Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
Brokeback as an Anti-Gay Polemic : essay by W.C. Harris
pnwDUDE:
--- Quote from: garycottle on January 14, 2008, 02:53:07 am --- ::)
--- End quote ---
Wouldn't expect anything less. Made my point, thanks.
Brad
Clyde-B:
--- Quote from: bradINblue on January 14, 2008, 03:00:52 am ---The homosexual men I know think gay is a lifestyle and don't consider themselves 'gay'. The straight people you refer to are right.
I say this to make the point that when one lumps everyone into a catagory of 'gay' just because he is a homosexual is a mistake. Back to Jack and Ennis. They don't fit.
Brad
--- End quote ---
Well, none of the homosexual men I know think gay is a lifestyle. So which one of us is right? How do we decide?
pnwDUDE:
--- Quote from: Clyde-B on January 14, 2008, 03:06:44 am ---Well, none of the homosexual men I know think gay is a lifestyle. So which one of us is right? How do we decide?
--- End quote ---
Clyde, neither of us is right or wrong. That's not my point. It is that all homosexual men don't think alike. There are so many out there that don't feel they can surface (come out) because they don't fit into what it is to be gay. This is what Brokeback Mountain is all about.
Brad
Clyde-B:
--- Quote from: bradINblue on January 14, 2008, 03:12:13 am ---Clyde, neither of us is right or wrong. That's not my point. It is that all homosexual men don't think alike. There are so many out there that don't feel they can surface (come out) because they don't fit into what it is to be gay. This is what Brokeback Mountain is all about.
Brad
--- End quote ---
??? ??? ???
Coming out means admitting you love someone of the same sex, or want to love someone of the same sex. How does coming out mean you have to follow any given style of life other than who you get involved with emotionally?
Nevermore:
Film Quarterly devoted an entire issue to Brokeback last year, full of essays written by Cahiers du Cinema types of the ilk skewered by Jeff here:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on January 06, 2008, 06:52:46 pm ---I haven't tried to find any information on Mendelsohn, but I googled Lisa Arellano. She teaches women's studies and gender and sexuality issues at Colby College. She also writes as if she has no clue how you go about transforming a short story into something that can actually be acted out on film. Maybe she would have preferred a slide show of Annie Proulx's text to an actual movie?
...I wish I could convince myself that these people are just playing academic games, that they don't really believe some of this stuff they're writing. I've already made pretty clear my position on academic literary and film criticism. These people write as if they believe this film has done more harm than good.
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Gawd, a gender-studies professor gets her fingers on Brokeback--will anyone even recognize it from the description? I would say that what made the short story and the film work so beautifully was that it was the very type of slim, stripped-down tale that good English teachers gently try to steer their students toward when they are hellbent on being the next Dale Eggers or chuck Palaniuk or whatever. It is a classic story that has been told over and over, because it works--two star-crossed lovers. They meet, fall in love, are forced apart, meet secretly until tragedy befalls one, leaving the other to mourn and the reader/viewer--and by extension, the society that separated them--to contemplate what convention drove this tragedy to its inevitable conclusion.
It works because of its simplicity and the verity of the characters. It is universal--who hasn't experienced irreversible loss?--but also very specific, because it involved two men, and of a type not familiar to gender-studies professors, hence the consternation it caused the critics in Film Quarterly when Jack and Ennis refused to squeeze into their boxes.
--- Quote from: Oregondoggie on January 04, 2008, 10:49:05 pm ---Right on! The structure of the story, the power of the tragedy, would be destroyed, ruined, without the death of Jack. No trip to Lightning Flat by Ennis and no discovering the shirts. The whole story is enfolded in those shirts, imprinted in blood. They are Veronica's veil, as it were.
Secondly, if Jack had simply left Ennis and were living, with or without Randall, I doubt if the panel of the dream would slide forward that opens the short story. Nor would Jack begin to appear in the dreams at the end of the story, after he finds the shirts.
Sorry W.C. Harris, Brokeback Mountain is not an anti-gay polemic. You've just got to stand it, Boy.
--- End quote ---
I would add to this, as someone who has done a bit of writing, Proulx may have begun with the intent of exploring the effect of "destructive rural homophobia" (see her own, Getting Movied essay), but as a writer, she has a certain repertoire of classic literary devices that she employs because, as before, they work. Jack dies as an indictment against the homophobic culture that formed him, just as Hardy's Tess d'Urberville has to die at the hands of hypocritical, class-bound Victorian England, while her tormentors, though they survive, are forced to reflect on what they have made to happen.
Proulx, a straight woman, writes about two gay men, because conflict is the essence of drama, and how much conflict is there, really, in a story of two heterosexual lovers? You have to be more and more inventive, or resort to a period piece, to make such a story resonate--see Titanic or The Bridges of Madison County. As the obstacles that separate men and women progressively fall, a tale of two men still has the power to move readers, where the same story about a man and a woman would be a test of a writer not to make hackneyed and trite. So it might be as simple as Proulx wanting to stretch her legs as a writer.
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