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All that Brokeback Allows
Author(s): Jim Kitses
Source: Film Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 3 (Spring 2007), pp. 22-27
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2007.60.3.22
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Film Quarterly,Vol.60, Number 3, pps 22-27.ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630.© 2007 by the Regents of the University of California.All rights reserved.Please direct all requests for permission
to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp.
TWO COMMENTARIES, THE first from a nineteenthcentury
memoir subtitled The Truthful Narrative of the
Events in the Life of a California Girl on a Sheep Ranch,
the second from one of America’s greatest twentiethcentury
writers, Thomas Wolfe, in their different ways
both testify to the loneliness that, as Wolfe put it, “is
stamped on the American face.”1
These men lived lonely lives . . . Often there
was some mystery about those who took this
work—a life with the sheep was far away from
curious observation, and served very well for a
living grave. Once I overheard talk of a herder
who . . . had hanged himself. And no one knew
what tragedy in his life lay behind the fatal
despondency!2
The mountains in the wintertime had a stern
and demonic quality of savage joy that was, in its
own way, as strangely, wildly haunting as all of the
magic and the gold of April. In Spring, or in the
time-enchanted spell and drowse of full, deep
Summer, there was always something far and
lonely, haunting with ecstasy and sorrow, desolation
and the intolerable, numb exultancy of some
huge impending happiness.3
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■ JIM KITSES
All that Brokeback Allows
AFocusFeaturesrelease©2005FocusFeatures.Photo:KimberlyFrench
Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (left) and
Ang Lee on the set of Brokeback Mountain
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More often expressed through a stoic style and taciturn
manner rather than openly addressed, isolation and
solitude nevertheless have been a key subtext of the
Western genre. And it is the sympathy and depth with
which that motif is explored in Brokeback Mountain
that produces much of its powerful impact. Like Wolfe’s
angels, Ang Lee’s protagonists look homeward in vain.
Yet the relationship of the film with the Western
genre is a confused and contested question. This is puzzling
given the film’s reliance on genre aesthetics and
motifs to shape its lament for a broken America. A
prime example is the key image employed in some of
the film’s advertising: Ennis del Mar stands looking
down at two foul-mouthed louts he has cowed as Independence
Day fireworks explode above him. Ennis’s
imposing stature and righteous demeanor bespeak a
character absolutely certain of who he is and of his role
and power. He is the Western hero incarnate, America’s
defender of family and community, a transcendental
character of agency and action.
Compare a later, equally powerful and significant
moment. “I wish I knew how to quit you”: Jack Twist’s
anguished remark elicits Ennis’s own tortured feelings—because
of their history “I’m nothing . . . I’m
nowhere.”Against the vista of Brokeback’s high country
beyond, they grapple with each other, helpless victims
of love and pain, rage and despair.
These images so crucial in mapping the film’s
trajectory testify to its sophisticated play with Western
conventions. Like stereotypes, genre labels can offend
by being reductive, yet nevertheless often point to an
appropriate, even fundamental, relationship. Director
Lee repeatedly rejected “gay Western” or “gay cowboy
movie” as misleading and limiting descriptions. However,
the labels had stuck well before he came on
the scene in the seven years the Larry McMurtry–Diana
Ossana screenplay circulated among studios and
directors.
One can sympathize with Lee. As a popular genre
the Western is very much past its glory days. Commercially
once the bread-and-butter of the industry, the
form is now seen as a pejorative category signifying
“old-fashioned”to the mainstream audience. But in Lee
and Brokeback Mountain’s case the change in emphasis
suggested by the preferred labels of gay love story or romance
is somewhat more complex.
Beyond the stigma of an unfashionably ancient
genre, such efforts to market the film were also attempting
to soften suggestions of a film with a radical
gay agenda. In effect this campaign to orchestrate a
more open reception of Brokeback Mountain amounted
to an implicit depoliticizing of the film. Such efforts
undoubtedly contributed to the pronounced tilt in
some of the film’s reviews seeing it as a tragic and universal
study of tabooed passion and unrealized dreams.4
Yet Diana Ossana has acknowledged that she and
writing partner Larry McMurtry were well aware that
they were involved with a project that “subverts the
myth of the American West and its iconic heroes.”5
The
culture wars that dominate America and fuel much of
its politics are in fact centered on gay issues such as
same-sex marriage. No matter how high-culture its
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Ennis as American hero and broken man
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style and approach, a mainstream project like Brokeback
Mountain at this stage in the nation’s history inevitably
has radical social implications. In fact, the
film’s subversive potential is all the greater for its lack of
highlighting, dodging a conservative audience’s defensive
radar by the delicate humanizing of its characters
and their hopeless situation. In any case, the extraordinary
impact of the film as a mega-event is undeniable;
Brokeback Mountain immediately achieved an
iconic status as a code word and cultural reference
point that dominated its historical moment. Ironically,
the strongest proof of the political significance of the
film is in the industry’s calculated slight, the Academy
preferring Crash for best picture and thus limiting the
extent to which predictions of a “gay Oscars” would be
realized.
“It has very little to do with the Western genre,”Lee
has said.6
However, if the film avoids what the director
terms “the fictionalized Western,” nevertheless it is the
genre’s conventions that launch and drive Brokeback
Mountain. Universal some of its themes may be, but
this is not a film about lawyers or stockbrokers, not a
study of a medieval or Victorian era. The cowboy is the
American emblem par excellence, and Ennis del Mar
and Jack Twist are nothing if not prototypical cowboys.
Exemplars of pastoral purity and yeoman industry, they
possess the knowledge and skills of the wilderness. They
are authentic American heroes, self-reliant and brave,
honorable and loyal. The circumstances of their relationship
are such that we cannot judge them as flawed,
cowardly, or duplicitous. Their passion’s costs are
counted in the dead and scattered sheep of their compromised
mission and in their fatally damaged families.
Yet if anything, paradoxically, such failures only serve to
ennoble them in the innocence and depth of their love,
and to dramatize the devastating scale of their—and
everyone else’s—sacrifice and victimization.
Recent Westerns have indulged a postmodern nostalgia
for the cowboy way of life. Neo-Westerns set in
the 1960s (as is Brokeback Mountain’s early action),
both The Hi-Lo Country (1998) and All the Pretty
Horses (2000) rhapsodize over the joys of the cattle
drive and bronco busting. The neoclassical Open Range
(2003) indulges a more conventional end-of-the West
melancholy; after Robert Duval’s consummate cowboy,
“they broke the mold.”But in Brokeback Mountain such
yearning for the independent life of the cowboy is given
a spin that is not so much romantic—or for that matter
queer—as it is edgily realistic.
If the figures of Ennis and Jack draw on the Western’s
grand myth, they are also remarkably detailed
both in terms of individual psychology, and social and
economic setting. The context and nuance provided by
Annie Proulx’s short story make for the kind of backstory
for cowboys typically glossed over in the genre.
Young, uneducated, dirt poor, Ennis and Jack are roughnecks
struggling to survive in a hardscrabble world. All
cool and swagger on the surface, they are in fact lonely
and needy, the products of broken families and absent
fathers. Hiring them to herd sheep during the winter,
Randy Quaid’s sour supervisor addresses his new employees
as “you pair of deuces.”
Lee exploits the Western’s conventions to definitively
place his characters. The taciturn cowboy, a genre
cliché, is reinvigorated in Heath Ledger’s charged, contorted
performance that externalizes his inability to address
the emotional complexity of their situation.
Although the more adventurous and articulate, the
rodeo performer, Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack is no less at
the mercy of “Brokeback.” The opening scene of their
non-meeting, the two cowboys pointedly avoiding each
other as they wait for a job interview, immediately defines
a world governed by macho drives and fears.
Thereafter Quaid’s abusive manner in hiring them gives
further voice to these values. Formed by a competitive
and violently homophobic society, Ennis and Jack’s
conviction that they “ain’t queer” is understandable.
Theirs is “a one-shot thing . . . nobody’s business but
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Images that recall the classical Western and melodrama
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ours.” What drives the emotional attack of the film is
the inadequacy of its characters to articulate and understand,
let alone control, the experience that strikes
them like a storm. American cowboys—of all people—
have no business falling in love with each other. Practical
and conservative types of a rough and ready
manhood are by no means ready for man-love. It is precisely
because their involvement is such an irrational
and implausible event that it can elude easy categorization
and is so persuasive and affecting. These are men
of a particular time, region, and occupation far removed
from a culture at ease with feelings and their
verbal expression. The stone-faced Ledger in particular
is a study in spastic, constipated pain, hunched over,
gagging, swallowing his speech, a man who has been
taught to hate feelings he has now discovered within
himself.
The isolation of the wilderness and the utter loneliness
of their lives both make possible the love that
overwhelms these two men and also renders it intelligible,
for us if not them. In open range, feelings, gender,
and sexuality cannot be fenced in or legislated.
What is sinful or perverted or deviant in the natural
world, the world of the sublime?
But mountains are like the oceans, aggressively
visible and yet mysterious in offering a variety of meanings—threat,
challenge, spectacle, the eternal. Mountain
literature has defined the extremes of ideology that
have been influential in shaping understanding of such
landscapes.“Mountain Gloom”is the term John Ruskin
coined in his Modern Painters (1907) for the repulsion
and fear that dominated representations of nature’s
most dramatic form until the nineteenth century.
“Mountain Glory” was his balancing phrase to characterize
the onset of positive views of mountains as embodiments
of radiance and grandeur that coincided
with the discovery of the sublime in nature.7
Inevitably,
we have read into nature whatever we have been taught
or needed to see. Thus the Rockies—within which
Wyoming’s Brokeback would sit—were called the Shining
Mountains by the Cree Indians who lived below
them, and the Stonies by the first Americans who
climbed them.8
Brokeback is obviously colored by these two extremes
given the painfully ambivalent experience that it
finally becomes for the men. A landscape (in Wolfe’s
words) of “savage joy,” offering both ecstasy and torture,
Brokeback Mountain’s mountain setting is crucial
both as physical site and as the marker it becomes for
the cowboys (“Old Brokeback got us good”).A signifier
of their transformative experience and high hopes, the
peak becomes the touchstone of their life and both a
fond and finally haunting memory. Lee has said he was
pleased at the abstract quality of the strange poetic title
that Proulx had bestowed on her fictional peak. What is
Brokeback-ness? A resonant allegorical reading implicit
in terms of the Western’s ideology and landscape is the
notion of a damaged nation of tarnished ideals and betrayed
promise. Such an idea is reinforced if one recalls
that the Rockies have been proclaimed “the backbone
of the continent.”9
Quite apart from the aesthetics of the infinite,
Brokeback’s majesty and radiance can thus be said to
have a national dimension. This is the American wilderness,
the grandeur, beauty and isolation of the film’s
setting echoing the language John Ford had helped to
shape with the buttes and mesas of Monument Valley. It
is the world of the pioneer and the nomad, of adventure
and adversity, the vessel that shaped American character.
As foreign critics were quick to see in the early days
of Hollywood, the Western’s settings gave it a unique
power to express in what became a coded aesthetics the
ideological promise of America—freedom, openness,
redemption, reinvention. Within this perspective it is
possible to see the validity of the claim that Brokeback
Mountain queers the Western, that setting a saga of
same-sex love in the American wilderness both naturalizes
and nationalizes it.
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©1956UniversalInternationalPictures
Cabined and confined, Ennis’s sacrificial pain recalls that of Robert Stack’s Kyle Hadley in Written on the Wind (1956)
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However, as Lee has argued, this is not the world of
the traditional Western. If Brokeback Mountain recalls
the frontier, the range is no longer open. The wilderness
may appear pristine, but the mountain is the preserve
of the Forest Service and its land is broken into
allotments; Ennis and Jack are akin to government employees,
like their hostile supervisor. The men soon find
themselves between the proverbial rock and a hard
place.
Moreover, Ennis and Jack also differ from the
classic cowboy in their work as sheepherders. Despite
an importance in the West’s economic history that rivals
that of cattle, sheep have been assigned a marginal
role in the movies. Traditionally, they have been the
source of conflict, their place on the frontier contested
as a threat to cattle ranches. In this they have been seen
as interlopers, the property of a lower class of immigrants
and minorities. Coloring such conflicts have also
been hints of a gender motif in the suggestion of caring
for sheep as a less manly pursuit. Such tensions have
also been exploited for comedy, as in George Marshall’s
The Sheepman (1958), where Glenn Ford is the despised
but frustratingly imperturbable sheep rancher. However,
from Little Bo Peep to Ballad of Little Jo (1993),
sheep have often had distaff shepherds. Maggie Greenwald’s
feminist Western features Suzy Amis as the Eastern
woman who finds her salvation out West in her
disguise as a man and sheepherder. In Brokeback too the
sheep suggest a more nurturing, maternal function for
the characters, appropriately softening the world of the
film. Of course sheep also come to mind, not inaptly
here, as the butt of classic sexual comedy in providing
the lonely shepherd with a substitute for women.
The trick of Brokeback Mountain is to evoke
repeatedly at the outset a vast and desolate frontier setting
that allows the creation of a passionate relationship,
but thereafter to leave behind that space and its
possibilities. In the end, for all its promise of a shining
glory, Brokeback Mountain delivers gloom and an unforgiving
reality. As the film unwinds, the wilderness
setting is left behind but for brief scenes sandwiched
between the domestic norms of the men’s lives. The expansive
images from the film’s early scenes—trucks traversing
vast open plains, the huge sheep herd flowing
up into the mountain’s meadows, Ennis on horseback
framed against the horizon like a John Ford hero—
shrink to the dimensions of crowded kitchens, closets,
trailers, and window-framed views. The awesome scale
and reach of the mountain is reduced to a postcard.
The film ends with the traumatized and profoundly
alienated Ennis all but a recluse, his world that
of a scruffy mobile home that is neither. He watches
his about-to-be-wed daughter drive off—another
painful scene of farewell, another separation. He finds
her forgotten sweater and then rediscovers the earlier
forgotten garments, his shirt within Jake’s, “like two
skins” as the script has it. The images reprise shrinking
spaces—the closet, the postcard, the window with its
bleak view. He is holding the shirts and crying—“Jack,
I swear . . .”
It may be a stretch to invoke Douglas Sirk’s delirious
Universal 1950s melodramas, but something very
like his unmerry-go-round structure, where A loves B
who loves C, is clearly operating in the interlocking and
frustrated relationships of the film’s world. Convention,
tradition, and social regulation rule family, gender, sexuality:
Brokeback Mountain becomes Written on the
Mountain, or perhaps more aptly, Back Mountain. The
traditional Western was the province, in Robert
Warshow’s elegant phrase, of “the last gentlemen,”10
whom the genre allowed to affirm their identity through
action.Although there are brief returns to the wilds, the
world of the Western that is created in the film’s first
forty minutes soon transitions into melodrama, both
male and family varieties. Our wilderness types are instantly
civilized on their return, cabined, cribbed, and
confined. The Western’s liberating confrontations and
duels, the resolution of personal and communal con-
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Love, loss, memory
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flicts, is denied these heroes. They become impotent,
repressed, oppressed. Their heroism will be forged of
sacrifice, victimization, and the long odyssey of suffering
that is the classic fate of melodrama’s characters. As
the years go by the battles they fight are with their families,
in kitchens and dining rooms, or with each other
at the end of cramped idylls. The film’s violence is ugly
in the murder of Jack, but also in the emotional attacks
both repressed and unleashed, and in the anguish that
punishes the couples. Lee’s film is careful to give the
wives and families their due. After the arrival of Jack
after a four-year hiatus, the passionate clinch of their
reunion is shown us from Alma’s point of view, complicating
our relationship with the lovers. Thereafter
the film is scrupulous in providing a kind of equal time
for the disappointments and despair of the women,
their loss of joy and spirit. Jean Renoir’s famous dictum
comes to mind: everyone has their reasons.
This melding of the Western and the melodrama
has received little attention. This is partly the result of
the unclear status of the term and of melodrama as a
genre. Indeed, more than one reviewer praised the film
for avoiding “melodrama”:11
that is, an excess of emotion,
melodrama as tearjerker. Would a more florid
style have diminished the film, perhaps pushing it toward
the baroque rhetoric of a Johnny Guitar (1954)? In
any case, in Brokeback Mountain the marriage of the
two genres can be said to interact to mute the film,
contributing to the restrained style. The melodrama
contains the action, the heroes unable to achieve selfdefinition,
to draw their weapons, to save the ranch, to
bring civilization to America. But at the same time the
Western’s conventions can be said to constrain the
melos, lowering the emotional and stylistic peaks, the
extreme gestures, the “music” of the melodrama. The
result is a haunting, unsettling film that may be easier
to admire than love, a bittersweet rendition of defeat
and lost opportunity.
The scene of their last rendezvous culminates in a
moment that captures the “what-might-have-been”
that tortures the men. Ennis’s confession that he cannot
see Jack for six months precipitates a violent scene.
Hurling angry words, they struggle in each other’s embrace,
fighting and hugging, finally overcome with
hurt. We dissolve to a toasty camp fire over which
stands a dozy Jack wrapped up from behind by Ennis—
“Come on now, you’re sleepin’ on your feet like a horse”
—quoting his mother and quietly humming him her
lullaby from his childhood, a moment in which we are
suspended with Jack as he is rocked gently from side to
side within the embrace, the moment ending with him
contemplating Ennis ride off to sleep with the sheep,
and then the flashback ending with a desolate Jack
in present time watching the truck drive away. That
the flashback is crucial—the film’s defining Brokeback
moment—is underlined by its positioning after their
agonized struggle as they separate, unknowingly, for the
last time. Their life together has been one of life apart,
a life of constant separations, a life separate from all
others too, family included. All separate lives. “A few
high-altitude fucks,” as Jack has said, were not enough.
He and Ennis had been denied intimacy, constancy,
humanity, soulfulness.
NOTES
This essay is in memory of Jack Babuscio.
1. Thomas Wolfe, The Web and the Rock (1939), excerpt anthologized
as “Home from the Mountain,” in The Book of the
Mountains, ed. A.C. Spectorsky (New York: Appleton Century
Crofts, 1955), 486.
2. Sarah Bixby Smith, Adobe Days: The Truthful Narrative of the
Events in the Life of a California Girl on a Sheep Ranch and in
El Pueblo de Nuestra de Los Angeles While It Was Yet a Small
and Humble town; Together With An Account of How Three
Young Men Drove Sheep & Cattle Across the Plains, Moutains,
& Deserts from Illinois to the Pacific Coast; And The Strange
Prophecy of Admiral Thatcher About San Pedro Harbor (1931;
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 84.
3. Wolfe, 486.
4. J. Hoberman sees the film as a “sagebrush Tristan and Isolde”
in “Blazing Saddles,” Village Voice, 29 November 2005; Roger
Ebert claims“their tragedy is universal”in“Brokeback Mountain,”
Chicago Sun-Times, 16 December 2005.
5. Annie Proulx, Larry McMurtry, and Diana Ossana, Brokeback
Mountain: Story to Screenplay (New York: Scribner, 2005),
145.
6. See Roger Clarke, “Lonesome Cowboys,” Sight and Sound 16,
no. 1 (January 2006): 28
7. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain
Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1959), 3–7.
8. Frank Waters,“High Country,” in Spectorsky, 480.
9. Ibid.
10. Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience (New York: Anchor
/ Doubleday, 1962), 94.
11. Ebert, for example.
JIM KITSES is Professor of Cinema at San Francisco State University
and the author of HorizonsWest:Directing theWestern from John Ford
to Clint Eastwood (BFI Publishing,2004).
ABSTRACT In Brokeback Mountain, the grand Western tradition’s heroes
are deconstructed, and the monumental landscape with its
coded promise of freedom and opportunity reduced to the scale of
a postcard. Brokeback Mountain transforms into melodrama, albeit
with a restrained style that disguises its radical take on an America
betraying its original ideals.
KEYWORDS Western,neo-Western,melodrama,mountain literature,
betraying America
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