The trailer for Brokeback Mountain is finally making its way across the net (scroll down to the first comment after the link).
I must admit, when I first heard they were making a feature film out of this material, I wondered how they could make it work. Part of a collection by Annie Proulx, the original story is brief and full of a kind of writing as spare as rural Wyoming - it doesn't rely on ornamentation to be beautiful while still capturing deeper human truths.
When I heard Ang Lee would be helming the film, I sighed in relief. Not only is this a director familiar with gay material (The Wedding Banquet), but he is also a reverse Oliver Stone. Lee is a film-maker who never seems less than earnest. While someone like Stone uses homosexuality as a cheap vehicle for sensationalism and psuedo-controversy (see: Alexander), Lee always seems content to let his camera and characters speak for themselves. In this film, I think we can expect to see the sexuality of the characters subtly folded into their personalities, rather than propped like a gaudy piece of jewelry meant to draw the eye and shock the senses.
That alone is reason enough to see it, but there is something else here:
This is a story about actual men. Not only actual men, but actual love.
Much of gay "literature" and film revolves around sudden realizations that some people like cock, and then we're barreling down a strained, angst-ridden path invariably involving drugs, night clubs, a series of one night stands, and suicidal self-loathing. If I never read another novel or see another movie that involves someone on a three month, sex-fuelled meth bender, it will only be too soon. While issues of awakening to and accepting one's sexuality are inherently adolescent in nature, that doesn't mean writing about them has to be.
While some of these elements are no doubt present in Brokeback Mountain, there's the surest sense that these characters are not driven by the need for acceptance and a wish to just be who they are. Instead, we have two people who have suddenly and inexplicably fallen in love and are confused by how they feel this way. They cannot believe it, and because they cannot believe it, they have a grudging time accepting it.
While I've always heard stories by friends and boyfriends about always knowing they were gay, I've never been able to relate. My sexuality has always been one long, unfolding realization. My first great love was also my best friend. Closeness bred familiarity, and familiarity engendered love. That he was male seemed of far less importance than the fact that he was such an over-whelming part of my life. There seemed a time when the boundaries of platonic attachment must break under powerful, half-understood forces of attraction. It was about a need for an ever deepening closeness, until you can actually feel the other person inside your own soul.
Gay cinema has always misunderstood this component of love and attraction. The requirements here don't merely extend to "has cock" or an adolescent social anxiety. While two people certainly can and do get together because they both find each other hot, there has be a deeper shared splinter of understanding for love to work and remain believable. There must be a potrayal of the recognition that there is something in the other person that mirrors a cherished, long-hidden part of ourselves.
Most gay films and books concentrate on the shallow things. The initial physical attraction, the one night stands that seem more like Christmas morning - these people aren't undressing, they're unwrapping a present they've long window shopped for. After many drunken arguments and strained misunderstandings, perhaps the two main characters will walk down the street while holding hands. The credits will somehow roll up before a banner can appear on screen screaming "I like cock, and that's ok!" And yet, I always know those two characters will break up in roughly three weeks if my friends are any barometer. It just doesn't work like that.
That's why I'm pretty excited about this movie. It's about two men who aren't scrambling to gay clubs to find acceptance and dick. They are who they are, living their lives. Love is a startling, unexpected thing. You can't look for it, you can't go out and find it. It finds you, whether you like it or not, whether you want it or not. The only thing you can do is cope with it and deal with it the best you possibly know how.
So, yeah. Finally. A movie about real men, real people. I'll probably live in the theater during the month it comes out.
Plus, there are worse ways to spend time than watching Heath Ledger make out with Jake Gyllenhall.
I'm just sayin.
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