|
Article Excerpt
"Yes, it's the gay cowboy movie. Get over it," wrote Ty Burr in his Boston Globe review of Brokeback Mountain (par. 1). Intending to rebuke any viewer who would resist the movie because of its "gay" content, Burr ends up constructing a response that has the effect of simultaneously defining and denying such content. At the same time that the statement declaratively assigns the film a very particular same-sex identity--"gay cowboy movie"--it denies the significance of that identity through an imperative erasure ("get over it"). Structurally, Burr's comment replicates the cultural effect of the film as a whole: at the very point that Brokeback Mountain was being praised by many American critics and commentators as a brave and daring affirmation of same-sex love (1) and was being hailed by some as a defining moment in the United States' "national conversation" about sexual identity, (2) both the film and many critical responses to it were deconstructing the very terms of such a conversation by dismantling the whole notion of sexual identity (as opposed to merely sexual behavior). In doing so, they were not complicating or questioning current identity categories such as "gay" or "bisexual." Rather, they were simply erasing these identities by returning male same-sex desire and practice to a position of marginality and invisibility of the sort that predates any cultural notions of sexual identity at all, even pathological ones such as those constructed by the late nineteenth-century sexologists.
In discussing Brokeback Mountain, columnist Godfrey Cheshire might argue that "'gay,' perhaps more than any other word in the language, signifies the argument over cultural values that America has been having with itself in recent years" (par. 5), but if so, the film and its American commentators do not contribute to or even recognize that argument. Instead, by more or less eliminating identity categories, they eliminate the debate altogether. Far from "challeng[ing] people's ideas about the value and validity of same-sex relationships," as Newsweek writer Sean Smith claims (68), Brokeback Mountain and many of its cultural respondents simply reassure straight audiences that such relationships do not even meaningfully exist. Thus, like Terry Castle's "apparitional lesbian," (3) the gay male of Brokeback Mountain, cowboy or not, is ultimately no more than a ghost. It is this spectral status, rather than any progressive message about accepting alternative sexualities, that is largely responsible for the film's success with U.S. audiences.
This erasure of identity is ironic, given the ubiquity of the phrase "gay cowboy movie" as a cultural tag for the film. Almost as soon as Brokeback was released, that term became a contested site representative of the film's cultural positioning, particularly as discussed by American film critics. Burr wasn't the only one to call attention to the popular phrase. For most commentators, the label was no compliment. Paul Clinton of CNN.com found it "odious" (par. 1). Jami Bernard of the New York Daily News objected to the film's being "reduced to [a] catchphrase" (par. 2) when the main characters' "feelings transcend anything as mundane as sexual orientation" (par. 13). Some people found the term unfairly limiting. Diana Ossana, one of the film's Oscar-winning writers, noted that "people come in with this preconceived notion that this is a gay cowboy movie. But it's more than that" (qtd. in Villarreal, "A Winning Team" par. 14). In the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Colin Covert wrote, "It has become shorthand to call Brokeback Mountain 'the gay cowboy movie,' but it is much more than that glib description implies. This is a human story" (8F). Roger Ebert, too, believed that to call Brokeback Mountain a "gay cowboy movie" was a "cruel simplification" (par. 3).
The critics are right--Brokeback Mountain should not be labeled a "gay cowboy movie." But we should eschew the term not because it is reductive or simplistic (why would it have to be?), or because Brokeback Mountain is "more" than a "gay cowboy movie" (to the extent that the film erases the category of "gay," it's actually less than a "gay cowboy movie"), or because calling the movie "gay" might cause audiences to miss what the film is really about (namely the "universal" and the "human"). Brokeback Mountain should not be called a gay cowboy movie because it's not a gay cowboy movie. Not only are there virtually no cows, but no one is gay. Certainly no one is gay in the post-Stonewall sense of the term that signifies a shared political activism and sense of community. Nor is anyone gay in the more general sense of the term to designate a constructed identity that is not limited to sex acts. (4) As many of the commentators on Brokeback use the word, "gay" is neither political nor identity-based; it's a polite and contemporary equivalent of "homosexual" and depends on the popularly held notion that any man who has sex with another man is, though he may deny it, essentially a homosexual.
No one is gay in Brokeback Mountain, then, in any sense that goes beyond an occasional sex act. As a result, despite grand critical claims that the movie is, as Kyle Smith wrote in the New York Post, "one of the best serious films about homosexuality ever made" (par. 2), or as Joe Williams said in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "one of the greatest love stories in film history" (par. 5), Brokeback Mountain is not about homo- (or even bi-) sexuality or romantic love. On the contrary--the movie deconstructs homosexuality as an identity category and equates love with sexual activity.
Of course, connecting a given sexual behavior to a specific sexual identity is notoriously difficult. Historically, such identity categories are fluid and changeable, reflecting and constructing a variety of political, biological, and cultural understandings in an often dialectical process in which one group's subversive category (such as the politically active, community-focused "gay" identity of the immediate post-Stonewall generation) becomes another group's restrictively normative boundary (many self-defined "queers" of the 1980s and later, for instance, felt excluded by the unity of gender and political experience implied by the categories "gay" and "lesbian"; many people also find the term "homosexual" to be too narrowly constituted by its opposition to "heterosexual" or by its overtones of medicalized pathology). It is true that these identity categories are problematic and often highly contested. But once the concept of sexuality as an identity exists, however complicated or inadequate the categories become, one cannot return to a discourse in which such identities are not conceptualized. Such a return, however, is what Brokeback Mountain attempts.
Based on a short story by (E.) Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain tells the story of Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger), two cowhands who, in 1963, take summer jobs herding sheep on isolated Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. Since, in typical Western hero fashion, neither is particularly verbal (Ennis is only a few degrees from mute), they express their growing attraction to each other by physically horsing around. Finally, during a cold night spent sharing body warmth in a small tent, they have sex. Soon after, Ennis assures Jack, "You know I ain't queer." "Me, neither," replies Jack.
They part at the end of the summer and take the heterosexual paths their time and culture require: both marry and father children, even though neither is able,...
|
