The Significance of Brokeback Mountain

Ralph Roughton

"Brokeback Mountain" began as a short story of just 31 pages by Annie Proulx, published in The New Yorker in 1997. Her spare and gnarly prose is thoroughly grounded in the gritty, hard-bitten landscape of Wyoming. At the same time, it has an elegance and economy of expression—like a haiku poem, where every word is necessary and no word is superfluous.

The film is a beautiful end product that retains this essential quality in bringing it to life on screen, with hardly a false note. With each viewing, it just gets better.

Director Ang Lee deservedly won every major directing award—22 at last count—but the screenplay, the actors, the cinematography, the musical score all contribute seamlessly to this deeply moving experience. Every detail is important; tension builds more by inference than by spoken words.

Like an association in psychoanalysis, every juxtaposition means something. For example: As they part at the end of that idyllic first summer, we feel the yearning in both Jack and Ennis, but hardly anything is said. Tentatively, Jack asks if Ennis will come back next summer; and he says maybe not, because he's getting married. Their faces are somber and they are reluctant to part; but they do, saying "guess I'll see you around" with a surface casualness that denies their palpable anguish. Jack drives off in his truck, looking bereft, watching Ennis in the mirror. Ennis begins walking along the same road; then, when Jack is out of sight, he collapses against a barn wall, retching and sobbing. We don't need a narrative voice or dialogue to describe the devastation Ennis feels on that windy Wyoming road, as he realizes what he's giving up. We feel it with him.

As this scene fades, a voice-over from the next scene begins reciting the prayer: "forgive us our trespasses." We are in church, at a wedding, and the minister is about to pronounce Ennis and Alma man and wife.

Another juxtaposition: When the drunk and freezing Ennis finally gives in and joins Jack in the warm tent (how symbolic is that?)—it's inevitable that sex will follow, and it is quick and frenzied. Then comes the cold light of morning, and Ennis rushes back to the sheep he had left unattended all night, only to find that a coyote has killed and eviscerated one of the sheep. These powerful metaphors suggest that man-to-man sex is a sin ("forgive us our trespasses") and that violence will be the consequence. Ennis's traumatic memory of his father taking him to see the mutilated body of the gay rancher is echoed by these metaphors, and Jack's own death by tire iron is foreshadowed.

In relying on metaphors to convey feelings, it's not just that the characters have no vocabulary of emotions nor any habit of expressing feelings. It's also a method of story telling that draws us into the character's inner felt experience—without words—and creates an artistry of inarticulateness and powerful non-verbal expression. One of the most poignant scenes is a deeply depressed Ennis, sitting in the café, pushing a piece of pie around on the plate, trying to eat. He can barely mumble a few words of self-deprecating apology to the waitress, who has been hurt by his not returning her calls: "Sorry, I was probably no fun anyway." We don't need Ennis to tell us in words that his grief over the loss of Jack is profound. The previous scene had been their last time together.

Against this backdrop of inarticulate expressiveness, however, every once in a while there comes a sudden, laser-like spoken line that ignites powerful feelings. Some examples:

"Sometimes I miss you so much I can hardly stand it."

"If you can't fix it, Jack, you gotta stand it."

"I wish I knew how to quit you."

"Then why don't you just let me be, huh? It's because of you I'm like this. I'm nothing. I'm nowhere."

And Alma: "I always wondered why you didn't bring home any trouts."

These verbal zingers are the more powerful because they punctuate a film whose emotional impact is carried largely through images and associations.

What words could have the impact of simply watching Ennis discover the two shirts nestled lovingly in Jack's closet? The realizations unfold in our minds and stir up our feelings. Jack really did love him and held him in his memory. And Jack's mother knew about the shirts and must have understood what their silent embrace meant. In her own unspoken way, she accepts Ennis as Jack's lover. How? By simply suggesting he go up to visit Jack's room, knowing he will find the shirts. By assuming that he will want to take them, silently getting a paper sack for him to put them in, by nodding to acknowledge his gesture of thanks, and by inviting him to visit again. The message is subtle, but powerful. For the first time, Ennis has met understanding and acceptance of his love for Jack.

We can infer that, having felt this acceptance of his love, Ennis can now put his daughter's happiness ahead of his need to work. In the very next scene, she comes to invite him to her wedding, and initially he begins to make excuses about having to be away at the cattle roundup. But then he stops, realizing her disappointment, and says they can just get themselves another cowboy. His "little girl" getting married is more important. It is the first time that Ennis has not disappointed someone who loved him (Jack, Alma, his daughters, the waitress).

The film ends with another wrenching visual metaphor, as described by critic Stuart Klawans in The Nation (Jan 9/16, 2006):

". . . [T]he closing shot of Brokeback Mountain . . . cuts the screen in half. On the right, glimpsed through a mobile home's window, is a patch of western landscape. On the left is a shadowy closet—a shrine, actually—holding a lover's relic. Nothing could be simpler. Nothing could say more."

This final scene is a visual contrast between the confining space of the closet and the freedom of the landscape; between the life Ennis has lived and what might have been. But, as is always true, there is complexity in the tragedy. While the closet stifles and limits, it also provided the safety for Ennis to survive in a hostile, homophobic environment. This was the lesson his father so brutally instilled in him as a boy. Jack, less encumbered by fear and shame, followed his desires. He chose freedom, with its risks; and its lurking dangers killed him.

The closet also holds the memories of love which sustain Ennis in his loneliness. It's conveyed so beautifully in pictures—as we realize that Ennis has reversed the shirts. Ennis now cradles Jack in his arms, reflecting the flashback that was non-verbal in the film but described here in Annie Proulx's words:

"What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.

"They had stood that way for a long time in front of the fire . . . Ennis' breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat."

The film closes as Ennis lovingly, tearfully adjusts the shirts and the postcard picture of Brokeback Mountain. He can only murmur, "Jack, I swear"—which is probably as close as he can come to saying, "Jack, "I love you."

But Brokeback Mountain is much more than an artistic success. Most importantly, it evoked a national discussion about gender and sexuality, about love and homophobia. Cowboys are an icon of masculinity, and here we have two cowboys in love, challenging the assumption that being attracted to another man unmans you—that you cannot both want a man and be a man.

This year-long, national conversation spawned serious articles in literary journals, cover stories in popular magazines, endless Internet chats, and non-stop comedians' jokes. Someone wrote a Marxist interpretation of the film. The corporate world's Color Marketing Group chose the earth-toned hue "Brokeback Bronze" as one of the hot new colors for everything from automobiles to shoes (New Yorker, 01-22-07). The film even prompted Willie Nelson to record a song he'd kept in the closet for 20 years: "Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other," which became his biggest single hit in 20 years. Clearly we, as a society, were trying to work something out.

Unlike the plethora of films and TV shows with gay characters or gay themes, which try to normalize gay life or preach a polemical message, this story struck a responsive chord in middle America. It challenged stereotypes about masculinity and it made people feel the devastating effects of homophobia.

We're looking back on a historical period—and it's not over yet. The story begins in 1963—six years before the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village that ignited the gay rights movement; and ten years before the APA decided that homosexuality is not a disorder. We're in the wild, wild west of Wyoming, where men are men; and anyone who acts queer might get worked over with a tire iron. The story covers a 20 year period, up to the mid-1980's. Remember that in 1986, the U. S. Supreme Court upheld a Georgia law that made it a crime for two consenting adult men to have sex with each other in the privacy of their own home. Annie Proulx's story was first published in The New Yorker in 1997, a year before gay college student Matthew Sheppard was brutally tortured and murdered on a fence post—in Wyoming. Despite remarkable progress in many areas, homophobia was alive and flourishing throughout the land.

The film works on different levels for different people. Some will see it as a love story, others as a tragedy. Some will gain a deeper realization of the effects of homophobia, both the kind that killed Jack and the kind that smothered Ennis's emotional life. Some will focus on the effect on the wives and children; others on the thwarted lives of the men. It's also about loneliness and about yearning for what you can't have.

For those of us who lived through the same era as Jack and Ennis, yearning for what we couldn't have, it packs a particular wallop—the loneliness, the longing, the feeling that life has dealt you an unfair blow—and at the same time that it's all your own fault. It's powerful because we feel "recognized" by the film and therefore affirmed.

I agree with critic Daniel Mendelsohn, writing in The New York Review of Books, that to call this a universal love story, or even a story about universal human emotions, is to seriously misconstrue its real achievement. Rather, he says, it is a tragedy about the closet. Jack Twist and Matthew Sheppard were each killed by actual homophobic enemies. Ennis suffocates in the closet of his own internalized homophobia. Society's attitudes became part of the matrix of his developing personality and connected his sexual desire with fear and shame, deeply affecting his ability to love; but even more so it robbed him of the conviction that he had a right to the love he desired. To quote Mendelsohn:

"The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters, but that it tells a distinctly gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it."

The film has such a profound effect, because it allows different people to get inside the skin of these two men, to feel along with them, and to take what lessons they can from it. It does not preach; it evokes emotional understanding. When you are feeling what the character feels, not simply watching an actor portraying a feeling, you become him through identification. Transformation can occur when individuals question their prior assumptions and biases about the injustice of homophobia because they have felt what it is like to be inside another person's emotional world, experiencing his hurts and desires.

It is the film's capacity to evoke this kind of indentificatory empathy that explains why so many people found Brokeback Mountain such a profoundly moving experience and why it was one of the most significant films of recent years.

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