Lassoing lust
How was the West won? Hollywood’s Brokeback Mountain would have us think it was won by the lonely hearts of men who used their time on the range to lust for each other. Toby Keith—one of America’s greatest Western story-tellers—sings to a different tune:
I should’ve been a cowboy
I should’ve learned to rope and ride
Wearing my six-shooter riding my pony on a cattle drive
Stealing the young girls’ hearts
Just like Gene and Roy
Singing those campfire songs
Oh, I should’ve been a cowboy!
Brokeback is not based on history—it is based on a piece of short fiction by Annie Prouix. You don’t have to sit through the movie, like I did, to realize that Prouix is no Thucydides. History is honest—it may be biased by the world-view of the author—but there is an underlying requirement that any personal biases are outweighed by its grounding in FACTS.
Brokeback’s writer, Larry McMurtry, describes the reaction he and his writing partner, Diana Ossana, had after reading Prouix’s novel: ‘We just thought it was the greatest story to address the American West. I instantly thought, “Wow, why didn’t I write it?’ In other words, Brokeback’s writers consider themselves historians conveying a long-overlooked phenomenon of the West.
Brokeback Mountain is the best story to address the American West if American men are the most chauvinistic group of people to walk this planet. This portrayal of the male gender displays behavior more chauvinistic than that of men who expect women to enter into a polygamous relationship with them. It is also more chauvinistic than male rulers of the Sung Dynasty like Li Yu who started the painful and wrecking tradition of foot-binding. This is a fictional tale that degrades women and misrepresents the West, and I’ll tell you why.
The movie stars Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhal—neither who gay in real life—as two restless cowboys who meet while herding sheep up on Brokeback Mountain. While the dialogue between the two men is minimal, it seems that both men are lonely and restless. They are simply bored, and have two outlets—whiskey and each other.
The first time they come together, it’s like high-schoolers making out in the back of a car—only it’s a tent—and these are grown men who have previously expressed no real feelings for each other. It’s just a cold night and Ledger’s character, Ennis, feels that he cannot take the frigid mountain air any longer. So, he joins Jack (Gyllenhal) in the tent. They ride each other like cattle, and this random event becomes a regular occurrence—a potent addiction. When Jack and Ennis go back to town, they both get married (to women), and Jack moves to Texas while Ennis stays in Wyoming. Jack and his wife have a boy and Ennis has two adorable little girls.
Four years go by and neither man tries to make contact with the other in any way. In fact, it’s easy to question whether they even care for each other at all. But when married life gets rocky—as it typically does when you have small babies crying and sneezing uncontrollably (Ennis’ case) or a wife who is ultra-focused on work to the point where she is ambivalent to her husband (Jack’s case)—the weakness of these “cowboys” shows through. Instead of bucking up and trying to work on their familial relationships, they get back in touch with each other and begin a series of monthly “fishing trips” up to Brokeback Mountain.
Brokeback is a highly emotional movie that tries to engage audiences in sympathy for gays. It implies that if society had only been more open to alternative forms of love and relationship, cowboys like Ennis and Jack would have been able to live together in peace. The movie promotes itself as a tragic love story of two men who are never able to be truly happy because society won’t let them.
If Ennis and Jack really love each other—then why is their relationship all about sex? There is essentially no dialogue between these two men during the entire movie, and one gets a strong sense that neither of them really know each other. They both take advantage of their wives—making up stories and leaving them at home with their kids for weeks at a time so that they can enjoy a new form of sex. They essentially let their wives raise their children and run their households while they “go to work,” just doing what cowboys do, up on Brokeback.
In the classic tragic romance, Romeo and Juliet, the relationship is tragic because the love is prevented by an outside force bigger than the lovers—society. However, the lovers are fearless—they do not let societal pressures get in the way of their love, even though they know it could ruin them in the end. In the case of Brokeback, the cowboys’ love for each other is not strong enough to stand up to society. On the contrary, they use their relationships with women as a protective shield so that they can have fun.
As a woman watching this movie, I was disgusted because it made two men look like tragic heroes who left so many innocent women wounded.
Tired of waiting for their weekly fishing trips, Jack’s hunger for male sexual relations grows. He makes clandestine trips to Mexico, where he can easily find male prostitutes to do his bidding. He also cultivates a relationship with a male friend in Texas whose wife “talks too much”—an excuse as good as any for Jack to justify deceiving her. Jack and his new pal enjoy going to an empty cabin on his parents’ land for erotic excursions. Ennis eventually divorces his wife after she finds out about his affair with Jack and she can’t stand the thought of sleeping with him anymore.
Ennis obtains the divorce only to quickly find a girlfriend who he uses for a while to look normal to society. He leads her on—and she falls in love with him—only to be coldly pushed aside by Ennis with no explanation after Jack dies at the end of the film. (Oops, guess I just spoiled the profound plot for you.)
Not only do both of these men lie to society and to the women they drag into their lives as cover-up, they also find it hard to be honest with each other. They have the attitude that since society does not uphold their relationship, they are licensed to be unfaithful to each other on Brokeback off-weeks. After all, in their eyes, their infidelity is not their fault—it’s society’s. Well, sorry cowboys, that argument won’t hold here. You are rational beings with free will, not wild bulls.
I was shocked by the number of women who went to see this movie. I realize that most of them probably went out of curiosity or to see heartthrobs like Ledger and Gyllenhal on the big screen. I could only count four men out of about 40 movie-goers when I attended the movie. The feminist movement has made little headway if swarms of women will sit through a movie that openly degrades them and expects them to feel sorry for the culprits.
In one scene, where Ennis runs into the local grocery store where his young wife is shopping with their two little girls, he tells her that he’s heading up to the mountain because he has to “work.” She stammers, “But what about my job?” He could have cared less, and he rushes out of the store to go work with Jack on Brokeback. And this guy is a tragic hero. Wow.
I challenge Hollywood to produce a movie that depicts real tragic love—not lust: love that is honest and is willing to sacrifice for the other person in the face of adversity or societal pressure, love that does not use other people to achieve it’s end, and most importantly, love that is based on something deeper than physical pleasure.
Our hero, Jack, conveys the depth of his feelings for Ennis at the end of the movie, saying: “I’m not like you, I can’t make it on a few high-altitude f—s a year.” It may have achieved four Golden Globe Awards, but Brokeback fails as a tragic love story.
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