From the Wilderness into the Closet:
Brokeback Mountain and the
Lost American Dream
In the film B r ok e b a c k M ountain, Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) tells Jack
Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), “I ain’t queer.” Twist responds, “Me neither.” With
these faltering but defiant words begins a personal pilgrimage into a wilderness
at least as terrifying, as uncharted, and as destabilizing as the one initiated by
early explorers of the American West. Like the medieval quests upon which
much of Western literature is based, this particular epic journey in search of selfknowledge ends in paralyzing loss.
Overwhelmingly, film critics have analyzed the challenge to heterosexual
norms implicit in the film. While they are correct in doing so, the film succeeds
for reasons that are largely unrelated to sexual orientation. It succeeds not only
because it challenges preconceptions about gender identity but because it forces
us to contend with the fears and limitations that make our being able to choose a
richer, more passionate, more imaginative life impossible. The possibility of a
rich, restorative, and expressive life spent in the Wyoming wilderness comes to
nothing; instead, in the final scene of the film one of the central characters
stands silently in the closet of his trailer.
Set in Texas and Wyoming and shot in Alberta, B r ok e b a c k M ountain is a
tale propelled by contradictions, oxymorons, paradoxes, and oppositions. Drawn
from Annie Proulx’s short story by the same name, B r ok e b a c k M ountain
juxtaposes the wilderness with settled communities, wild animals with civilized
townspeople, the poor with the privileged, the uneducated with the intellectually
elite, women with men, rural life with city life, the innocent with the corrupt,
and, yes, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals with their heterosexual family members,
neighbors, and friends. However, the landscape of B r ok e b a c k M oun ta in is
endlessly suggestive, and its heterononnativity is but one s ѽ