Author Topic: Brokeback as an Anti-Gay Polemic : essay by W.C. Harris  (Read 45602 times)

Offline HerrKaiser

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Re: Brokeback as an Anti-Gay Polemic : essay by W.C. Harris
« Reply #60 on: January 14, 2008, 01:50:34 am »
The vast majority of peoples’ lives are a long road of happinesses, sadnesses, let downs, successes, failures, and all the other contrasting emotions and occurrences you can think of. I personally heartily disagree that tragic episodes in own’s life makes his life a tragedy. It has been stated on this thread that BBM is a tragedy; 20 years of a loving relationship a tragedy? How many couples have the wonderment Ennis and Jack had? Just because it wasn’t perfect does not make it tarnished or lessen its value. No way. To me, the story is a love story, enriching and positive in many ways that caused me, for one, to wish I was one of those two men. I am neither a sadist, masochist nor suffer from depression; I seek only positive aspects to life; give me Ennis without any changes to the story from 1963 to 1983 and my life would seem complete.

Ennis and Jack didn’t “have to hide from the world”. They made choices that actually worked out well for a long time. I am quite sure they were not the only two gay men in WY in the 60s and 70s. They had a deep and lasting relationship and considering all the people in their lives, their choices seemed to have been good ones.

In terms of “heteronorming” to have made the story more palatable, and hence perhaps, causing my own positive feelings, maybe. Fact is that the vast majority of “adapted” screenplays that were originally in book, story, or stage script form are always changed for film treatment. Yes, it is generally because of the much larger and more demographically dispersed movie going audiences and the producers want to cater to everyone’s likes and dislikes. In doing so with BBM, I think it became a better communications device. Ennis and Jack in the story were unattractive guys. I’m sorry, but replace any of Julia Roberts roles with an unattractive woman, and her films would have gone nowhere, likely. Same is true with BBM.

But, this, along with the bi-sexuality tending to soften the outright gayness of the film is fair game in my opinion. And I do not see this as anti gay, rather a means by which massive amount of global discussions were propagated on the subject of gay mens’ relationships and how they work in a way most people never imagined.

When the mass gay movement came out of the closet in the mid-late 70s or thereabouts, it was not unexpected for mainstream folks to want to see whatever gay life was to be more ‘heteronormed’. Why not? Isn’t that a major part of the immigration issue today? When people come into the fold, so to speak, the larger group tends to expect assimilation (and over the ages most people coming into a larger group do assimilate). How many Germans, speaking German in their lederhosen have you seen lately? And I know that gays bought into such; many now live is suburban neighborhoods with white picket fences, dogs and in many cases, kids. This was NEVER predicted in 1978.

There have been many comments made over the last two years on this site and Cullen about Ennis’ failure as a man because of his adultery and non commitment etc. This is way off and I won’t get into an Ennis speech here, but I find such negative attitudes to be actually anti gay. Gay men do have to tweek the mainstream lifestyle to live; they do have to make adjustments and choices that perhaps straight folks may not have to make. To criticize Ennis or gays for making such choices is to me the anti gay possibility.

Offline Clyde-B

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Re: Brokeback as an Anti-Gay Polemic : essay by W.C. Harris
« Reply #61 on: January 14, 2008, 01:55:15 am »
What does the above term mean?

Do you mean to say that extensively showing the scenes of the heterosexual life of Ennis and Jack does not enable straight viewers to more completely identify with the two characters?

If not for that reason, then why would the screen writers add those scenes? Its just not a good enough explanation of the additions to say, that it "fleshes out the home life of the two characters", as McMurtry and Ossana have said.

OK, why "flesh them out" at all ? And why "flesh them out" in the fashion in which they were fleshed out?

If the screen writers are going to INVENT scenes wholesale, why not show more of Jacks philandering with Randall, or his undoubted cruising for sex in other area such as parks, bathrooms. Hey I'd like more of the scene with the Mexican hustler.

Why not show more of Jacks's cruising time as a when he was bullrider? We can go on and on.

There has to be a reason for the extensive additions over the screenplay, and emphasizing Jack's closeted sexuality does nothing to market the product because I doubt that most mainstream viewers would not be interested in those hypothetical scenes.

But they just loved Ennis's scenes with Alma and the girls. And Jack's scenes with Lureen.

The original story was not long enough to make a two hour movie.  Two hours is the average movie length today.  Some material had to be added.

The scene with Jimbo the rodeo clown does not exist in the short story.  It was totally fabricated from the line - "Shit no," said Jack who had been riding more than bulls, not rolling his own.
 
The scene with Jack going to Mexico after driving to Riverton doesn't exist in the short story either .  It was also an addition to the screenplay.  Mexico was only mentioned in the short story in the final confrontation.

Likewise, Randall didn't exist in the short story at all.  John Twist mentions an unnamed ranch neighbor a his from Texas that Jack was going to bring to Lightning Flat, but there were no scenes with this unnamed person in the short story.

So you are asking for things to be expanded upon that didn't even exist in the short story.  These elements of gay life were fabricated by the screen writers and added also.

pnwDUDE

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Re: Brokeback as an Anti-Gay Polemic : essay by W.C. Harris
« Reply #62 on: January 14, 2008, 02:34:49 am »
Clyde, may I say that I do feel that the BM movie in some ways does make Ennis and Jack lives like they are heteros... indeed!
Do you see that both Ennis and Jack got married to females??
Their marriages are not gay-males-ones!!

Jack and Ennis weren't gay (the term was queer in 1963). Gay has become to mean way more than a guy who wants to be in the arms of another guy. A way to dress and decorate. A way to vote. Political correctness at all cost. Relating to females more than men. Rainbow flags and parades. In later years viciousness and resentment. Youth and sex.

Jack and Ennis weren't that back when they was young, no more than they would be that today. If J&E were together today, they would not be considered gay by any standard.

Jack and Ennis were like a lot of closeted guys are today. They didn't/don't fit in to the gay mainstream lifestyle. They choose to live their lives behind rings and kids and fullfill ( so sad ) their sexual desires like Jack did or find love like they both found in a very similar way to the story of BBM.

Brokeback isn't a gay love story. It's about guys who love other guys but aren't 'gay'. They are very similar to their hetro brethern with only one exception--who they wanna fuck. Ms. Proulx understood this more so than most gay men can comprehend. The result, Brokeback Mountain.

The story was ment to be anti-gay.

Brad
   

Offline Clyde-B

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Re: Brokeback as an Anti-Gay Polemic : essay by W.C. Harris
« Reply #63 on: January 14, 2008, 02:50:43 am »
Jack and Ennis weren't gay (the term was queer in 1963). Gay has become to mean way more than a guy who wants to be in the arms of another guy. A way to dress and decorate. A way to vote. Political correctness at all cost. Relating to females more than men. Rainbow flags and parades. In later years viciousness and resentment. Youth and sex.

Jack and Ennis weren't that back when they was young, no more than they would be that today. If J&E were together today, they would not be considered gay by any standard.

Jack and Ennis were like a lot of closeted guys are today. They didn't/don't fit in to the gay mainstream lifestyle. They choose to live their lives behind rings and kids and fullfill ( so sad ) their sexual desires like Jack did or find love like they both found in a very similar way to the story of BBM.

Brokeback isn't a gay love story. It's about guys who love other guys but aren't 'gay'. They are very similar to their hetro brethern with only one exception--who they wanna fuck. Ms. Proulx understood this more so than most gay men can comprehend. The result, Brokeback Mountain.

The story was ment to be anti-gay.

Brad
   

Most of the homosexual people I know use the term gay as synonymous with homosexual.  The only people I know that seem to think gay is a lifestyle are some straight people.

There are as many variations in homosexual (gay) lives as there are in heterosexual (straight) lives.  I don't know of a gay lifestyle anymore than I know of a straight lifestyle.

pnwDUDE

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Re: Brokeback as an Anti-Gay Polemic : essay by W.C. Harris
« Reply #64 on: January 14, 2008, 03:00:52 am »
Most of the homosexual people I know use the term gay as synonymous with homosexual.  The only people I know that seem to think gay is a lifestyle are some straight people.
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

pnwDUDE

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Re: Brokeback as an Anti-Gay Polemic : essay by W.C. Harris
« Reply #65 on: January 14, 2008, 03:04:48 am »
::)

Wouldn't expect anything less. Made my point, thanks.

Brad

Offline Clyde-B

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Re: Brokeback as an Anti-Gay Polemic : essay by W.C. Harris
« Reply #66 on: January 14, 2008, 03:06:44 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

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

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Re: Brokeback as an Anti-Gay Polemic : essay by W.C. Harris
« Reply #67 on: January 14, 2008, 03:12:13 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?   

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

Offline Clyde-B

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Re: Brokeback as an Anti-Gay Polemic : essay by W.C. Harris
« Reply #68 on: January 14, 2008, 03:20:34 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

??? ??? ???

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?

Offline Nevermore

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Re: Brokeback as an Anti-Gay Polemic : essay by W.C. Harris
« Reply #69 on: January 14, 2008, 04:00:15 am »
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:

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.

  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.


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.

  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.