Every once in a while a film comes along that changes our perceptions so much that cinema history thereafter has to arrange itself around it. Ang Lee’s story of two contemporary cowboys who fall in love, Brokeback Mountain, is just such a film. Even for audiences educated by a decade of the New Queer Cinema phenomenon, it’s a shift in scope and tenor so profound as to signal a new era.
There has never been a film by a brand-name director, packed with A-list Hollywood stars at the peak of their careers, that has taken an established conventional genre by the horns and wrestled it into a tale of homosexual love emotionally positioned to ensnare a general audience. With Brokeback Mountain, all bets are off.
The vast majority of New Queer Cinema works were gritty urban dramas, a new kind of storytelling geared to the unprecedented narratives filling their lives and lenses. They were festival films through and through, not multiplex movies.
Now, Brokeback Mountain has blown this division wide open, collapsing the borders and creating something entirely new in the process. With utter audacity, Lee, aided and abetted by novelist-screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana and master storyteller Annie Proulx, on whose story the film is based, have taken on the most sacred of all American genres, the western, and queered it.
Brokeback Mountain is a great love story, pure and simple. It is also a great romantic tragedy, the story of a great love broken by a society’s intolerance.Tuning into the gay experience in all its euphoric and foreboding chords, Lee has used the skills he honed in Sense and Sensibility for etching heartache, and those he found in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for conveying emotion through action. Setting the film in 1963 places it squarely before the gay liberation movement and the politics of modern queer identities.
Proulx’s story originally appeared in the New Yorker in 1997, the year before University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered for being gay. Shepard was tortured and killed in October 1998, just outside Laramie, Wyoming, in cowboy country, just shy of his 22nd birthday.
Since the dawn of feminist film criticism in the 1970s, scholars have analysed the homoerotic subtexts in the classic western. But Brokeback Mountain goes much further, for it turns the text and subtext inside out and reads the history of the west back through an uncompromisingly queer lens. Not only does the film queer its cowboys, but it virtually queers the Wyoming landscape as a space of homosexual desire.
Brokeback Mountain has a lineage to which it can lay claim. Consider, for instance, Giant, the 1955 film starring James Dean in his final role as the black sheep of a Texas cattle-ranching family. Given the tales of Dean’s bisexuality and his claims to have worked as street hustler, his cowboy duds in that final posthumous role were frosting on the cake. Cowboys had long been a gay fantasy, anyway.
Andy Warhol certainly had noticed their appeal — and danger. His 1968 feature, Lonesome Cowboys, was a hip version of aberrance — and was widely denounced by outraged citizens.
In 1969, Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight would rocket to superstardom with Midnight Cowboy, an urban vision that explicitly followed Warhol’s lead in ascribing queerness to cowboy’s duds and enduring male friendships.
Lonesome Cowboys and Midnight Cowboy cemented the cowboy-hustler motif in the popular imagination and lifted a subculture to the surface, writing the cowpoke into the book of gay desire for decades to come.
But Lee also knows something else, from his years of making films that tread with exquisite delicacy on the suffering of the human heart. He knows that great love and suffering are sometimes packaged together. He knows that self-denial is as finely tuned a punishment as the damage any posse could inflict. He knows that the death of the heart, to add Elizabeth Bowen to these citations, knows no bounds of gender, nationality or era.
It is fascinating indeed that after his green misstep in The Hulk, Lee has returned to the subject matter of his first triumph, The Wedding Banquet, released more than a decade earlier to great critical praise. And it’s noteworthy that Lee’s longtime producer and screenwriter James Schamus also executive-produced many of the New Queer Cinema films, often alongside the legendary Christine Vachon. He’s credited on Poison, Swoon and Safe.
Times have changed and, unlike the sunny Wedding Banquet, this new film carries the burden of a crushing societal threat that will not be solved by a turnabout of forgiving parents. Brokeback Mountain, by raising the stakes, merits far greater praise. Lee has done nothing less than reimagine the United States as shaped by queer experience and memory. Alas, it cannot be a sunny picture. — Â