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Popular Culture Review
revisionist film that up-ends the wide open spaces that are as much a part of the
Western genre as cattle rustling. It leaves one hero dead and another standing in
two closets—first, a closet in his lover’s childhood home and second, a closet in
his own trailer.
The film is decidedly a revisionist text, one that forces viewers to question
their assumptions about the West, about “real men,” about cowboys and
ranchers, about small town life, about sexual orientation, and about family life.
“Talk about revisionist westerns!” writes Richard Schickel. “Brokeback
Mountain is, as far as one can tell, the first movie to trace the course of a
homosexual relationship between a pair of saddle tramps, doing so in
considerable—if discreetly visualized—detail, from first idyllic rapture to angry
rupture some 20 years later” (68). Also, because McMurtry wrote the adaptation,
Brokeback Mountain “focuses, as some of his fiction does, on the modem, anti
romantic West, a place of trailer parks and honky-tonks, of small, thwarted
hopes, wrangling wranglers and sweet dreams betrayed by raw reality” (68).
Schickel considers the film flawed but celebrates its “assault on Western
mythology, its discovery of a subversive sexual honesty in an unexpected
locale” (68).
“Queer Eye for the Big Sky,” the teaser on the cover of the January 13,
2006, issue of The Chronicle Review, is both humorous and suggestive. There
are, ultimately, no big skies in this fictional Wyoming. Two men who have
conquered their environment—surviving bears, storms, poverty, the elements,
etc.—are vanquished by their own forbidden desires. “Queer Eye for the Big
Sky” introduces an article by Colin R. Johnson entitled “Rural Space: Queer
America’s Final Frontier.” While probably not in actuality its “final frontier,”
rural America is admittedly for many one of the least likely places for two men
to fall in love and seek to build a life and a home together. An assistant
professor of gender studies, history, and American studies, Johnson writes:
Especially in the wake of Matthew Shepard’s brutal murder in
1998 in Laramie, Wyo., but also in light of the poignant
sadness at the core of other queer landscape films like My
Own Private Idaho (1991) and Boys D on ’t Cty (1999), the
kind of big-sky rural vistas that Lee captures quite superbly on
screen have tended to engender feelings of exposure and
vulnerability in lesbians and gay men more than freedom and
openness, two symptoms of affective privilege that
heterosexual Americans have traditionally felt in connection to
the great outdoors though rarely regarded as privilege per se.
Brokeback Mountain refigures that aesthetic association i