Brokeback Mountain on my mind

[drscott]

Thoughts on Brokeback Mountain continue to surface. The grafted-on McMurtry Texas schtick was pretty successful, even though Jake Gyllenhaal is too young and pretty to be convincing as a middle-aged family man. But in fleshing out the hints of his Texas life in the story, some of the ambiguity was lost.

It still disturbs me: in the story, one is never certain of what actually happened to Jack. Ennis talks to Jack's wife and concludes from the improbable story of his death that he was actually set upon and killed, as he half-expects from an early traumatic experience (when his father makes him view the body of the neighbor who's been beaten to death (possibly by Ennis' dad) because of his homosexuality.) In the movie, the visual cues given by Jack's wife and the brief shot of Ennis' imagining make Jack's beating a fact to the audience, skewing the story's ambiguity towards Ennis' belief being factual.

The power of the story is that Ennis' prison is in his head. His fears kept him from pursuing his true happiness, but he accepts that as the price of survival. It's far from clear to the reader that he and Jack's fate would have been worse had Ennis had the courage to defy convention.

In my 5th and 6th grade years, I took summer enrichment school (a perk for the brightest kids to enjoy being together while studying advanced topics.) After my disastrous 7th grade year, when a ball-busting Common Studies (English and History) teacher flunked me because of my spotty attendance, I had to take remedial summer school, populated by the stupid and the incorrigible. It was surprisingly enjoyable -- I discovered that most of these kids, who in the normal course of events I would have avoided, were actually rather nice to me and adopted me as their pet brain. It was broadening to experience their coarse humor and rough tit-for-tat ethics. But I also got my clearest experience of the possible price of being identified as gay, during the daily school bus ride across town to summer school: a boy named Chrisman, who admitted to enjoying giving blow jobs, was constantly teased and harassed in the back of the bus. The guys made jokes about how he loved "Homo Milk" and occasionally held him down and tickled him until he cried; no doubt he suffered much worse abuse off the bus. I didn't ever want to be subjected to that kind of attention. And so the prison gets built.

Now by nature I'm not particularly macho or effeminate. But this kind of early life experience trained me to fit in, and so I became what I pretended to be, fairly butch in manner and outlook. It would be interesting to know how I would have turned out growing up in the Bay Area of today, where young men adopt (unknowingly) gay fashions, use "gay" as a synonym for dorky with not much heat behind it, and join high school gay-straight alliances to meet cute girls.

Comments

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

The movie also includes the daughter and lets Ennis looosen up a little in that last scene with her to let us know that he realizes that love should have been more important than fear. This detail makes it much more appealing to straight women, who can see it as a story of how men should let themselves feel more, a subject most of them can get behind!