Not That There's Anything Wrong With That

You get what you pay for with free software (e.g., blogger.com). I had a post, looked at it in "preview" mode, and it disappeared with I clicked "publish." Luckily most of it was pre-written.

I wrote my sister today. In a previous email I had told her the story of the times a friend and I were physically threatened by groups of straight white males. The first time was in the late 1970s or 1980. A friend (J.L., straight) and I had gone to Cinderella City to see some critically acclaimed, utterly forgotten thing starring Alan Alda as a senator (The Seduction of Joe Tynan?). To kill time, as the mall was closed (it was a holiday--they did this back then), we walked around the building. Some guys drove up, called us fags--the usual stuff. J.'s chutzpah in dealing with the idiots saved our skins. More recently, in 1999, P.C.D. (gay) and I had gone to the Southbridge Seven (Broadway & Mineral, now a Marshall's) on a cold January Monday night to see Pleasantville. We were chased back to our cars by six high school football team types whose gaydar was apparently functioning; our quick feet got us back to my old Subaru in time (and it started--Subarus generally do, even ancient ones).

My sister thought the stories were interesting enough to send to a friend of hers, but I said to here that they weren't remarkable. Then I said (and this is my laziness--posting a blog using a previously-written email):

What I do find remarkable, but I probably shouldn't, is a lot of the recent press around Brokeback Mountain. It seems that a lot of straight men who consider themselves liberal and enlightened, who may even have gay friends, refuse to see the movie with their wives or girlfriends (this started a few weeks ago when Larry David--the comic genius and executive producer of Seinfeld--wrote a humorous piece for the NYT Op Ed pages, and several other straight male writers have picked up on his "not that there's anything wrong with that" line).
I've seen many thousands of movies and TV shoes, not to mention read thousands of stories and novels, where the guy gets the girl, or loses the girl, or what have you--heterosexual stories, in other words, and never complained that they made me uncomfortable. The double standards are amazing--"I have gay friends," they say (substitute the word "black" there, and see how patronizing it sounds)--yet the idea of two masculine characters falling in love makes them distinctly nervous. I t's as though they want us all to be faggish in the Carson Kresley-Harvey Fierstein--Nathan Lane-Paul Lynde-Liberace mode--all Broadway showtunes and flower arrangements and just one of the girls.

The actual sex scene (singular, not plural) in the movie is so abstract as to be incomprehensible--some rapidly undone belt buckles and animalistic grunting for all of 20 seconds, followed by the inevitable "what did we do last night?" look on Heath Ledger's face the next morning as he wakes up with his pants undone.

Then there are some kisses. The one that generates the most nervous laughter takes place when the two men finally meet up again after four years of separation (and nearly four years of sex only with their wives). Ennis (Ledger), his wife and young babies are living above a laundromat in Riverton, WY. Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) has sent him a postcard announcing he'll be coming through on a certain date. All day long Ennis broods, waiting. When he finally shows up, Ennis runs outside, bounds down the stairs, hugs Jack, and throws him against the wall, kissing him ferociously. The next shot shows his wife Alma, looking through the window, shocked to her bones. It's a tragic moment in her life--Michelle Williams, the actress playing Alma, conveys this clearly.

The audience guffaws. It happened both times I saw the movie, but I noticed no guffawing coming from gay people--it was from all the liberal heterosexuals. Both times I was appalled. And this was not in a suburban multiplex--it was at the Mayan, at 1st and Broadway, an art cinema. I can't wait to watch this on DVD, with no sympathetic liberals nearby.

Of course if you are a straight male liberal (or libertarian) friend of mine, I don't lump you in with those I felt disgusted by at the Mayan. If you don't go see this incredible movie, I'll understand. It's not like there's anything wrong with that.

So Over It

The holidays are over. The holidays are over. The holidays are over.

It's been since the 11th of November that I've added anything to this damn blog that about three people read. Sorry about that--I blame the holidays.

This year I just couldn't "get into it," and neither could Matt. Maybe it was the nice warm weather we had all through November, and for parts of December (the high in Denver on the 25th--the holiday--was something like 67 degrees, a record-breaker). Or maybe it was the sense I've had all year that we're living in increasingly difficult and dangerous times, and what's the point of celebrating anything other than the most short-term victories over darkness? Or maybe it was my increasing antipathy toward organized religion, thanks to reading not one but three books this year on freethinking--secularism--whatever you want to call it (for the record, the books were Michael Shermer's The Science of Good & Evil, Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers, and Sam Harris' The End of Faith) (not to mention Tariq Ali's The Clash of Fundamentalisms, but that book, even though it was written by an unbelieving Muslim, was more about the geopolitical world than religion per se).

It was probably a combination of all three factors, plus my increasing disconnection from American consumerism, plus a few reasons I don't even know about.

Sure, I went through the motions--the tree with 840 decorations, hung more perfectly this year than in other years; the open house for our friends here in Denver; Matt's parents on Christmas day (the paella turned out better this year than any other time I can remember). But the season never clicked.

There was one highlight, however (every day with Matt is a highlight, but that's not what I'm writing about): Brokeback Mountain.

I haven't been this deeply affected by a film in years. The story of Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar and their forbidden love that stretched from 1963 to 1983 got into my head and my heart, lodging there alongside the very small handful of movies that are my own personal list of classics (Ordinary People, Maurice, and one or two others).

For those of you who haven't seen it, or have been on the moon (it has garnered more than its fair share of publicity), Brokeback Mountain is Ang Lee's adaptation of Annie Proulx's 1997 short story of the same name (published originally in The New Yorker) that describes what happens in a relationship when one person doesn't know what he has until he has lost it. Jack and Ennis fall in love that last innocent summer (it can't be a coincidence that Proulx chose 1963) when both are charged with keeping an eye on a massive herd of sheep high up on a Wyoming mountainside. Unsophisticated country boys that they are, neither can admit they're queer. Both marry and have kids (the wives' stories would make for a compelling movie on its own). Four years after they say goodbye, Jack contacts Ennis, and they resume their relationship. For the next 16 years they meet every summer, on "fishing" trips that yield no catch. Jack proposes they leave their wives and get a ranch together. Ennis, who had been exposed in his youth to the deadly consequences of just such a situation, is too fearful, and too emotionally mute, to ever give of himself to Jack in this way. In their last scene together, Ennis disappoints Jack to such an extent that neither can say goodbye to each other.

SPOILER ALERT: Stop reading here if you don't want to know what happens before you see the film.

That first summer, after they'd been told to come off the mountain before the end of the summer grazing season (obstensibly due to weather, but the film leaves the option open that as their boss had seen them canoodling through his powerful binoculars, he may just want to deprive them of a month of pay out of spite), they're too tough to admit their love. So they do what all 19 year-old boys do in the west when faced with mysterious emotions: they fight. Blood spurts from noses, and is wiped on sleeves.

In 1983 Jack is killed. Both the story and the film are ambiguous here. Ennis, upon receiving his postcard to Jack back from the post office (marked "deceased") calls Lureen, Jack's wife in Childress, TX. She tells him that he was changing a tire on a back road. Something caused the rim to explode off of the tire and hit him in the face, breaking his nose and his jaw. No one was around to help him, and, unconscious, he drowned in his own blood. But she doesn't believe this, and neither does Ennis. He knows it was a gang of local good ol' boys who attacked him while he was changing a tire, using his own tire iron to do the damage ostensibly caused by the explosive rim.

Jack's last wish was to have his ashes scattered on Brokeback Mountain, the only place in his life where he had ever been truly happy. Ennis drives to Jack's parents barren little windblown house. His rough, hardscrabble father wants nothing to do with him--he has guessed full well what kind of relationship his son had had with Ennis Del Mar. The mother, however, is much more human. She invites Ennis to go upstairs by himself to see the room where Jack grew up, and where Jack would spend a week every summer after his time with Ennis. Jack ascends the stairs, enters the room, and examines the sparse furnishings. He sits down. His eyes wander into Jack's closet--really more of an alcove with a curtain. He sees something he recognizes: the two shirts the 19 year-0ld boys were wearing that last day on Brokeback. Jack had saved them, never washing off the dried blood. Ennis's plaid cotton shirt has been threaded through Jack's blue denim, forever protecting it from harm.

He takes the shirts downstairs, and in a lovely moment that requires no words, his mother puts them into a paper sack for him to take. She invites him back for a later visit he'll never make.

The final scene takes place in Ennis' trailer--he's moved down in the world, living in what used to be someone's vacation toy instead of a house connected to the ground (Proulx writes about the wind whistling underneath). His daughter, now 19, has come by to tell him of her impending marriage, and to invite him to the wedding. He promises to come, and she happily drives off. Too late, he realizes she has left her sweater. After trying to catch her, he puts it to his nose, smelling her scent. He moves to a closet, to store it safely until he should see her again. The door opens, and there, on a nail, are the two shirts--but this time, it's his plaid shirt on the outside, protecting forever Jack's blue denim. Tacked next to the shirts is a postcard image of Brokeback Mountain. Lee creates an image that splits the screen here, with the closet door filling the left hand side, and the world, as seen through a window, on the right--the postcard and the shirts are forever Ennis' reality and his refuge from the world.

I get teary-eyed just writing about it. Go see this movie! And if you live in such places as Underwood, MN or Walterboro, SC--wait for the DVD, I guess....

I could go on about various symbolic typologies Lee uses to get across his point, but I won't--let someone in a film studies class do that.

Most critical reaction has been, of course, ecstatic (except for the Evangelical critics, who have tended to fault Lee for portraying homosexual love as normative and positive). Some reviews have been patronizing--Matt made the point to me recently that some were calling Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal "brave" for taking these roles, and that's like saying Alec Guiness was brave for playing an Arab king in Lawrence of Arabia--nothing brave about it, just good acting.

My favorite review so far has been in The Nation, where the reviewer said that the image of Jack and Ennis madly kissing (the 1967 reunion) at the bottom of the stairs behind a laundromat in Riverton, WY, will stand as a classic iconic cinematic image, alongside images like Rhett carrying Scarlett up the stairs of their Atlanta mansion, or Marilyn Monroe happily struggling to keep her skirt down while standing on top of an air vent. I'd add the lovers on the beach scene in From Here to Eternity.

Anyway, somehow that movie helped me get through the holiday season in a big way--go see it.