Disclaimer 1: If you haven’t seen this movie and you want to, don’t read this post because I’m going to give it away.
Disclaimer 2: If you think I’m going to give you some kind of graphic details, have no fear. (While the love scenes are probably going to be somewhat uncomfortable for any heterosexual, they are hardly the lurid stuff of rumours.)
Let me start by saying that as anyone who knows me would tell you, I am a George Bush loving conservative. I think the Iraq war is right and abortion is wrong. Terry Schiavo was murdered. Richard Nixon is over-demonized. Reagen had tremendous foresight, and George Bush is no idiot.
I love cowboys. I love a good Western. I have loved Clint Eastwood from afar, literally for as long as I can remember. Homosexuality is wrong. Adultery is wrong.
So I think I should have hated Brokeback Mountain. But I didn’t. I was moved to tears. Heartbroken even.
When Brokeback Mountain first came out, I read a quote somewhere by a member of the crew who said, “conservatives are going to like this movie.” Well this conservative did, and here’s my theory on why that comment makes sense.
While I’m sure a significant portion of the gay population would disagree, I believe much, if not most, homosexuality, is environmental; not natural. In my own extended family there is strong evidence to support this. Abusive, or even just overbearing parents can have a profound effect on a child’s tender psyche both in childhood and throughout life.
It has long been accepted that young girls tend to “marry their fathers” – seeking out men, for better or worse, who exemplify the man that raised them . . . or neglected them, or abused them, or abandoned them. What are the lyrics to that John Mayer song? “Oh, you see that skin? It's the same she's been standing in since the day she saw him walking away; Now she's left cleaning up the mess he made . . Fathers be good to your daughters; Daughters will love like you do; Girls become lovers who turn into mothers . . . .”
Well, why is this any less true of a father’s impact on his sons? And why is it any less possible that a son would seek out in relationships the things he didn’t get from an abusive or at least emotionally vacant father? I have a 2-year-old son. And he loves his mama – but when his dad comes home from work, or his Uncle Jake comes over, or his “older” friends Jacob, Cooper, or Conner are around – it’s all about them. 150 percent. Mom fades to black. They play loud, push, run, fall down, yell, laugh, even giggle. I think there are some very good single moms out there who’ve done as well as they possibly could raising boys on their own – but I guarantee that in most cases they have not done it as well as if there had a been a loving father in the picture. Boys need men to love them as much as girls do.
Throughout Brokeback Mountain there are allusions, references, or brief flashbacks to each characters’ life that indicated to me a father who was at the very least cold, maybe even abusive. Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) tells Ennis (Heath Ledger) in one of the opening scenes, that the reason he works for sheep-rancher Joe Aquirre (Randy Quaid) each summer, despite the hard work and unreasonable expectations, is because “it beats workin’ for my old man.” And in the end of the movie we meet his father and see why that first statement was probably true. He is clearly bitter and seemingly unmoved by the death of his son, only barely tolerating Ennis’s presence when he comes to express his condolences and try to take some of Jack’s ashes up to Brokeback Mountain where Jack asked that they be scattered. Jack’s father refuses, knowing full well why this was his son’s request and who Ennis is.
In a later scene, Jack tells Ennis that he wants a real relationship – not just a fling on Brokeback Mountain. Ennis replies flatly that it won’t happen, that if they got caught, they could end up dead. Then he proceeds to recount a childhood memory, which the movie flashes back to, about “two old guys ranched up together” and how one day the locals took a tire iron to one of them, dragged him around until he was dead and then left him in a ditch to rot. In the memory Ennis is no more than nine and, as he says, “My daddy, he made sure me and my brother seen it. . . Hell for all I know, he done the job.” As we watch the flashback, the camera moves in close to the face of this horrified little boy staring at a bloody, mutilated corpse. There are freckles across his sun-browned nose, dirt in the fine creases around his eyes, and we see his father’s hand on the back of his neck. It is not a loving touch. As we watch, his large fingers press hard into the flesh around the tendons on the side of Ennis’s neck, warning him.
I don’t offer the above explanation as a defense of homosexuality, because truly I believe it is wrong. Even if you didn’t believe it was wrong in and of itself, at the very least you’d have to agree it was wrong in a relationship where the two participants are both married to other people. Rare is the movie these days that really sanctions adultery (although “Walk the Line” did and there wasn’t much hue and cry over it from the conservative community).
But right or wrong, homosexuality does exist. As a Christian conservative I’m not blind to that fact. It’s reality. But I think it exists for reasons related to a fallen world; not God’s perfect design. The argument can be made that Brokeback Mountain, however subtly, presents it not as accidental reality owing itself to a genetic lottery, but as consequential reality; sins of the fathers. And this, for me, made it something that I could relate to with compassion even if I disagreed with it. Who among us, cannot relate on some level to the human condition we each suffer at the hands of others.
There is no doubt that the movie sets out to make you feel for its main characters. But it doesn’t make any attempt to gloss over the negative impact of their affair. Everyone around Ennis and Jack is undone by it – their children, their wives, their in-laws. It is painful to watch Ennis’s oldest daughter try to understand why she isn’t a priority in his life. Jack’s son becomes a vacant child marked with the sign of an unimpeachable Texas-upbringing: zombie-like attention to football. There is no indication that either child knows of their father’s homosexual love affair, but they are profoundly affected nonetheless.
Their wives are bitter and pathetic in their attempts to grapple with their marital reality. Ennis’s wife (Michelle Williams) probably garners more sympathy from viewers because she actually deals with the situation, however painfully. Jack’s wife (Ann Hathaway) becomes cold and mostly unlikable - an overly blonde, large-haired Texan with bright lips and fingernails. But there is a moment late in the movie, as she is telling Ennis about Jack’s death, when the camera moves in close to her face and in her eyes you can see this intense, almost throbbing pain. Even though you find her mostly repulsive, you still feel for just how crappy this must have been for her too.
Brokeback Mountain convinced me to feel compassion for two gay characters. But it didn’t make me agree with the homosexuality. And I don’t think it was trying to. The negative consequences of their relationship are everywhere. Ennis becomes little more than a lonely ne’r do well living in a beat-up trailer on the outskirts of his Wyoming town. So convincing is his dejection that you wonder that he can even enjoy a slice of pie he eats by himself in a half-empty diner. Jack is promiscuous, finding sex in Mexico when he can’t be with Ennis. If he hadn’t died the way he does in the movie, he surely would have met his end virally in the AIDS-soaked 80’s. Neither man’s children are priorities for them. They devastate their wives - women they married, despite knowing that they'd never properly love them.
Certainly, there are peripheral characters that are meant to represent a place, a time and a society that even today probably wouldn’t “cotton” to queer cowboys. But this is hardly the theme of the movie. You never believe that this is working out for Jack and Ennis.
If Brokeback Mountain is meant to be some kind of endorsement of homosexuality well then I didn’t get it and I’d have to give it an “F.” But if it is supposed to be a small, poetic illustration of one part of the human condition it does an achingly good job.
