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Article Excerpt
Over the late summer and fall of 2006, a small group of scholars specializing in Western American literature, cinema, and cultural studies began exchanging ideas about a collaborative project that would examine the provocative film text, Brokeback Mountain (2005). Directed by Ang Lee, starring Heath Ledger as Ennis del Mar and Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist, Brokeback Mountain presents a particularly interesting case of intertextuality, as its screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana adapts Annie Proulx's short story of the same name. That Proulx garnered the National Magazine Award and an O. Henry Prize shortly after her story's original publication in The New Yorker, Lee won the Motion Picture Academy's "Best Director" and the British Academy's "David Lean Award" for 2005, McMurtry and Ossana earned "Best Adapted Screenplay" from both the academy and the British Academy, and the production was nominated for a host of other awards including 2005's "Best Picture" Oscar merely hint at the film's popularity and success. And still, as these scholars recognized, practically no scholarly attention has been paid to this film and its somewhat contentious messages. Alan Weltzien, Sara Spurgeon, Donovan Gwinner, and Scott Baugh responded to this call by engaging in a "conversation" in short-essay form.
With the help of Tara Penry, the group initiated a dialogue by exchanging prompts that elicited careful analyses of the film text; each of the four members provided one prompt and responded to the three from her or his colleagues. Referencing a handful of only the most relevant secondary sources--Jane Tompkins's West of Everything, Lee Clark Mitchell's Westerns, Laura Mulvey's theories of spectatorships, and Leslie Fiedler's notions of masculinity and chaste love, for example--and foregrounding particularly close attention to the primary texts, the group discovered its own path through Brokeback Mountain's "varied spaces" and "contested desires."
Prompt: How does Brokeback Mountain conform to or challenge conventions of the Western genre? Jane Tompkins argues the real antagonist of the Western is the "cult of domesticity" (39). Savage Indians, outlaws, or landscapes are merely straw men the hero battles as he protects a feminine domestic social order he nonetheless despises. Does this film subvert the traditional narrative trajectories of the Western? Or does it carry Tompkins's notion to its logical extreme by having the violence which threatens the heroes originate in the space of "civilization" rather than "savagery"?
Gwinner: Insofar as the society in which Ennis and Jack live enforces heteronormativity, sometimes violently, "civilization" in Brokeback Mountain is "savage." Since our heroes do not really battle homophobic "forces" directly, however, we must look elsewhere for the conventional antagonist. While the savagery of repressive society serves as the abstract oppositional force, the more identifiable "enemy" is a localized symptom of society's repressive-ness: a fear of others knowing about their sexuality. The heroic fight is thus redefined to cast the "savage" enemy not as desperados, Indians, or the land but an internalization of the "savagery" of homophobia. As an extension of such internalization, homosexual desire itself, the film suggests, is a wild threat. The "enemy" is both without and within. Indeed, one of the most wrenching implications of the narrative is that Jack and Ennis seem to be their own worst enemies. They live at cross purposes, engaging in a secretive homosexual relationship while leading straight lives. That Jack wishes to settle down with Ennis only dramatizes the intrinsic tension of their situation, the bind of having it both ways and, finally, not having it at all.
The crucial depiction of societal savagery directed at homosexuals is revealed by the story of the murder of Earl, the gay man who lived with his partner Rich in Ennis's family's community. As Ennis relays the story to Jack, explaining how his father "made sure" to take his sons to see the bloodied corpse in the ditch, the film flashes back to the childhood experience. Most of the flashback consists of a slow-motion approach to the corpse, which builds tension and emphasizes how the two boys are physically led to the site. The father's face is not shown, both to focus on the facial expression of young Ennis and to "abstract" the teacher of the "lesson," implying that the father is acting as "patriarch" and not merely as "dad." When the camera reveals Earl, it does so very briefly, as if to avoid a hint of gratuitousness and to suggest an abrupt turning away from the abject figure. Ennis tells this story to reject Jack's notion of "two guys livin' together," yet the story also serves as the template for the way in which Jack is supposed to have died, not according to Lureen's (Anne Hathaway) rote account but based on Ennis's intuitive reconstruction, which is filmed to depict the assault and the attackers briefly and indistinctly. Although the violence is quite graphic and fatal, the handling of the two encounters is accomplished all but offscreen, at a remove. Rather than being a reflection of directorial squeamishness or restraint, the representation of violence at virtual secondhand implies that the threat is general and that the "enemy" cannot be confronted directly.
While the savage attackers of Earl and Jack are essentially anonymous, the wildness of the threat they embody is reflected in the way the lovers' desire is figured, especially by Ennis. Before and after the recollection of Earl's death, Ennis speaks of their passion for one another as something uncontrollable that can attack them. Ennis prefaces his story about Earl and Rich with a warning: if "this thing grabs on to us again in the wrong place, wrong time, we'll be dead." Of course, the fatal threat, "this thing," is the desire they feel for each other. Following the account of the two ranchers, Ennis insists that, with no reasonable alternatives, they have to "stand" the constraints that will allow for continuing to meet in secrecy. When Jack asks Ennis how long they can "stand it," Ennis replies: "Long as we can ride it. Ain't no reins on this one." Similar to the earlier figuration of a threatening "thing," Ennis's analogy here suggests a particularly wild horse or bull that cannot be ridden and tamed with domesticating reins. It is as if Ennis's fear of being discovered, of being trampled by men who would kill and maim another man because he is gay, renders the love they feel for each other--not the (would-be) attackers themselves--as "savage."
Increasingly, the enemy is simply the fact or the prospect of other people knowing about Ennis's and Jack's sexuality. As before, Ennis is the one who is especially concerned with the possibility of others knowing about his identity and his relationship with Jack. One of the most contentious exchanges in the film is sparked by Alma's (Michelle Williams) inquiry into Ennis and Jack's "fishing" trips. When Alma suggests sexual "nastiness" as the foundation of their comradeship, Ennis flies into a rage. He grabs Alma roughly, threatening her with his fist while insisting that she "don't know nothin' about it." While it seems unlikely that Ennis would consider Alma to be a potential threat to him, as someone who would leave him to bleed to death in a ditch, in his altercation with his ex-wife, he fights against the very fact of someone "knowing" about his homosexuality. Coincidentally, in fleeing a perceived threat to the secrecy of his identity, he barges into another altercation with a man who beats him badly. It is as if Alma's revelation "causes" a physical assault on Ennis. In the following scenes, when the lovers are again together in the Wyoming wilderness, the fear of others knowing registers with Ennis, and he asks if Jack ever gets "the feeling" that people "know." Ironically, their last conversation devolves to the point where Ennis himself transforms into the "knowing" violent threat against a gay man. He informs Jack that "all them things I don't know could get you killed if I should come to know them." The low point of the film is thus when Ennis, so consumed with the fear of others knowing about them and the fear of losing Jack in one way or the other, becomes the mouthpiece of savagery. By the time Ennis has tried to make contact with Jack for another vacation together, the men who kill Jack have come to "know" about a gay man in their midst.
In postmodern "literary Western" fashion, the "good guys" do not win, though their defeat coincides with a kind of conventional victory: heterosexual patriarchy prevails symbolically in the betrothal of Alma, Jr. and Kurt, but the audience is in the position of holding up the larger cultural logic this "victory" represents as heartbreaking, perhaps tragic. Indeed, by the end of the film, civilization and savagery have been deployed generically in order to redefine the axiological charge of the two terms: civilization, the (violent) reassertion of a heteronormative social order, has triumphed, but we cannot help but dwell on the brutality of the ways in which gender and sexuality are policed. So, while the men fight each other and are terrorized by their "enemies," their defeat is its own kind of victory because the devastation compels us to reject the false dilemma of sexual orientation--silent repression or strict heteronormativity--that the Western presents. With that kind of exclusionary cultural logic, it is as if Ennis and Jack's relationship is a transitional frontier on which the "heroes" are massacred, Jack physically and Ennis emotionally.
Baugh: Violence, so much a part of the Western, manifests itself in several forms in this movie, but one profound example appears in the death of Jack. Brokeback Mountain reveals the murder of Jack in several competing fashions and leaves viewers to puzzle through the implications of these different representations. As the sequence opens, Ennis exits the Riverton post office having had his postcard to Jack returned; a detail from Ennis's point of view reveals the card stamped "deceased." This literally institutional statement of Jack's death, decontextualized in a number of profound ways, offers one quick answer but leads to greater unanswered questions. As viewers, compelled by the same question as Ennis, we want to "see what happened."
The primary diegetic line seems to favor, at least initially, Lureen's retelling of the event. The telephone conversation between Ennis and Lureen is treated rather conventionally: Ennis "looks in" to the right, Lureen back to the left, and the camera's positioning across reverse angles offers viewers a relatively objective stance to listen in on their conversation. Lureen, though, gradually faces full-front and looks slightly down to us. As she re-tells the "official" version of the story, there might be a hint of sadness but, curiously, not the anguish, the loss, that Ennis emotes. "Jack was pumping up a flat on the truck out on a back road when the tire blew up. The rim of the tire slammed into his face and broke his nose and jaw, knocked him unconscious on his back": she delivers the information "level," like a news report from a "talking head" removed emotionally and psychically from the deep drifts of this...
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