BBM as Existentialist Art?

[Lynne]

It's been said that one way of interpreting Brokeback Mountain, and our attachment to it, is related to the movie being an existentialist work of art.

If anyone is interested, I'd love to have a better understanding of this.  I've perused the Atheist thread because TexRob was in a discussion about existentialism there.  Here is a post of his that I thought makes a good jump-off point:

...Existentialism, in turn, is an expression which is hard to pin down in everyday usage.  The definition of existentialism I'm using is the point of view that man finds himself alone in an indifferent or even hostile universe.

Existentialism is not a full blown philosophy so much as it is a way of looking at the world around you.  It's basic root is that existence precedes essence, meaning we're the product of a natural world, not a spirit world lying beyond it.  From there, existentialism elaborates several "themes."  One of them is the role of alienation in our lives.  Another is our absolute freedom to choose, and our right to refuse labels: to put it in Sartre's words, an consciousness that "isn't what it is and is what it isn't."   Another theme is our existence in a world of other people, who put a limit on our own realities by their mere presence to us.

There are other existential "themes" as well, and in Brokeback Mountain, every single theme is expressed in one scene or the other.  Take the very first one, where Ennis and Jack are sneaking looks at one another.  To put this in Sartre's words, this scene represents the radical appearance of the Other (Jack) in a person's life, and Sartre's discussion of "The Look" is borne out as Ennis steals a glance at Jack, and Jack steals one back through the mirror.  The Look represents the disturbing draining off of our reality toward the Other, and this is exactly what was happening in that scene.  The "radical" appearance of the Other in our lives is a specific existential theme.

That's just the first scene of the movie.  Each scene that follows picks up on another existential theme, then another, to very end, where in Ennis's tears we see the existential definition itself:  Man is alone ... in an indifferent or even hostile universe.

How to get past this aloneness or alienation, and whether that's possible or even desireable, is a major question for existential thought.

There's a lot there to consider, and I'm going to have to do some research because I'm afraid my Philosophy 101 from 20 years ago is inadequate to this task  .

The first thing that strikes me, though, is that many of us have been talking about different angles of this question for some time.  A couple of topics that spring immediately to mind include

     - In the Donnie Darko thread, we talk a bit about Roberta Sparrow telling Donnie that 'Every living creature dies alone.'
     - Front-Ranger and the Thoreau discussion - 'Do the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation?' is on the poll board.

In the midst of all this aloneness, a striking thing about Jack and Ennis in Brokeback Mountain, for me, is that when they were able to be together, they are very much in the present moment together.  I was struck by how carefully Jack listens to Ennis tell about Earl's murder - Jack is actively listening and understanding.  And when Jack is telling Ennis on that last camping trip that he 'misses him so much' he can hardly stand it, Ennis is giving Jack his full attention.  (Unfortunately he does not or cannot respond.)  But nevertheless they are truly together in their rare stolen moments, rather than isolated people passing time together.

[Daniel]

I remember Rob talking about his views on Brokeback Mountain as existential art... the main critique which I had was that not only did BBM reverberate with the existential-beingness quality, but also with a transcendent perspective as well... or more specifically, a mystical one. I've explored this theme in a number of places: my daily meditations, the performance thread, my poetry, the book which you have read a great deal of, Lynne.

[TexRob]

Hi Guys --

One of the questions that comes up about Brokeback Mountain centers on whether the movie is just entertainment, or whether it actually qualifies as art.  In thinking about that question, it occurred to me that if the movie is art, what kind of art -- what genre -- would best describes it?  I thought existentialism might be the closest description of the art of the movie.

The part that Lynne quoted comes from an earlier discussion of what existentialism is in the first place.  Rather that an actual philosophy, it's more a way of looking at the world which was especially popular in the decades after World War II, the time when Ennis and Jack met and loved.  But the question is not what it is, but how it applies to Brokeback Mountain.

One of the "themes" in existentialism is the irreducible uniqueness of every human being.  This theme comes across in the film and suffuses every character in it. As an example, Lureen's reaction to her husband differs sharply from Alma's, showing us that there is no one way to be "the wife of a gay man."   Ennis at first appears as a sort of tough guy, but by the end of the film we find the description doesn't really fit.  Jack, too, evades any attempt to pigeonhole him or categorize his actions.  All the characters, in fact, escape attempts to characterize them by general categories, preserving their unique individuality in the process.

Other existential themes run through the movie as well, but this is an example of how a viewer might be able to watch the film through an existential lens.  I think part of the reason this is possible is that Ang Lee structures Brokeback Mountain using an open text narrative as opposed to the traditional closed text.  This means that the person watching the movie has to help interpret the movie, because the meaning of each scene is seldom explicitly stated.  In fact, many of our friends and relatives who went to see the movie and didn't get it were expecting the meaning of the film to be laid out for them explicitly, as is normally the case, and they were frustrated when that doesn't happen.

As a result, the art of the movie allows for multiple interpretations  (and perhaps that's the sign that the movie is indeed art).  Daniel mentions the transcendental feel that the movie left him with, and can that not be the case as well?  I've read descriptions of Jack as a Christ-like figure, and it's easy to see how that interpretation can be extracted from what Ang Lee gives us.  For me, it's exitentialism that seems the best fit to the movie.

So the very structure -- the art -- of the film, can sustain different interpretations. 

I'll make an exception here.  One aspect of the film comes across no matter how you interpret it.  That aspect:  The movie is about the closet.   That's the single motif that holds every frame together in coherent whole.  In 2500 years of performing arts in Western culture, this is the first work to approach that subject head-on. 

So there, I've said it.  Brokeback Mountain ... is a work of high art.   While schlock can win best picture awards, art is timeless.