Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum

TOTW 12/07:Is Brokeback Mountain a 'universal love story' or a 'gay love story'?

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Brown Eyes:
I still am trying to figure out exactly what "universal" love really means.  It just seems too general of a term to me.  I don't know how we can know what kind of emotion or experience is truly universal.

I started thinking about this "universal" question a little bit while responding to the "Is BBM anti-gay" thread here in Open Forum.  And, I started to wonder about how the audiences of the film tend to feel in terms of identification with characters in the movie.  The whole question of how an audience member identifies with the protagonist/ main characters in any film is a major, major issue within film studies.  And,  I think one thing that the filmmakers of BBM are very, very successful in doing is finding ways for the audience member (regardless of gender or sexuality) to identify with the two main characters and really begin to experience the situation through their eyes a bit.  And, then I sort of wonder, if this ability of a general audience member (or more specifically any audience member who isn't a gay man) to identify with the social position of closeted gay men might then translate into this idea of "universal" love.  In other words, the general audience member/non-gay-male audience member then experiences the love between Ennis and Jack as something that they too can completely identify with... and therefore the emotion is articulated as "universal" as a way of explaining this phenomenon.

Does this make any sense?  Anyway, I think the whole question of how audiences identify with Ennis or Jack (or both) through the course of the film is really important to this issue of how the love story is perceived.

serious crayons:
I wanted to link and quote Daniel Mendelsohn's famous piece in The New York Review of Books, complaining about the phenomenon of people calling it a "universal love story." Turns out you have to buy the article to see it online. But here's a paragraph about it:

(Mendelsohn) argued that to see it as a story of “universal human emotions” is to diminish its importance as a “specifically gay tragedy” about “psyches scarred from the very first stirrings of an erotic desire which the world around them… represents as unhealthy, hateful and deadly.”

So I think another factor is whether you see BBM as a love story or a psychological drama/tragedy about homophobia. Personally, I thought Mendelsohn's interpretation was too limiting.

Garry_LH:
Not much I can really ad to this discussion... Other than my road killing a few things I mentioned not long after I first time saw Master Lee's interpretation of Annie Proulx's words.

Missouri is not Wyoming, but there is something so familure about the world Jack and Ennis exist within, that I know most of the characters in this film as though they were my own relatives.  The way of speaking, that cadence, that bravado couched in terms as polite as a good horse, and as dangerous as a rattle snake. These characters are ten years older than I am. Then, I remember the world they grew up in. It had it's good points, just as it sure had it's bad ones.

I guess what I can say is, for the first time in my life I have a film in which I don't have to transpose the love the characters have for one another. I don't even have to think about their way of speaking. I grew up with our own rural northern Missouri version of these two good oll boys. And the real hard part, I dam well knew the fear Ennis had of what would happen if anyone else found out. I think for a lot of us older gay folks, that is a whole lot of what kicks us in the gut with this story. It's like Jack and Ennis are two parts of our own soul. The dreamer that can always see the possibilities in life, and the realist that knows just how fast this world can kill you if you make the wrong move.

A universal love story?  Perhaps mixed race couples of that same period would understand why that feels like a bit of stretch for those of us that ended up with this label called gay, and a lot more far less polite terms. Just one more gay tragedy, a friend of mine said. In a way yes, but unlike the plethora of AIDS tragedies and Mathew Shepard remakes, it is the characters themselves that unwind all hope once they leave their piece of  heaven that fall of 1963. A piece of heaven Ennis can never bring himself to name beyond 'this thing'.  Am I the only one that feels a longing in Jake Gyllenhaal's Jack to put his feelings into words. Even as Jack knows, those very words would send Ennis running for his life.

A universal love story?  What other love can so threaten one's own sense of self, can make one question what it is to be a man or a woman, and drive one to deny that what they are feeling is that undefinable madness we call love?  To never speak those words, I love you? If that is universal, this is one scary world we are living in these days.

louisev:
for better or worse, it appears Ang Lee struck just the right note in his restrained direction of the film, so that gay viewers could find something of themselves in it, and those who did not directly identify, older straight women, could relate to unrequited love, or love denied, or the road not traveled, to make it a critical as well as a commercial success such as had not happened before.

I was thinking about what you wrote, Amanda, and I think that the identification that people have made with the film becomes universal when they themselves, not being gay or not having been denied the relationship they wanted and needed, are able to understand the frustration, denial, and tragedy in terms of whatever loss they experienced in their own life, and that is their means of identifying.

Some purists have condemned the film as "not being gay enough", or for using very attractive straight male leads instead of gay actors, or for restraining the depictions of sex onscreen, but the fact is that this film may have been only as much as America could handle - and maybe that is something Ang Lee would know more about since he comes from outside the US cultural milieu and has had to learn about it.

serious crayons:

--- Quote from: louise van hine on October 28, 2007, 02:07:25 pm ---I was thinking about what you wrote, Amanda, and I think that the identification that people have made with the film becomes universal when they themselves, not being gay or not having been denied the relationship they wanted and needed, are able to understand the frustration, denial, and tragedy in terms of whatever loss they experienced in their own life, and that is their means of identifying.
--- End quote ---

Well put, Louise. The very fact that so many straight people (even a few straight men) DO identify with it -- not as just an interesting story or well-made film but as a transcending experience that was moving,  romantic, tragic, etc., on a deeply personal level -- suggests that "universal" is at least one of the terms that accurately desdribes it.

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