Book Review: Reading Brokeback Mountain: Essays on the Story and the Film

Two years ago, while teaching a freshman college writing seminar on gender issues, I discussed The Crying Game with my students. (It was highlighted in Susan Bordo's text The Male Body, required reading for my class and, I'd say, for anyone who may be reading this.) One student asked how popular Neil Jordan's film was the year of its release, and I replied -- flatly, I now realize -- that it became a surprise hit, thanks to controversy. After more discussion, another student came to my aid: "It was like their Brokeback Mountain." I replied that, though the films are different in many ways -- lumping gays and transsexuals/-vestites together is always shifty -- The Crying Game's influence on the mainstream was quite similar.

Yet, Brokeback could easily side into cultural amnesia, as did The Crying Game. Its merits and importance aside, Brokeback's prominence in the 2005 awards season could makes it a thing of the past: think of other "issue-based" films, like A Beautiful Mind and Million Dollar Baby now in the $5.99 digital dustbins at SprawlMart.

Thankfully, unlike those simpler films of lesser quality, many dynamics to Brokeback are still unchartered. At its roots, the story/film is a classic romance, albeit one that highlights love most forbidden. The Crying Game, in comparison, avoided the vulnerability of a non-hetero romance by burying its love story within a thriller.

Brokeback is also an outright indictment of conservatism. While the idyllic unions between Jack and Ennis occur away from their homes, the men live in two versions of social repression. Ennis del Mar exists in a rural, lower-class Wyoming -- an undeveloped area where his family resides in a rather squalid apartment house, in essence rural and impoverished, less bucolic than it is a wasteland. Jack Twist works for a middle-class Texas business owned by his small-minded redneck father. (The Texas-Wyoming pairing may be a joke: in the Rough Guide to Westerns, Paul Simpson cleverly points out that Ennis and Jack are, respectively, from the homelands of No.s 1 and 2 in the Bush Jr. administration -- wink, wink.)

The lives of Jack and Ennis are hell, but ones they cannot abandon -- not so much because of their families, though society has programmed Ennis to rely on his wife as if she's a grown-man's mommy. These boys were born country and love just about everything the lifestyle provides, save its family-values-inspired gay holocaust. They are true cowboys who heard livestock as the real frontiersmen did years ago -- the real workers beneath the six-shooting archetypes that our storytelling tradition celebrates. So devout are they that they even agree to herd a less-romantic livestock, sheep, which requires no masculine show like roping and pinning horns to the ground.

To detail all of Brokeback's issues would require years of study from various perspectives, and hence a lead-off project, Reading Brokeback Mountain (from McFarland Press), collects a variety of perspectives on both the film and the original Annie Proulx story. Editor James Stacy offers a wide scope of scholarly approaches and some personal reactions, thus making for a text that's erudite in style but grounded in humanism.

Two opening essays investigate the film's pastoral traits to situate Brokeback as a new take on a classical form of escape. While the original idylls celebrated a peaceful respite -- and often opportunity for romantic love between men, let's not forget -- Brokeback creates a temporary sanctuary that eventually crumbles, as the conservative influence smothers Ennis and ultimately destroys their relationship. "[T]he story had already been written, over and over again, in the landscape of Proulx's American literary forebears, as well as their ancestors who were writing in the homoerotic pastoral tradition that had not yet included two cowboys." In Ennis and Jack's original meeting, the satanic figure of Aguirre watches while preparing to cast them out from their Eden; hence, their reunions at Brokeback over time are haunted by the knowledge of the exterior repressions.

"Mythical" readings are followed by John Kitterman's "Love and Death in the American Story," which contextualizes the Brokeback with Leslie Fielder's thesis of American literature: the strain that focuses on men's -- usually a pair, one of which is non-white -- escape from the establishment. Natty Bumpo and pals, Ismael and Queequeg, and Jim and Huck all found a way to escape feminized domesticity by heading outdoors. So too do Ennis and Jack, though their escape is less a flight from responsibility than a means to discover themselves, each other, their sexualities.

From here on, queer studies readings take over and make good on a variety of perspectives. Interestingly enough, Lisa Arellano argues that the story endorses "heteronormative" lifestyles, in that the film consumes any hope for a healthy gay life. While true in a literal sense, Arellano misreads by allowing moral imperatives to smother art. This reading assumes that a symbolic sacrifice, such as Ennis and Jack, is not worth the benefit of a greater understanding in its viewers.

Many obvious takes appear, likely because writers are treading on new grounds: arguably the first full-bodied, non-exploitive gay film to reach the American mainstream. A rewarding take comes from Charles Eliot Mehler, who covers the popular responses to Brokeback in a milieu that "encourages viewing the homosexual, as sensationalistic, the homosexual as exotic, the homosexual at a safe distance." There's certainly a lot to discuss here. On one end, we have Larry David's humorous New York Times opt-ed piece that, regardless of its simplicity, appears at once ironic and homophobic. The apex comes with Jack Nicholson's gasp of "Whoa!" before he announced the winner of Best Picture at the Oscars to be Crash, a moralistic film that plays like an after-school special on how not to be a racist. Nicholson's response may the purest critique of the mass-media's fear of alternate sexualities.

Surprisingly broad for its page length, this collection lays the groundwork for future study. Reading Brokeback Mountain may appear dense and scattered, but at this stage, such a collection would have to be. Three years after the film's release, we are still digesting its grandeur and cultural importance, even if it began in smaller circles years earlier, when the New Yorker published the original story. On Amazon.com's page for Close Range, in which Brokeback the story was first collected, a customer review by SEB "wurvous" begins: "Proulx will break your heart with that last story." This was written just before the film's premiere, and does it seem prophetic now.

Scholarship on Brokeback still has miles to go before it can settle. The journey begins here.

To order Reading Brokeback Mountain, visit http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/ or call 800-253-2187.

Ennis and Jack.

Review: What Just Happened?

Based on a 2002 memoir by producer Art Linson (Fight Club, Into The Wild), What Just Happened? continues the line of self-obsessed Hollywood vehicles like The Player and Entourage, wherein the evils and shallowness of the business are brutally explored but nevertheless celebrated. Here, director Barry Levinson manages to get a good performance from Robert DeNiro (who has phoned in about a decade's worth of work) as Ben, the harried and ruthless producer who yet is always acquiescing to higher authorities. He is also still in love with his ex-wife (Robin Wright Penn), a sub-plot that seems added on to humanize but goes nowhere. Ben has to juggle appeasing a studio boss Lou (Catherine Keener) who is none too happy about the movie delivered by arty-director, Keith Richards wanna-be Jeremy (Michael Wincott). Jeremy has made a gritty Tarantino blood feast starring Sean Penn, complete with a graphic dog shooting in a gory, bathetic finale. Lou's basic reason for wanting the film re-edited, in addition to appalled reactions from test audiences, is that with the film re-cut she could lose a little less money on it.

The opportunity to explore such a cynical willingness to gut a film's meaning for the sake of a few extra dollars is wasted. Jeremy, convinced of his genius, is no more likeable than Lou; outrageous and unfounded narcissism is just as much a turn off as greed. Even his surprise re-edit of the film, revealed to all defiantly at Cannes (complete with self-serving speech by the "artist"), does not feel like a triumph. It merely seems like one asshole has upstaged another asshole. That certainly is part of the message of What Just Happened? But Levinson's lazy direction and archetypal caricatures weaken most of the punches. The viewer is left feeling as if what was shown was already known, already disliked.

Saving the film in certain moments, along with a low-key but smarmy turn by Sean Penn as himself, is a cameo by Bruce Willis. Also playing himself, he drives Ben to the brink by refusing to shave his ZZ Top beard and lose weight for a role, asserting his artistic freedom for what will most likely be another tepid, bloated Hollywood action film.

In all, though, the film is what it skewers, and there isn't enough bite to the satire to leave any teeth marks. Hollywood still loves itself, and What just Happened? more or less savors, rather than indicts, the excesses.

Review: Timecrimes (Spain, AKV Entertainment)

One of the more odd theories to come out of recent speculation into multiple universes is the idea that there may be enough dimensions so that, somewhere, everything happens:

You took a left instead of a right, you became a famous novelist, you bought the good car instead of the shitty one, etc. That would take the pressure off decision-making, no?

Timecrimes is not about multiple dimensions, but it is about how, literally in this case, conflicts can between competing versions of the self can be as complicated and fraught with competition as those involving many people. One can be victim, hero, mastermind and fly in the ointment all at once.

Karra Elejalde plays Hector, an absent-minded everyman who moves into a new house in the Spanish countryside with his wife (Candela Fernandez). While unpacking, the phone rings, though no one has their number yet. Hector redials using caller ID, and is told by an automated voice that he has reached a private number and to not call again. Soon after, they sit out in the yard taking in the quiet. Hector does, however, have a pair of binoculars, through which he spots a naked woman in the woods behind the house. His wife leaves for the market, which gives Hector a chance to investigate. He finds the woman laying against a rock, but before he can get close enough to see if she is still alive, he is attacked by a man whose face is covered in bloody gauze. While on the run away from the scene, Hector chances upon a building which he breaks into for safety. He meets a young man (the film's writer and director, Nacho Vigalondo) who offers to help hide him--in an untested time machine. He emerges from the machine (covered vat filled with what looks like milk) seemingly within seconds. But there is now a problem. The man emerging from the time machine is not Hector: he is Hector 2. Soon we learn of a third Hector, all living in the same real time, but each about ten minutes apart from the actions of the day that threaten to upend Hector 1's life, unless he can outwit the other Hectors and eliminate them, leaving only a whole self.

This is a confusing, funny and poignant meditation on how we are our own worst enemies, and how events and lives are often a hair's length away from being totally different. Choices not taken may echo as long as those we do make.

With its mixture of sci-fi, madcap mystery and surrealism, Timecrimes packs quite a punch for a low-budget film. Vigalondo's direction keeps the story grounded and oddly, matter-of-factly plausible, even in its most outrageous twists and turns. To explain the plot fully would be to give the ending away. This is a great little gem that you need to see, and figure out, for yourself.

Nacho Vigalondo diagrams chaos.