Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
Brokeback as an Anti-Gay Polemic : essay by W.C. Harris
Artiste:
Wow, wow, wow!! Thanks very much for your comments!! They are food for thought!!
I will come back to those later, since I have to take away snow off the truck and/or car, and bring mother for grocery shopping soon. So remind me if I forget to answer any of your questions, please.
One thing troubles me a great deal, and still does about the BM movie, which can be seen maybe as anti-gay:
That thing I hate about the BM movie is not only the killing of Jack as if he was murdered or not because he was gay or bi, but mostly the trailer showing what is in that film as too much gratuitous violence especially concerning the murder of the man who lived with the other!! No one talks about that!! No one dares!!
Awaiting your comments,
hugs!! Happy Gay New 2008 Year to all gay men and others on Earth for freedom and peace!!
brokeplex:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on January 03, 2008, 10:16:40 am ---
I'm sorry, but I'm not clear on what you mean here. Are you saying you do see an anti-gay polemic?
I'm not sure I need to read it to feel that the best person to respond to a charge of "providing the ending expected by a largely straight readership" is Annie Proulx herself.
I will admit, however, that it might be useful to make sure I have a clear understanding of what these writers mean by "anti-gay polemic" and "heteronorming"--and what it is that McMurtry and Osana and Lee did that they consider "heteronorming."
[. As for "heteronorming," well, Ennis and Jack are married, they have wives and children. That's the way Annie wrote the story. Are these critics criticizing her for not writing the story they think she should have written?
--- End quote ---
I am offering the essay written by Harris for everyone's consideration, and debate. Part of the Harris thesis is that there elements in the short story which constitute an "anti-gay polemic". My own personal opinion is that there is merit to this argument. I do not believe that Proulx deliberately set out to write an anti-gay story, by no means!
But I do see as the murder of Jack as unnecessary in order to achieve a goal of illustrating the destructiveness of the closet and rural homophobia. In fact in many ways, after Ennis's flashbacks to the murder of Rich, the murder of Jack is predictable to the point of formulaic banality. I didn't like that segment in the story or the movie at all. Jack 'giving up' Ennis to live with Randall on his father's ranch would have completed Ennis's devastation in a more believable way for me. Gosh, does a story have to end with the death of the queer in order to make the point about the destructiveness of the closet? Relatively very few gay men have been killed with tire irons, relatively few have been murdered, but many, many more have suffered the devastation that the closet brings to people like Ennis. Why not tell a more realistic story that would relate more closely to lives of more gay men? Well, it just wasn't in the formula, I guess.
I am very interested in the commentary of Proulx and also have read much of what she has said about the story and the film. But why should we rely on her as a final source of commentary? Doesn't she have a bias? Shouldn't we balance this out with critics who may be biased in different ways?
The heteronorming comment made by several critics including Mendelsohn is shown in the "fleshing out the domestic life of Ennis and Jack" (McMurtry's words) in the screen play. Why was it necessary to augment the domestic lives of the boys? Proulx's short story was sparse in its treatment of the boys domestic lives, we learn very little about Lureen in Proulx's story. The reason offered by Mendelsohn for the heteronorming of the film is that it made it more marketable. It turned a gay story into a "universal love story". I agree at least partially with Mendelsohn that this is deleterious to the gay story. Making the 'gay experience' seem more normal to mainstream America is what Mendelsohn refers to as heteronorming the story. By denying that this is a "gay cowboy story" we push their gay experience back further into a closet of the imagination. The story of Ennis and Jack just isn't universal, it just isn't comparable to a straight love affair. The film critic Ebert has suggested it analogs with an interracial romance. This betrays a lack of understanding as to what really is the experience of being in the closet. The closet teaches young men and women to hate themselves for their natural biological urges that they can do nothing to change, they can only hide it, secretly engage in it, and hate themselves. An interracial couple may have enormous challenges that their experiences bring to the table, but they are not taught to hate themselves in the ways that gays are from childhood onward.
Jeff Wrangler:
Thanks for the clarifications and expansions, bud. ;)
--- Quote from: brokeplex on January 03, 2008, 03:55:31 pm ---I am offering the essay written by Harris for everyone's consideration, and debate. Part of the Harris thesis is that there elements in the short story which constitute an "anti-gay polemic". My own personal opinion is that there is merit to this argument. I do not believe that Proulx deliberately set out to write an anti-gay story, by no means!
--- End quote ---
I'm glad to see we don't disagree on this. :)
--- Quote ---But I do see as the murder of Jack as unnecessary in order to achieve a goal of illustrating the destructiveness of the closet and rural homophobia. In fact in many ways, after Ennis's flashbacks to the murder of Rich, the murder of Jack is predictable to the point of formulaic banality. I didn't like that segment in the story or the movie at all. Jack 'giving up' Ennis to live with Randall on his father's ranch would have completed Ennis's devastation in a more believable way for me. Gosh, does a story have to end with the death of the queer in order to make the point about the destructiveness of the closet? Relatively very few gay men have been killed with tire irons, relatively few have been murdered, but many, many more have suffered the devastation that the closet brings to people like Ennis. Why not tell a more realistic story that would relate more closely to lives of more gay men? Well, it just wasn't in the formula, I guess.
--- End quote ---
Now, this is interesting, and I'm glad to have your take on it. What you see as "predictable to the point of formulaic banality," I see as necessary, not so much to make the point of the destructiveness of rural homophobia, but because of the mythic, or legendary, or folk-tale quality to the way Annie Proulx wrote the story--as I wrote yesterday.
--- Quote ---I am very interested in the commentary of Proulx and also have read much of what she has said about the story and the film. But why should we rely on her as a final source of commentary? Doesn't she have a bias? Shouldn't we balance this out with critics who may be biased in different ways?
--- End quote ---
Well, my take would be that we rely on Annie Proulx as the final word because it's her story. As a corollary of my dislike of "lit crit," I also dislike critics who think they know more about a work of art than the artist who created it in the first place. Trust me, I've gotten into fearsome debates on this point on this site. :laugh: But that's just me.
--- Quote ---The heteronorming comment made by several critics including Mendelsohn is shown in the "fleshing out the domestic life of Ennis and Jack" (McMurtry's words) in the screen play. Why was it necessary to augment the domestic lives of the boys? Proulx's short story was sparse in its treatment of the boys domestic lives, we learn very little about Lureen in Proulx's story. The reason offered by Mendelsohn for the heteronorming of the film is that it made it more marketable. It turned a gay story into a "universal love story". I agree at least partially with Mendelsohn that this is deleterious to the gay story.
--- End quote ---
OK, thanks, I didn't misunderstand what was meant by "heteronorming." But I do wonder how Mendelsohn would have transferred Annie's brief description of the growing distance between Ennis and Alma to film otherwise than McMurtry and Osana did. I'm thinking, for example, of the line in the story where we are told that Alma disliked that Ennis never wanted to go out and have any fun, versus the scene in the film where Alma wants to "smarten up" and go to the church social, and Ennis just mumbles that remark about the "fire and brimstone crowd. Personally I simply don't have a problem with this so-called "heteronorming," regardless of the effect it may have had on the "gay story," because I think it was part and parcel of the artful realization of Annie's story on film--a very different medium from a short story.
I guess they felt it necessary to create more of Jack's life in Texas to balance the story--make it less of just Ennis's story--though even here I think, for example, you can trace the scene where Jack is demonstrating the combine to Annie's brief description of Jack's work in the farm machinery business.
--- Quote ---Making the 'gay experience' seem more normal to mainstream America is what Mendelsohn refers to as heteronorming the story. By denying that this is a "gay cowboy story" we push their gay experience back further into a closet of the imagination. The story of Ennis and Jack just isn't universal, it just isn't comparable to a straight love affair. The film critic Ebert has suggested it analogs with an interracial romance. This betrays a lack of understanding as to what really is the experience of being in the closet. The closet teaches young men and women to hate themselves for their natural biological urges that they can do nothing to change, they can only hide it, secretly engage in it, and hate themselves. An interracial couple may have enormous challenges that their experiences bring to the table, but they are not taught to hate themselves in the ways that gays are from childhood onward.
--- End quote ---
This is wise. Is this you, Brokeplex, or Mendelsohn?
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: garycottle on January 03, 2008, 05:14:45 pm ---I'm sure that Proulx has many valuable insights, and what she has to say about her own story is well worth considering, but stories come from the subconscious by and large, and the reason writers feel the need to write their stories is because it's a way of working something out that haunts them. I heard the writer Gore Vidal say in an interview recently that we write to know what we think. I would add that we write to know what we feel, too.
Since inspiration is often a mystery to a writer it is very possible, even probable that someone else could understand something the writer does not. And furthermore, stories are interactive. We don't come to them as blank slates. A writer writes the story that is in his/her head, but when we read it we make the story our own. The spin a reader puts on a story can be just as worthy of examination as the story itself.
--- End quote ---
Sure enough, but I don't think examining what a reader gets out of a story is the same thing as claiming that the reader understands the story better than its author. As for the rest, it may depend a lot on what, exactly, one is talking about in a particular story. For example, if a writer makes a positive statement about the motivation behind something that a character created by that writer does in a story written by that writer, then I think it's nonsense for some so-called critic to come back and say, "No, that's not why he did thus-and-such. This is why he did it" That's what I was talking about.
Jeff Wrangler:
Gary,
--- Quote from: garycottle on January 03, 2008, 10:01:30 pm ---This thread is about the possible motives AP had in killing off Jack at the end of her story, and the motives of the screenwriters and the director for making the kind of film that they did. It's been said that they were trying to appeal to a straight audience, and they were trying to make their story more profitable, etc. I find this disturbing, and I don't see any reason to assume that there's any truth to these claims.
--- End quote ---
On this we agree.
--- Quote ---But criticism in a literary sense does not necessarily mean a negative, or personal attack. Even though most of us here are not professional literary scholars, a lot of what we say about BBM is a form of criticism, in the broader sense of the term. And I happen to like reading what people make of the story, and I think it does have value. Reading other people's opinions and interpretations has expanded my own view of the story. For example, it would make my day if I found a post that gave fresh insight into the meaning of Ennis's encounter with the bear.
So your statements about the worthlessness of literary criticism seemed overstated to me, and I didn't want you to throw the baby out with the bath water.
--- End quote ---
I think you are missing my point, and I'm sorry if I wasn't as clear as I thought I was. If I wasn't interested in other people's opinions I wouldn't be on this site. Go back and reread my little anecdote about the revelation I had when writing a paper on Macbeth for a Shakespeare class. My objection in particular is to professional and/or academic criticism--the sort of stuff written by people who get essays published in volumes of criticism--which I think is little more than an academic con game--though I also simply can't and don't agree that anyone, amateur or professional, can know more about a work of art--or the artist's motivations--than the artist himself.
I didn't overstate my position. I said exactly what I mean. I have no time or use for professional/academic literary criticism.
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