I received my copy of this book from Amazon today! It's definitely a text book... which, again, I think is soooooooooo cool for Brokeback. LOL, in grad school I was a TA for two different film history/theory courses and so this book is giving me warm fuzzies for both BBM reasons and nostalgia for student days.
Anyway, I thought I'd report that discussions of BBM are sprinkled throughout the text (it looks like, based on the index). And, then at the end there is a series of "case studies" where specific films are discussed in some depth. Brokeback is "case study" 11. The first sentence from the BBM essay is:
"The release of Brokeback Mountain, possibly one of the most important American films of recent years, was an unprecedented cultural event." The essay about BBM is accompanied by a very rare outtake photo of Jack and Ennis grilling steaks outside a tent, not from the 63 summer... but from the blue parka post-reunion camping trip. I don't remember if I've seen this exact photo before. I feel like I've seen outtakes from the blue parka scene... but, in any case, it is fairly rare. I wish I had a scanner here so I could post the pic.
I'm somewhat sorry to report that Crash also has a "case study" essay, and Crash's is number 9. The first sentence of the Crash essay is not as illustrious as the BBM opener.
"Crash is a well-intentioned social problem film about the racism and sexism of everyday life." LOL, I enjoy the phrase "social problem film."
Anyway, in general, this book looks very interesting. There's a whole section, with many subsections, about the representation of disabilities on film called "Ability and American Film: Cinematic Images of (Dis)Ability", which seems like a particulary interesting topic. Most of the sections are about race, gender and sexuality (as the book's title and subtitles suggest).
