You are clear, and I don't think that either Harris or Mendelsohn are saying that Proulx or for that matter Ang Lee deliberately created an anti-gay polemic. To sum them up without again offering the substantiating quotations I used in my above posts, I think that they are both indicating that Proulx and Ang Lee are responding to market forces. Proulx by providing the ending expected by a largely straight readership, and Ang Lee / McMurtry-Ossana by heteronorming the story.
You ask how could anyone see an anti-gay polemic after reading "Getting Movied"? Yes, I read that essay very carefully.
I'm sorry, but I'm not clear on what you mean here. Are you saying you
do see an anti-gay polemic?
I ask you, have you read the Harris essay and the article by Mendelsohn? I urge every Brokie to read both. And read all of the other essays in "Reading Brokeback Mountain". These are very thoughtful pieces which shed a great deal of light on the short story and the movie, and it TRUE impact on society.
I don't read literary criticism, and very little movie criticism, either. Time is limited, after all, and most of my limited reading time is spent reading history. 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. It might also be useful to know more about the publication history of the story, too. Was it rejected anywhere before it was published in
The New Yorker? I've been reading
The New Yorker for more than a quarter of a century and I see no reason to alter my position that readers of that magazine are far too sophisticated to
need a story ending where the gays end up miserable or dead. Considering that Annie Proulx's stated purpose is to tell a tale of the effects of rural homophobia, it's difficult to see how the story could have had any other ending; "happily ever after" would have been implausible, and then it would not have been the story that Annie set out to tell.
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."
Edit to Add: Just to explain myself a bit, and at the risk of straying off topic, my attitude toward literary criticsm (and by extension film criticism) was formed when I had to write a paper on
Macbeth for my Shakespeare class in college. Even as I wrote it I knew it was nothing more than an intellectual exercise, ultimately signifying nothing--and not just because I was only an undergraduate writing a paper for a professor to satisfy a class requirement. The thought that came to me then was, If this is just an intellectual exercise for me, why should it be any different just because someone is a professional or has academic credentials?
So having read "Brokeback Mountain" so often that at one point I practically had it memorized, and having read Annie's commentary on it (and a couple of interviews with Annie, too), and having watched the film numerous times in the theater and on DVD, my own opinion is that the idea that the story is an "anti-gay polemic," an attack on homosexuality
per se--"gay is bad, first thing we do is kill all the fags"--is absurd on the face of it. 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?