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In the realm of Oshima

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Where is the love?

Big rock candy Mountain
Brokeback Mountain is a near-perfect template for this cultural phenomenon. The film offers audiences total acknowledgment of gay love and passion. It even honors them as valid and deeply romantic. But it also, perhaps because of its hyper-romantic sheen, renders the sexual relationship mostly invisible. With the exception of a quick medium-long-shot sex scene and a passionate kiss, Jack and Ennis’s physical relationship is all off-screen. The fact that Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal are so uncommonly sexy only heightens audiences’ expectations and ambivalence. It’s not just that the film depicts more straight sex than gay sex — although that is certainly the case — but it also assiduously avoids showing us the mundane, everyday aspects of the lovers’ primary relationship. We are treated to numerous scenes of Ennis and Jack interacting with their wives, children, and even in-laws, but we never see the two men having coffee around the morning campfire, discussing the weather, or just casually hanging out in their underwear on one of their long-awaited camping trips. Except for their long-running argument about getting their own ranch, we have almost no sense of what brings them together and sustains them as a loving couple.

Brokeback Mountain, therefore, is the perfect movie for this particular political moment. It is emotionally sympathetic yet sexually obscure. Its valorization of gay love is predicated on making that love socially and physically invisible. Love may be a force of nature, but Lee’s film simply removes it from the reality of actual human relationships. It creates audience unease about homosexuality and then quickly addresses this anxiety by neutering the sexual component.                

Hollywood films are fantasies, and all fantasies spring from contemplation about what we have and what we imagine having. Brokeback Mountain is no different. Sure, the film addresses straight audiences’ ambivalence about gay relationships, but also — maybe even more so — their ambivalence about heterosexual relationships. Hollywood has been force-feeding happy-marriage fantasies to heterosexuals for more than a century, and most married people are, on some level, discontent because they are not living out the ideal romantic fantasy they’d been sold by Hollywood.

The solution to this personal and cultural discontent is a trip to Brokeback Mountain, where the men are beautiful, the passions run high, the sex isn’t obvious, and no one is happy in the end. It’s the perfect unhappy Hollywood homosexual fantasy for people who’ve been disillusioned by the traditional happy Hollywood heterosexual fantasy. With cultural baggage like this, it could win every one of those Oscars it’s nominated for.

Michael Bronski’s most recent book is Pulp Friction (St. Martin’s Press, 2004).

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On the Web:

"When Nathaniel Met Herman" by Michael Bronski: http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multi-page/documents/03107053.asp
Larry David on Brokeback Mountain: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/02/opinion/eddavid.php
Brokeback reviewed from a Biblical perspective: http://www.christiananswers.net/spotlight/movies/2006/brokebackmountain.html

E-mail the author:

Michael Bronski: mabronski@aol.com

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