens were in New York, Los
Angeles and San Francisco -- hardly national bellwethers. But I'll rashly
predict that the big Hollywood question posed on the front page of The Los
Angeles Times after those stunning weekend grosses -- "Can 'Brokeback Mountain'
Move the Heartland?" -- will be answered with a resounding yes. All the
signs of a runaway phenomenon are present, from an instant parody on "Saturday
Night Live" to the report that a multiplex in Plano, Tex., sold more advance
tickets for the so-called "gay cowboy picture" than for "King Kong." "The
culture is finding us," James Schamus, the "Brokeback Mountain" producer, told
USA Today. "Grown-up movies have never had that kind of per-screen
average. You only get those numbers when you're vacuuming up enormous
interest from all walks of life."
In the packed theater where I caught "Brokeback Mountain," the trailers included
a National Guard recruitment spiel, and the audience was demographically all
over the map. The culture is seeking out this movie not just because it is
a powerful, four-hankie account of a doomed love affair and is beautifully acted
by everyone, starting with the riveting Heath Ledger. The X factor is that
the film delivers a story previously untold by A-list Hollywood. It's a
story America may be more than ready to hear a year after its president
cynically flogged a legally superfluous (and unpassable) constitutional
amendment banning same-sex marriage for the sole purpose of whipping up the
basest hostilities of his electoral base.
By coincidence, "Brokeback Mountain," a movie that is all the more subversive
for having no overt politics, is a rebuke and antidote to that sordid episode.
Whether it proves a movie for the ages or as transient as "Love Story," it is a
landmark in the troubled history of America's relationship to homosexuality.
It brings something different to the pop culture marketplace at just the pivotal
moment to catch a wave.
Heaven knows there has been no shortage of gay-themed entertainment in recent
years. To the tedious point of ubiquity, gay characters, many of them
updated reincarnations of the stereotypical fops and fussbudgets of 1930's
studio comedies, are at least as well represented as other minorities in
prime-time television. Entertainment Weekly has tallied nine movies,
including "Capote" and "Rent," with major gay characters this year. But "Brokeback
Mountain," besides being more sexually candid than the norm, is not set in urban
America, is not comic or camp, and, unlike the breakout dramas "Philadelphia"
and "Angels in America," is pre-AIDS.
Its heroes are neither midnight cowboys, drugstore cowboys nor Village People
cowboys. As Annie Proulx writes in the brilliant short story from which
the movie has been adapted, the two ranch hands, Ennis Del Mar (Mr. Ledger) and
Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), are instead simply "high school dropout country
boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both
rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life."
They meet and fall in love while tending sheep in the Wyoming wilderness in
1963. That was the year of Martin Luther King Jr.'s march on Washington
and Betty Friedan's "Feminine Mystique," but gay Americans, and not just in
Wyoming, were stranded, still waiting for the world to start spinning forward.
Over the next two decades of sporadic reunions and long separations, both Ennis
and Jack get married and have children; it barely occurs to them to do
otherwise. In their place and time, there is no vocabulary to articulate
their internal conflicts, no path to steer their story to a happily-ever-after
Hollywood ending. Before they know it, they are, in Ms. Proulx's words,
"no longer young men with all of it before them."
Ennis's and Jack's acute emotions -- yearning, loneliness, disappointment, loss,
love and, yes, lust -- are affecting because they are universal. But while
the screenplay, by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, adheres closely to the
Proulx original, it even more vividly roots the movie in the rural all-American
milieu, with its forlorn honky-tonks and small-town Fourth of July picnics,
familiar from elegiac McMurtry works like "The Last Picture Show." More
crucially, the script adds detail to Ennis's and Jack's wives (as do Michelle
Williams and Anne Hathaway, who play them) so that we can implicitly, and
without any on-screen moralizing, see the cost inflicted on entire families, not
just on Ennis and Jack, when gay people must live a lie.
Though "Brokeback Mountain" is not a western, it's been directed by Ang Lee with
the austerity and languorous gait of a John Ford epic. These aesthetics
couldn't be more country miles removed from "The Birdcage" or "Will & Grace."
The audience is forced to recognize that gay people were fixtures in the red
state of Wyoming (and every other corner of the country, too) long before
Matthew Shepard and Mary Cheney were born. Without a single polemical
speech, this laconic film dramatizes homosexuality as an inherent and immutable
identity, rather than some aberrant and elective "agenda" concocted by
conspiratorial "elites" in Chelsea, the Castro and South Beach, as anti-gay
proselytizers would have it. Ennis and Jack long for a life together, not
for what gay baiters pejoratively label a "lifestyle."
But in truth the audience doesn't have to be coerced to get it. This is
where the country has been steadily moving of late. "Brokeback Mountain,"
a Hollywood product after all, is not leading a revolution but ratifying one,
fleshing out -- quite literally -- what most Americans now believe. It's
not for nothing that the proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage
vanished as soon as the election was over. Polls show that a large
American majority support equal rights for gay couples as long as the unions
aren't labeled "marriage" -- and given the current swift pace of change, that
reservation, too, will probably fade in the next 5 to 10 years.
The history of "Brokeback Mountain" as a film project in itself crystallizes how
fast the climate has shifted. Mr. McMurtry and Ms. Ossana bought the
screen rights to the Proulx story after it was published in The New Yorker in
1997. That was the same year the religious right declared a fatwa on
Disney because Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet in her ABC prime-time
sitcom. In the eight years it took "Brokeback Mountain" to overcome
Hollywood's shilly-shallying and at last be made, the Disney boycott collapsed
and Ms. DeGeneres's star rose. She's now a mainstream daytime talk-show
host competing with Oprah. No one has forgotten she's a lesbian. No
one cares.
ANOTHER startling snapshot of this progress can be found in a culture-war
skirmish that unfolded just as "Brokeback Mountain" was arriving at the
multiplex. The American Family Association of Tupelo, Miss., a leader in
the 1997 anti-"Ellen" crusade, claimed this month that its threat of a boycott
had led Ford to stop advertising its Jaguar and Land Rover lines in glossy gay
magazines. Last week Ford, under fire from gay civil-rights organizations
and no doubt many other mainstream customers, essentially told the would-be
boycotters to get lost by publicly announcing that it would not only resume its
Jaguar and Land Rover ads in gay publications, but advertise other brands in
them as well.
As far as I can tell, the only blowhard in the country to turn up on television
to declare culture war on "Brokeback Mountain" also has an affiliation with the
American Family Association. By contrast, as Salon reported last week,
other family-values ayatollahs have made a conscious decision to ignore the
movie, lest they drum up ticket sales by turning it into a SpongeBob SquarePants
cause célèbre. Robert Knight of Concerned Women for America imagined that
the film might just go away if he and his peers stayed mum. Audiences
"don't want to see two guys going at it," he told Salon. "It's that
simple."
So he might wish. The truth is that the millions of moviegoers soon to
swoon over the star-crossed gay cowboys of "Brokeback Mountain" can probably put
up with the sight of "two guys going at it." It's the all too American
tragedy of what happens to these men afterward that neither our hearts nor
consciences can so easily shake.
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