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Brokeback Mountain
Okay, next up, Brokeback Mountain. Since this is long, and disturbingly earnest and thoughtful rather than entertaining, I threw in lj-cuts for easy navigation and skimming. I'm particularly interested in your audience's reactions and/or opinions on audience reactions . . . so if you have input, skip to the last part.
SPOILERS contained herein:
I’m starting at the end, a very good place to start.
“I swear” –or was it, “Jack, I swear”? Anyway, something like that.
Maybe the line’s in the short story, and maybe what he’s swearing to do is explained there. I haven't read the story yet so I wouldn’t know. My own personal take on it was that Ennis was swearing he would begin to follow his heart. And it was that line which made me realize just what this movie is about.
A lot of (newspaper) reviews have been saying things like, “this is a film about humanity,” or that this movie is about love “that just happens to be between two men.” Before I saw the movie, I thought that these reviews were trying to say in an oblique way that the film portrays homosexuality as something human, something that can be both natural and right, something that contains all the love, sex, and betrayal. It is and the movie does, very thoughtfully, compassionately, and beautifully.
But the movie is also about Ennis being Very Fucked Up, and Ennis’s problems seemed to me to have a lot more to do with Ennis as a person than Ennis’s sexual preferences. (Naturally, those ideas aren’t mutally exclusive: Ennis’s person informs his preferences and vice versa.) The point I’m getting at (I think) is that there are a lot of Ennises out there, who aren’t necessarily gay or male or cowboys or really fuckin’ hot like Heath Ledger. They are people who fear themselves, close themselves off, and can’t connect with others.
The issues of homosexuality that the movie brings up are a macrocosm of those kinds of problems; instead of an individual’s interactions in his personal relationships it becomes about a group of people’s interactions with society. For Jack, being homosexual brings an outside pressure from society that’s in complete conflict with his open, giving nature. For Ennis, it’s a double pressure; I think he’s repressed from both the inside and the outside. Society’s reactions to homosexuality and him being homosexual make his natural propensity to bottle emotions and not show his true self positively crippling.
Take a look at his eldest daughter. He doesn’t connect with her, even though the movie suggests she is quite a bit like him—quiet, reserved, private. He constantly pushes her away, even though his interactions with her should have nothing to do with his sexuality. But, in the end, he suddenly, very consciously, decides to make an effort to be in his daughter’s life—because he’s made Jack a promise.
My first thought after that “I swear” line was that Ennis was swearing he’d follow in Jack’s footsteps—that is, admit to himself who he was, what he needed, and go after that, even if he feared the result would be a horrible death, even if the world was against him. And I thought that was a beautiful thing. But now that I’ve thought about it a lot, I’m not sure Ennis will ever do that, ever get to that point. But what he will do—what he has sworn to do—is live his life. Not scorn or abandon or turn away from the love that is given him. Love where he is loved, and give where he recieves. Most of all, I think it means that he and his daughter will have a beautiful relationship, and that’s the part that makes me get all teary-eyed.
Okay, other things. We’ve heard all about Ledger and Gyllenhaal and Michelle Williams were all awesome, but let me just say also: Anne Hathaway. She could light up the world with her smile.
My main beef with the movie was what a lot of people are saying is a virtue: the way it flipbooks through the lives of these two men, touching us softly in different places over and over again. A short story can do that, and I’m guessing Proulx does it well. Novels, otoh, can cover the same time frame, but each touch is a story in itself, a long, fleshed out scene. The movie didn’t make the major mistake of trying to be one or the other, like some biopics—it didn’t rush and I only thought it dragged at the end.
But I did find the passage of time somewhat disconcerting (I didn’t like anyone’s but Jake Gyllenhal’s age make-up; Ledger’s looked crusty and Hathaway’s just plain didn’t happen). I also felt that we were subjected to some scenes that existed to move along a plot that is so tried and true that we don’t need scenes that explain it or move it along. That is, the plot, the bare bones of it, has been done a million times before: star-crossed lovers married to the wrong people. I can’t recall now what scenes I felt were trying to be “plotty” when I would have preferred just more . . . time existing within the scene, but I definitely felt that way sometimes, especially in the second third.
Now, last, the real beef, which is nothing to do with the movie itself, but the audience reaction. I was in a small artsy theatre in a “hip” part of town, three days after its opening in Houston. The theatre was mostly filled with men, and I would wager most of them were gay. There were a small number of female couples, and I would wager most of them were gay, too. They were a rowdy crowd before the movie started, but we had stood in line for a long time to get into the theatre and I understood that there was considerable excitement about this movie.
Still, I don’t get why people laughed. They laughed through the sex scene. I thought later that perhaps the people in the theatre were uncomfortable, because even if I am quite sure more than 75% of the audience had had male-on-male sex before, they hadn’t seen it often on-screen in a regular theatre. My friend suggested earlier today that maybe they laughed because Ennis and Jack were, “doing it wrong.” In the same vein, I told my mom maybe they were scoffing at the idea of not using lube (which got me a horrified huh?)
But even worse, because it was the most touching, heart-rending scene, was when the theatre broke out in giggles when Ennis and Jack first kissed after they hadn’t seen each other in years. I thought okay, maybe people still have an issue with the boy touching thing. But when the wife saw Ennis and Jack, the laughing got much worse, and then there were hoots and ooohs—more as if the scene were a mother catching her child doing something amusingly naughty, than a wife watching her world fall apart.
I thought maybe my experience was singular, but the other day, there was this article in the Houston Chronicle. The reporter had gone to see the movie at the same theatre, but on a different day. He noted that the crowd seemed mostly gay, too. Then he noted that “raucous laughter filled the auditorium” at the same two parts in the movie I mentioned above.
The interesting thing about the article is that the reporter talks about his second theatre experience. Another theatre in Houston had picked up the film, this theater much more mainstream, with those big stadium seats and everything. He went and found himself surrounded by what seemed to him a much more diverse crowd of women and men; he notes they seemed to be more straight than gay. And he expected jeers and laughing, with that crowd. But this crowd was silent.
The reporter tries to draw conclusions about this, which might be a bad idea without having experienced a few more audiences. I know that most of the people on my flist are saying the audiences were quiet and seemed really movied by the movie. Still, the questions the reporter asked are questions I couldn’t help asking too after my theatre experience. He says, “Are gay people so accustomed to seeing ourselves vilified on screen that some of us don't know how to appreciate accurate depictions of homosexual love? Are we that cynical?
“Or repressed? Nervous laughter, after all, can serve as an escape valve, a diversion from things we'd rather not think or talk about. Perhaps those River Oaks chuckleheads were reacting to previous experience, numbed by all the movies that bash gays as villainous, predatory, sick of mind and body.
“Perhaps they just weren't prepared for the enlightened Brokeback Mountain, for the liberation from decades of mean stereotypes.”
Anyway, I was wondering what your personal theatre experiences were like, etc. Or just your thoughts on the movie. Or just mindless squeeing; it’s all good.
*
SPOILERS contained herein:
I’m starting at the end, a very good place to start.
“I swear” –or was it, “Jack, I swear”? Anyway, something like that.
Maybe the line’s in the short story, and maybe what he’s swearing to do is explained there. I haven't read the story yet so I wouldn’t know. My own personal take on it was that Ennis was swearing he would begin to follow his heart. And it was that line which made me realize just what this movie is about.
A lot of (newspaper) reviews have been saying things like, “this is a film about humanity,” or that this movie is about love “that just happens to be between two men.” Before I saw the movie, I thought that these reviews were trying to say in an oblique way that the film portrays homosexuality as something human, something that can be both natural and right, something that contains all the love, sex, and betrayal. It is and the movie does, very thoughtfully, compassionately, and beautifully.
But the movie is also about Ennis being Very Fucked Up, and Ennis’s problems seemed to me to have a lot more to do with Ennis as a person than Ennis’s sexual preferences. (Naturally, those ideas aren’t mutally exclusive: Ennis’s person informs his preferences and vice versa.) The point I’m getting at (I think) is that there are a lot of Ennises out there, who aren’t necessarily gay or male or cowboys or really fuckin’ hot like Heath Ledger. They are people who fear themselves, close themselves off, and can’t connect with others.
The issues of homosexuality that the movie brings up are a macrocosm of those kinds of problems; instead of an individual’s interactions in his personal relationships it becomes about a group of people’s interactions with society. For Jack, being homosexual brings an outside pressure from society that’s in complete conflict with his open, giving nature. For Ennis, it’s a double pressure; I think he’s repressed from both the inside and the outside. Society’s reactions to homosexuality and him being homosexual make his natural propensity to bottle emotions and not show his true self positively crippling.
Take a look at his eldest daughter. He doesn’t connect with her, even though the movie suggests she is quite a bit like him—quiet, reserved, private. He constantly pushes her away, even though his interactions with her should have nothing to do with his sexuality. But, in the end, he suddenly, very consciously, decides to make an effort to be in his daughter’s life—because he’s made Jack a promise.
My first thought after that “I swear” line was that Ennis was swearing he’d follow in Jack’s footsteps—that is, admit to himself who he was, what he needed, and go after that, even if he feared the result would be a horrible death, even if the world was against him. And I thought that was a beautiful thing. But now that I’ve thought about it a lot, I’m not sure Ennis will ever do that, ever get to that point. But what he will do—what he has sworn to do—is live his life. Not scorn or abandon or turn away from the love that is given him. Love where he is loved, and give where he recieves. Most of all, I think it means that he and his daughter will have a beautiful relationship, and that’s the part that makes me get all teary-eyed.
Okay, other things. We’ve heard all about Ledger and Gyllenhaal and Michelle Williams were all awesome, but let me just say also: Anne Hathaway. She could light up the world with her smile.
My main beef with the movie was what a lot of people are saying is a virtue: the way it flipbooks through the lives of these two men, touching us softly in different places over and over again. A short story can do that, and I’m guessing Proulx does it well. Novels, otoh, can cover the same time frame, but each touch is a story in itself, a long, fleshed out scene. The movie didn’t make the major mistake of trying to be one or the other, like some biopics—it didn’t rush and I only thought it dragged at the end.
But I did find the passage of time somewhat disconcerting (I didn’t like anyone’s but Jake Gyllenhal’s age make-up; Ledger’s looked crusty and Hathaway’s just plain didn’t happen). I also felt that we were subjected to some scenes that existed to move along a plot that is so tried and true that we don’t need scenes that explain it or move it along. That is, the plot, the bare bones of it, has been done a million times before: star-crossed lovers married to the wrong people. I can’t recall now what scenes I felt were trying to be “plotty” when I would have preferred just more . . . time existing within the scene, but I definitely felt that way sometimes, especially in the second third.
Now, last, the real beef, which is nothing to do with the movie itself, but the audience reaction. I was in a small artsy theatre in a “hip” part of town, three days after its opening in Houston. The theatre was mostly filled with men, and I would wager most of them were gay. There were a small number of female couples, and I would wager most of them were gay, too. They were a rowdy crowd before the movie started, but we had stood in line for a long time to get into the theatre and I understood that there was considerable excitement about this movie.
Still, I don’t get why people laughed. They laughed through the sex scene. I thought later that perhaps the people in the theatre were uncomfortable, because even if I am quite sure more than 75% of the audience had had male-on-male sex before, they hadn’t seen it often on-screen in a regular theatre. My friend suggested earlier today that maybe they laughed because Ennis and Jack were, “doing it wrong.” In the same vein, I told my mom maybe they were scoffing at the idea of not using lube (which got me a horrified huh?)
But even worse, because it was the most touching, heart-rending scene, was when the theatre broke out in giggles when Ennis and Jack first kissed after they hadn’t seen each other in years. I thought okay, maybe people still have an issue with the boy touching thing. But when the wife saw Ennis and Jack, the laughing got much worse, and then there were hoots and ooohs—more as if the scene were a mother catching her child doing something amusingly naughty, than a wife watching her world fall apart.
I thought maybe my experience was singular, but the other day, there was this article in the Houston Chronicle. The reporter had gone to see the movie at the same theatre, but on a different day. He noted that the crowd seemed mostly gay, too. Then he noted that “raucous laughter filled the auditorium” at the same two parts in the movie I mentioned above.
The interesting thing about the article is that the reporter talks about his second theatre experience. Another theatre in Houston had picked up the film, this theater much more mainstream, with those big stadium seats and everything. He went and found himself surrounded by what seemed to him a much more diverse crowd of women and men; he notes they seemed to be more straight than gay. And he expected jeers and laughing, with that crowd. But this crowd was silent.
The reporter tries to draw conclusions about this, which might be a bad idea without having experienced a few more audiences. I know that most of the people on my flist are saying the audiences were quiet and seemed really movied by the movie. Still, the questions the reporter asked are questions I couldn’t help asking too after my theatre experience. He says, “Are gay people so accustomed to seeing ourselves vilified on screen that some of us don't know how to appreciate accurate depictions of homosexual love? Are we that cynical?
“Or repressed? Nervous laughter, after all, can serve as an escape valve, a diversion from things we'd rather not think or talk about. Perhaps those River Oaks chuckleheads were reacting to previous experience, numbed by all the movies that bash gays as villainous, predatory, sick of mind and body.
“Perhaps they just weren't prepared for the enlightened Brokeback Mountain, for the liberation from decades of mean stereotypes.”
Anyway, I was wondering what your personal theatre experiences were like, etc. Or just your thoughts on the movie. Or just mindless squeeing; it’s all good.
*
no subject
gays feel the problems depicted are societal in nature, straight (usually) women find it's Ennis himself that's the cause.
That's interesting! I definitely think it's a combination, also. To say all the problems there are just Ennis's fault is to miss a big point--pretty much the point of the movie. That is, Jack didn't have Ennis's problems of connecting with others, and what did he get? Killed. But because Ennis is already reserved and introverted, society's behavior towards homosexuals serves to make him downright paralyzed. Society forced a kind of . . . I want to say unnatural kind suppression onto one that was already, in some ways, naturally repressed.
And definitely that's what makes it universal. I expected to see about individuals vs. society--and it was that. And I can relate to that, even though I'm not gay. But it was also the individual vs. himself--and it was that, the fear, the not connecting, the inability to reach out and communicate--which I could relate to most.
I'm not sure about the last line being an oath he loves Jack. I don't think that's something he ever needed to say. But I love how it's just . .. there. We can interpret it any way we want to. And the short story is like that too, which pleases me immensely (I've read it now!)