Brokeback
So, I saw Brokeback Mountain over the weekend. I liked it. I didn't find it a particularly engaging love story, though. It's more of a lust story. Or a neo-western, revisionist cowboy movie. I think it works better as one of those.
And I didn't find the portrayal of homosexuality to be particularly progressive in its politics. Basically, they're two men who just like having anal sex every once in a while. Until the very, very end, the film seems to show gayness as just something you do, rather than something you are. Hell, the flick's notions of manly love are almost conservative thanks to their Homeric nature. Women, not to mention femininity, have little place in Brokeback Mountain; only men can enjoy the full burden of the human experience.
And I didn't find the portrayal of homosexuality to be particularly progressive in its politics. Basically, they're two men who just like having anal sex every once in a while. Until the very, very end, the film seems to show gayness as just something you do, rather than something you are. Hell, the flick's notions of manly love are almost conservative thanks to their Homeric nature. Women, not to mention femininity, have little place in Brokeback Mountain; only men can enjoy the full burden of the human experience.
2 Comments:
It seems to me that part of the point/tragedy of the film is that there relationship gets reduced to that. They would obviously like to spend their lives together, the fact that their lust lasts 40 years with long intervals seems proof that it's more than that. But society won't let them have that happiness so they take what they can get.
To me the longevity of their passion for each other speaks of a deeperlove than anything in Titanic or Romeo and Juliet. Jack and Ennis love each other enough to last through a lifetime of disaster, not just a torrid romance that ends in disaster.
Ennis seems to me like someone who happened to fall in love with a man but isn't necessarily gay. Jack, though, is clearly gay, and always trying to make some kind of normal life out of his gayness ("let's get us a ranch together") and gets killed for it.
They could have been so happy.
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