|
Article Excerpt
On March 5, 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences produced the 78th Annual Academy Awards. From the moment the evening began and certainly before it was over, the night largely belonged to Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005). Heralded by critics as a "landmark film" (Travers, par. 1), nominated for eight Academy Awards, and winning three, (1) the film dominated the telecast, which opened with the host, John Stewart, making sexually ambiguous gay cowboy jokes. Also included that evening was a lengthy tribute montage to the Western genre that showed classic shots from films by the likes of John Ford and Sergio Leone. One portion of the ceremony that was not specifically devoted to Brokeback Mountain or the Western, however, was the academy's bestowal of an Honorary Award for Lifetime Achievement upon Robert Altman, the critically acclaimed director who never won an Academy Award for his work. During a montage celebrating his achievement in film, almost ominously absent was specific mention by title of Altman's own attempt at the Western genre: McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971). (2) Ignored in 2006 much as it had been overlooked in the 1970s, (3) Altman's film, and most importantly its subtle exclusion from his body of work by the academy, proves interesting considering that the Western, or at least Ang Lee's interpretation of it, was a primary focus of the telecast. Yet, even a superficial examination of these films reveals that each director possesses a singular vision of how the genre of the Western should be used in filmmaking. Furthermore, looking at the Oscars as a marketing machine ultimately reveals the manner in which Brokeback--despite the vehement desire on the part of its director and producers for it to not be thought of as the "gay cowboy" movie--comes to epitomize that very distinction by conforming to Western film archetypes. Comparing it to McCabe, a film that works to defy the Western genre, ultimately allows us to show how Brokeback's supposed status as a "landmark" film becomes overshadowed by its conventional views about gender and its performance; film and politics; and capitalism and movie marketing. Thus, the subtle and brief coexistence of these two Westerns at the Academy Awards begins an analysis of Brokeback Mountain that will situate it within its genre and examine both the filmic and sociopolitical implications that this association suggests.
An important point of departure for such an examination of Brokeback Mountain is the way it has been perceived by critics versus what the film's directors and producers claim to be promoting. Throughout Brokeback's reviews, "landmark," and other such words, are among the most commonly used catchphrases. For example, Stephen Holden wrote in his review for the New York Times, "This moving and majestic film would be a landmark if only because it is the first Hollywood movie to unmask the homoerotic strain in American culture that Leslie Fiedler discerned in his notorious 1948 Partisan Review essay, 'Come back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey'" (par. 6). Although critics were quick to see Lee's film as a socially conscious commentary on homosexuality that identified an already-homosexual tendency in U.S. culture, the director himself shunned such a distinction when he said at a press conference, "For me, Brokeback isn't rebellious at all. It's a very ordinary movie. People call it 'groundbreaking' or what not. It puts a lot of pressure on me.... This is the way gays are. It's just that they have been distorted. When two people are in love and are scared, that's the way they are" ("Lee," pars. 5, 6).
The apparent conflict between the response the film garnered and what the director claimed to achieve helps us examine the manner in which the film's conformity to, and idolization of, standard Western archetypes actually contradict both the idea that it is groundbreaking and Lee's claim that it is an "ordinary movie" depicting realistic lovers. Instead, we discover that the film, both in form and content, largely mirrors classic Westerns while converting the homosexual man into an archetype of rugged individualism that pigeonholes him into a widely accepted filmic myth, thus making the audience acknowledge, but not necessarily accept, these characters. In other words, in both the discourse created by reviewers as well as by Lee, there is an albeit implicit suggestion that the film's virtue lay in the fact that it is, above all, the gay cowboy movie. In this regard, Brokeback becomes an example of how homosexuality can easily fit within the Western film archetype, but it also demonstrates how both the Western and homosexuality become intertwined in a fairly static application of genre to a seemingly universal, tragic love story of the ill-fated romance between Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger).
What we suggest, furthermore, is that Brokeback Mountain's status as the gay cowboy movie reveals itself in the fact that the film works within a popular genre in order to remain commercially palatable. Facing a target audience that, by 2005, had shown itself polarized by such issues as a contested election and a controversial war, Lee chose a safe, centrist view of homosexual love--contextualizing it within a popular, and conservative, genre. As we will discuss in more detail later in the essay, the film glorifies the Western while marketing itself to an audience that loves Ford and John Wayne almost as much as Lee does. (4) Although one could see this glorification as an innovative way to approach a seemingly controversial topic, significant theory on sexuality and film both suggest otherwise. For example, Judith Butler, in her book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, asserts that "sex appears within hegemonic language as a substance, as, metaphorically speaking, a self-identical being. This achievement emerges through a performative twist of language and/or discourse that conceals the fact that 'being' a sex or a gender is fundamentally impossible" (25). Envisioning sex as performance has large implications within a filmic context, especially when, as we will see in Brokeback, sexuality becomes part of a mythic image projected onto the screen.
Such an approach to sexuality becomes even more complicated, however, when one takes into consideration Sergei Eisenstein's famous assertion that art, in particular film, should in its methodology contain conflict (48). In his essay, "A Dialectic Approach to Film Form," he argues that "art is always conflict: (1) according to its social mission, (2) according to its nature, (3) according to its methodology" (46). When considered jointly and independently as lenses for viewing Brokeback Mountain, both Butler and Eisenstein provide venues by which we can examine the performance of gender in this film while understanding how such performance contributes to a general lack of thematic or aesthetic conflict within the film. As it stands, the film takes an already masculine and homosocial undertone identified within the Western, makes it more concrete by centering the film around two gay men, and uses traditional filming techniques from the Western that never juxtapose the film against the myth it perpetuates. Simply put, sexuality in this film, or namely...
|
