From the Wilderness into the Closet
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Weisz [“Best Supporting Actress,” The Constant Gardener]. Although
Brokehack Mountain did not win in all eight of the categories for which it was
nominated, the competition among actors was especially strong.) In addition to
its three Academy Awards, Brokeback Mountain also garnered seven Golden
Globe nominations during a year when 19 million viewers were estimated to
have tuned in. In that venue, Brokeback Mountain won for “Best Picture,” “Best
Director,” and “Best Screenplay.”
And, finally, the talent behind Brokeback Mountain suggests that directors
and writers may be less concerned about taking on themes that might alienate
the public. In addition to Lee, Proulx (Shipping News) and McMurtry
(Lonesome Dove), both winners of Pulitzer Prizes, were involved with the
project. Proulx’s story “Brokeback Mountain” first appeared in The New Yorker
in 1997. It is included in a collection entitled Close Range: Wyoming Stories and
has been published as a separate text by Scribner. In addition to Shipping News,
Proulx is author of four novels including Postcards and the short story
collections Heart Songs and Bad Dirt. McMurtry has garnered 26 Oscar
nominations for film adaptations of his work—including those for Hud, The Last
Picture Show, and Terms o f Endearment.
One of the themes addressed by the film is the pain of being disenfranchised
and of struggling to remain closeted in order to be a part of a community—in
this case a heterosexual community that identifies itself as much by who is
excluded as it does by who is accepted within its circle. In “The Director’s Cut”
(subtitled “Brokeback's Ang Lee on Jack, Ennis ... and Other Outsiders”), Lee
explains his commitment to the project and his identification with the central
characters by saying, “I think it is very easy for me to identify with outsiders or
minorities—that is who I’ve been all my life. My parents followed the
Nationalist Party to Taiwan when their family was executed in China. We were
outsiders in Taiwan. Then I came to the States, of course, as an outsider.”
The film portrays the two central characters as noble, a characteristic that
most assuredly comes from their isolation and the stoic way with which they
deal with it. Hired to spend the summer of 1963 on Wyoming’s Brokeback
Mountain tending sheep, Jack and Ennis are unable to redefine themselves
enough to function in the restrictive society in which they have always lived.
Both, writes Hunter, are “ranch-bred, horse-proud, sinewy, resourceful, brave,
tough, industrious, poorly educated.” While this tough cowboy image is
certainly one they strive to maintain, the stereotype has its cost: they are stymied
as much by their internalized homophobia as they are by the hyper-masculine,
heterosexual, family-oriented rural West that surrounds them.
Brokeback Mountain becomes a meta-Westem, a film that, in fact, makes
viewers reconsider their preconceptions about life in the American West.
Brokeback Mountain is, as Luscombe writes, an “elegiac western” (66), but it
falls into a category far different from the John Wayne classics. Similar to
Midnight Cowboy, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Unforgiven in its
unflinching critique of Western mythologies, Brokeback Mountain is a