Esperanza on Brokeback Mountain
Dec. 23rd, 2005 04:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
verushka70Well, I was looking for something else and stumbled on Esperanza's posts (http://www.livejournal.com/~cesperanza/2005/12/21/) about Brokeback Mountain, which I have seen. So you might want to read her stuff a bit before you read my response.
I felt the need to comment on her posts, because there was such cogent thought -- and outrage -- behind them. But it turned into much more than a comment, and it focused on a lot of things Esperanza never said, just things that have irritated me about the promotion of Brokeback, and the entertainment buzz about it, so here it is...
Trying to make this brief (after 2am...ha! Going for broke!).
I understand the outrage of "is this still where we're at?" -- I actually do. Because, on the brink of 2006, and in Chicago, I'm going, "No, we're not there -- not us in Chicago."
But at the same time, I think that, unfortunately, YES, in many parts of this country, that IS where we're still at: "Hey, should we go beat those two queer cowboys to death with firewood, or should we just go get some beers?" "Nah, let's get some beers first." (spit)
Eddie Izzard has a great bit in the DVD of Dress To Kill where he was in some rural town and a man came up to him with his kids in tow and said to Izzard, "Talk British to my kids!" Like it's another language...
To get back to the topic at hand, I found myself wondering, while I watched Brokeback Mountain, if Ang Lee was intentionally evoking memories of Mathew Shepard (the young man beaten and left for dead tied to a fence-post in Laramie WY in '98) and James Byrd, Jr. (the black man dragged to death tied by his ankles to a pickup truck, also strangely in '98).
I totally sympathize with the commie pinko elitist intellectual urban living perspective Esperanza mentions, living in Chicago as I have all my life, and I sympathize with the frustrated thoughts of "c'mon, guys, come OUT, be freely GAY, and get a ROOM already!" But it's really easy for me (or Esperanza, or Nathan Lane) to forget, because we live in huge cities where everyone who wants to can fly their freak flag openly 24/7/365, that people don't get to do that in many parts of the country... at least not without some major consequences, depending on where they are. That's precisely why places like NYC, Chicago, Atlanta, SF, etc. became "gay meccas" -- because people in small towns or rural areas knew they couldn't just get away with being who they really are back where they came from. And it isn't something you really realize until you do a lot of interesting road trips through the heartland or out West, 'til you get out of major urban areas and see what things are really like in, say, Indiana or Kansas or wherever. We think we are so enlightened as a country... Are we?
I mean, Kansas several years ago passed state legislation to put creationism in biology class... and then it got cleverly changed over to "intelligent design." I praise that federal judge's recent decision that "intelligent design" cannot be taught in biology class in public schools, because it is about religion and religious beliefs -- but the fact that he did his homework and discovered that it got changed from creationism to "intelligent design" by means of a massive "find and replace" in the text they were using in those schools shows that, yes, in 2005, this is still where we, as a nation and society, are at. Is this happening in the UK? In Germany? In France? Certainly not in the Netherlands. No, in those countries, science is science, and religion is religion, and they keep them separate.
Personally, I found the film Philadelphia a major snoozefest and nothing to write slash about because it was such a buzzkill for my otherwise happy slashy thoughts. There was NOTHING homoerotic about Philadelphia for me; it utterly failed to press my slash buttons in all the ways various BBC miniseries and things like Forever Knight HADN'T failed to press my slash buttons. I remember thinking at the time I saw Philadelphia that it was very strange that a movie with a "real" (as in *canonically*) gay couple was so much less homoerotic than a variety of TV shows which had no openly, canonically gay characters! But it was because Philadelphia was so cowardly and conservative in its portrayal of homosexuality that it was so non-homoerotic.
But BBM pressed my slash buttons from the moment I saw the trailer which, I think, was months ago in the late summer. I had wanted to see it from then on, and I have seen it, and I'm not disappointed. The trailer had LOADS of angsty homoeroticism, and the film did as well. But I'm not the kind of person who must have happy endings for everything, because I know that's not how real life turns out all the time. I feel ripped off when I see a tragic story suddenly have its dark rug pulled out from under it to give a happy ending imposed by the studio and producers. I hated the Spielberg ending to AI; I wanted the Kubrick ending we never got to see.
I am fine with filmmakers and authors leaving things open, unresolved, messy, with loose ends... because to me, sometimes such endings are more realistic. But I also know that kind of realism, from the standpoint of narrative storytelling (as well as the stages of sexual arousal and climax which theoretically parallel narrative storytelling: introduce characters, introduce conflict, rising action, climax, denouement -- or so I learned in Film Techniques I when I was a silly young thing), unresolved endings with loose ends or open interpretations are also very unsatisfying for audiences. Audiences want some kind of resolution, some tying up of everything that went before.
MAJOR SPOILER -- STOP READING if you don't want spoilers!
This is why we have tearjerkers when we don't have happy endings. And BBM is being marketed as a kind of chick flick. It does tie things at the end, but not the happy way.
There are several reasons I thought of both Matthew Shepard's and James Byrd, Jr.'s deaths at the hands of intolerant rednecks while I was watching BBM. For one, Ledger's character Ennis reveals to Gyllenhall's character Jack that when he was a kid, his father took him to see the body (in a ditch, no less) of a queer who was dragged by his penis behind a truck until it was torn off, and then he was beaten to death. The father intends it as a lesson in the unacceptability of homosexuality. But this actual lesson Ennis learns is (which made a huge impression on the boy Ennis) how to live with his gayness in a way that would not get him killed.
And, at the end of the film, when Ennis finds out from Jack's wife that Jack died, the story she gives him is that a hubcap blew off a tire he was pumping up and sliced up his face and throat, and he bled to death. But the visual that accompanies her words is three guys beating to death another guy, and it is unclear if it is the queer cowboy Ennis saw dead in a ditch as a young kid, or if it's three cowboys beating Jack to death for being much more openly gay than Ennis ever would be, making the story the wife tells Ennis the "official story" she was given by local law enforcement. I would have to see BBM again to be more certain of this, or (preferably) have the DVD to freeze-frame through with as much clarity as possible. But I think that the guy being beaten to death was Jack, Ennis' lover.
END SPOILERS
Also, Matthew Shepard was killed in Wyoming, which is where Brokeback Mountain supposedly is located; and Jack (Gyllenhall) later moves to Texas, which is where Jack Byrd, Jr. was dragged to death behind a pickup. Is it coincidental that these two states where such horrifying hate crimes occurred are used in the film? I don't think so, although I have not read the original Annie Proulx short story to know. In fact, it might be interesting to find out when she wrote them and whether the same details are in the story as are in the film.
Finally, BBM portrays a twenty-some years long relationship which starts, if I remember right from my single viewing of BBM so far, in the 50s or 60s, and ends in the late 70s or 80s. Now, to put it in perspective, from 1980 to 1992 (and later!) President Reagan, that lying scumbag, and later ex-Reagan Vice President-turned-President George Bush, Sr., another truly evil man, were still refusing to deal with the reality of AIDS precisely because it was perceived and portrayed as merely a "gay disease" and their right wing religious conservative supporters were hailing it as a homosexual plague that would "rid" our society of gays.
Under those circumstances, what chance was there really that two gay cowboys could have been openly and happily gay in most rural towns of the west? Slim to none, I'd wager.
And, while I understand Esperanza's objection to outdated cliches like tragic romantic heroines ala Nicole Kidman's consumptive singer in Moulin Rouge, one of the reasons these things have power is precisely because they are familiar. I personally found Moulin Rouge to be derivative of at least three different Italian tragic operas that were about a hundred and fifty years old, most notably La Traviata (Verdi) and La Boheme (Puccini), especially in major scenes where (1) Ewan McGregor's character throws his money at Nicole Kidman's character totally, egregiously, obviously, blatantly ripped off from La Traviata!) and (2) the singer makes up with her lover right before she dies of consumption, ripped off from La Boheme.
But as offended as I was on behalf of the old Italian masters, I also found Moulin Rouge to be wildly visually entertaining, musically interesting, and a fairly good version of "the same old thing in brand new drag." Maybe it was because of my familiarity with the operas from which Moulin Rouge liberally stole that I was all right with Rouge itself -- and also because I know a lot of the composers who wrote operas also stole from the legends, myths, and popular stories of their day. So, in their own ways, the opera composers had "Moulin Rouge"d pre-existing stories, so I couldn't really hold it against Baz Luhrman for doing the same thing.
Tragedy has power to affect us because it is so universal. Cliches do too. That's why the bad women in Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! had to die, the same as Carmen the temptress has to die in Bizet's opera -- or Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction. When people do wrong things, or get themselves mixed up in situations that are too big for them or where they've misjudged the emotional dynamics or investment of the other person has put into it, conflicts and problems occur. In their own ways, these are fairy tales for adults in the same way cliches like "the blond chick always gets killed" is an adult fairy tale type of theme for horror/slasher flicks. They are road maps in what not to do, in the ways not to live your life. And, yes, they are often fundamentally conservative illustrations of the unpleasant consequences of immoral behavior. Not just portrayals of victimhood.
Of course, all of these cliches can -- and must -- be subverted. And along came Joss Whedon and Buffy... to shift the horror and vampire paradigm. (Praise the lord!!)
So I guess we are still waiting for the Buffy-like subversion of cliches of tragic gay love like BBM. (Incidentally, there is an indie documentary called Gay Sex in the 70s coming to Chicago (http://catalog.frameline.org/titles/gaysex70s.html) which I'm eager to see, although even the blurb about it mentions that few first person witnesses are alive to tell today's young gay men about it.)
But, I have to ask -- is Prick Up Your Ears (about Joe Orton and his long-time male lover) a tragic cliche? Or is it a fundamentally conservative film? Or both? (If you've never seen it -- damn! talk about hot and openly gay slash! A young Gary Oldman in leather hat and jacket in an abandoned building telling a male stranger "Handle my balls"! PUYE is a slash must-see!) Or what about Cruising? (Ah, the young Al Pacino, undercover cop pretending to be gay so he gets picked up in leather bars... by a psychokiller, but not before we see a lot of leather bar excesses and promiscuity. And a very young James Remar... most recently recurrent as Samantha's lover Richard in the last season or so of Sex And The City.)
SPOILER WARNING (STOP READING if you don't want Prick Up Your Ears spoiled for you!) There is no doubt that Prick Up Your Ears ends tragically, and that that tragic end (Joe's murder and his lover's suicide) is a consequence of Joe's actions -- his promiscuity, when his monogamy-minded long-time and long-suffering lover (basically, live-in spouse) couldn't take his infidelity anymore. In that respect, Joe's murder at the hands of his lover Kenneth is no different than that of any philandering husband, such as Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction. Except that instead of the psychotic other wo/man killing him, it's the male equivalent (Kenneth) of the Anne Archer character who kills Joe (Douglas in this comparison), and then offs himself. Now imagine how much better (or worse) Fatal Attraction might have turned out if Anne Archer had killed Michael Douglas and then herself!
Now, isn't showing the brutal murder of a promiscuous, philandering lover a fundamentally conservative portrayal of the morality of fidelity and the immorality of infidelity -- regardless of whether the couples in question are opposite sex or same sex? Isn't that, after all, why Spanish temptress Carmen is killed by Don Jose in Bizet's opera -- because she quickly moved on from Don Jose to the more attractive toreador, and Don Jose simply can't accept it? It's the same exact reason why Joe gets killed by Kenneth. And so the promiscuous lover is "punished" for his/her behavior by being killed, as an adult fairy tale to everyone everywhere not to fuck around on your loving spouse, or they might off you, too.
And isn't that the conservative spin some gays put on the polyamorous and/or promiscuous gays who grab much more of the headlines than the staid, long-settled same sex couples that are all over this country? "They're making us look bad. We're not all like that." Well, yes, that is true... but are those who maintain that gays are just like everyone else -- want to settle down and raise kids -- fundamentally conservative? Or are they in the majority? Or are the happily promiscuous gays in the majority? And what about all the closeted bisexuals, for that matter? I don't even know the answers, I'm just throwing all this out there. END PRICK UP YOUR EARS SPOILERS.
Another thing that bugged me about BBM: here in Chicago, a local capsule review (by an openly gay reviewer) of BBM said that seeing it "makes one hanker for the sort of unabashed queer stories found outside the mainstream." (http://spacefinder.chicagoreader.com/movies/briefs/29111_BROKEBACK_MOUNTAIN.html)
To which I rather irritatedly wanted to reply -- after I'd seen BBM -- dude, the whole point of BBM is that they are not unabashedly queer. They're nervous, jumpy, angsty, and closeted. And, further more, they're technically not even queer -- they're bi.
That's the other thing that I increasingly find irritating about American society in general -- and the promotion of BBM -- is the continued compartmentalization of people into only one of two boxes: gay or straight. It ain't that simple, people, if it ever was (and it certainly wasn't in ancient Greece or Rome, from whom our forms of government and many societal traditions are supposedly descended... hello!). Situational homosexuality (whether of prison or military service) does not automatically makes one gay. It didn't then, and it doesn't now. That's why I like evolutionary biology; it reveals that there's an awful lot of same-sex activity going on between reproductive members of various species of the animal and bird kingdoms. Like anyone who's ever had two same sex pets could tell you... But the point is, just becaues these men had a long term love (and sex) relationship does not mean they were gay. If neither married and neither had had kids, then I'd put them in the gay box. But they both did. This, to me, makes them not entirely gay -- and obviously not entirely straight, either. Must they be put in one box or the other?
And, finally, as to Esperanza's question "how unreliable a narrator is this?" about Ledger's character Ennis -- well, maybe he's not so reliable a narrator. But, then again, perhaps he is the most reliable narrator, because (1) what is a reliable narrator, when (getting all postmodern on ya) objective "reality" may not exist and the interpretation of reality often depends on one's perceptions, and no two people perceive a given situation exactly the same way? (SPOILER!!! DO NOT READ if you don't want spoilers!) And (2) Ennis (Ledger) is the most reliable narrator, because he's the one who is still alive, and because the only other potential narrator of the love story may have, through his more open behavior, gotten himself killed, if my perception of Jack's death in my one viewing of the film was correct. So how reliable is the narrator who can no longer narrate because he's dead? (she asked rhetorically) If his perceptions were accurate, then shouldn't he have been able to see that his actions would lead to his death? And since the other narrator's different actions (closeted) lead to his survival, doesn't that make him the most reliable narrator, at least because he more accurately perceived the dangers of not being closeted? (END SPOILER!!!)
I'll grant you, the end of BBM wasn't an ending I was happy about, and it's one I would hope becomes less common in real life (maybe through films like BBM showing the devotion and emotion between the two men and the cruelty of the way they are treated and must hide their essential selves), and undoubtedly is more uncommon than it would have been in the late 70s or 80s in rural cowboy Texas or Wyoming. And I realize Esperanza is talking about the films reception now, not how the cowboy manlove relationship would have been perceived back then -- but then again, Matthew Shepard was killed in '98, so that's still pretty close to now.
So, for now, in this world -- "in these United States" (who knows how many hate crimes still go unreported or unprosecuted in the Laramie, WY-like towns of our country?) -- the ending of BBM was an ending I could accept as realistic. It wouldn't have been realistic for two male lovers in NYC, or SF, or Chicago -- but for rural Wyoming or rural Texas, whether I like it or not (and let me be clear:I don't like it!) -- it wasn't a wildly inaccurate ending. Just because I don't like it doesn't mean it can't be true or realistic.
And, since I have been considering making a huge change (moving to a much less populated state) in my own life after I finish nursing school and have a much more portable "skills set," I've been forced to look at the realities myself. I'm not kidding myself that I'm going to find a lot of never-married, childless and frisky heterosexual women of about age 38 like myself in rural towns I might find myself living and working in, if I do make this change. (Lots of divorced women with kids and second or third husbands, maybe... which isn't to say Chicago doesn't have those women -- it does -- but that it has never-married, single het women in their late 30s and 40s in way larger numbers and proportions than Kalispell, Montana does, because in many rural communities, to live that lifestyle is to fly a freak flag and make people around you uneasy, either because you're an unknown heterosexual quantity, or because you're labled the town slut or town lesbian.) I'm not going to kid myself that I'll be able to pop down to the local cinema to see movies like BBM in those towns -- let alone subtitled foreign films. I'm not going to kid myself that the BodyWorlds exhibit I found so fascinating is going to come to a town of a couple thousand people in the middle of corn fields or cattle grazing land. And I'm certainly not going to be getting season tickets to the opera because there won't be an opera house for hundreds of miles, and if I find one, it's not going to be Lyric or the Met.
I'm not trying to badmouth rural areas by any means -- every place has it's good points and bad points. Rural areas have their charms, which are abundantly apparent to me: For one thing, random drive by shootings seem to happen a lot less in such towns, as well as those situations where old ladies get carjacked and driven around in the trunks of their cars from ATM to ATM (true story; happened in Chicago recently) or where people get their fingers cut off so the criminals can more easily steal their rings (another true story which happened in Chicago recently). And there are going to be a lot of people who are damned nice, and not suspicious, not rude, not distrustful, and not out to con me out of every last dime, like all the con artists and panhandlers and career criminals we have in Chicago. Every time I go anywhere rural, sorry to contribute to the cliche, but I am amazed at how nice and trusting people are by comparison with many people in many parts of Chicago... and I'm sad that I have become such a hardened city dweller that my initial response is to think "Why are these people being so nice? What are they planning to pull?" Because here, the niceness often comes accompanied by solicitation for charities you never heard of that don't exist and the money goes directly in the pocket of the con man smoothly lying to your face.
(One more advantage to rural living: sure there is no escape from mold or grass and tree pollen anywhere in the US. I've checked this out! Seriously! BUT -- I'm not going to have to wheeze my way through too many Ozone Action Days in Kalispell, Montana like I do every summer in Chicago, when I'm forced to choose to either contribute to the problem by driving my own car whyile simultaneously protecting my lungs with my A/C in my car, or to not contribute to the problem by taking public transit (and greatly increasing my chances of having an asthma attack, by standing in the ozone while waiting for the bus and train, that puts me in the ER).
Finally, one last comment on a BBM-related entertainment show blurb. Normally I would never watch Extra or ET or Access Hollywood, but I happened to be up really late (like, past 1:30am) one night recently when they were talking about the "gay cowboy themed" (their words!) BBM. They had a Ebert and Roeper blurb where the two were talking about BBM's box office potential. (As I understand it, it made all its money back in the first weekend it opened, which was only in select cities like NYC and LA, and didn't include Chicago until a week later. So put that in your pipe and smoke it. Hmph.)
Okay, truth: I dislike Roeper, always have since before he went on Ebert and Roeper, and I really disliked the fact that he was chosen as Gene Siskel's replacment for the Siskel and Ebert show. First because he is a silly hack writer for the Chicago Sun-Times who won his journalistic (if you can call it that) column at that paper by entering a contest. Okay, maybe he deserved to win that particular contest, and he did have some journalism background. But... the guy has no film scholarship history, no knowledge of the history of cinema, certainly not in the way Ebert does or Siskel did or people like Pauline Kael or even David Ansen. (There is more about Roeper's lack of qualifications at http://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=679)
But, that having been said, I still occasionally watch Ebert and Roeper, cringing a lot when Roeper talks.
Anyway, so they were asked on Extra or ET or whichever show it was, whether or not BBM would make money as a "chick flick." Ebert very reasonably pointed out that it's well known that men like to see two women kissing, and he wondered aloud if women would like to see two men kissing.
To which Roeper snapped, dismissively, before Ebert even finished the sentence, "Nope."
And I found myself thinking, You idiot, you have no fucking clue, do you? What demographic do you think has been buying and reading Anne Rice's ultra-homoerotic (not to mention polymorphous perverse) vampire chronicle novels for, like, twenty years -- and putting them at the top of the NYT best-seller list every time a new one comes out? Do you never surf the web? Do you have any idea how much slashfic there is out there -- for LOTR, let alone Starsky and Hutch -- you moron!?
But, clearly not. Richard Roeper: clueless hack for the 00s. And I get the impression he's an ultra-conservative bastard masquerading as a hip yuppie. Eh, maybe it's just me...
At any rate, I do see BBM as presenting one major detour from the stereotypes of gay (bi, whatever) men -- and that is, they're not androgynous, they're not going to leave Wyoming or Texas and become hairdressers, they're never going to become feminized -- they are, and remain, in most all other ways except preferring each other's company, traditionally masculine. I'll admit my reasons for appreciating the slashiness of the BBM male lovers are because of the angst, which I have a major thing for... But it's also because (1) their failure to become flamers fuels more of my everyman slashy fantasies than Will&Grace ever could. And because (2) I think it is more realistic about the existance of those "invisible" gays in America. There are a lot of gay bars here that gay construction workers, cops, and delivery men go to -- men who are not suspected in their regular or work lives of being gay (at least, not by non-gays), simply because they don't look like the stereotypes that all non-gays have been trained to perceive as gay. And, yes, those are the guys who sometimes mess around on their wives with other men.
(Incidentally, a gay friend -- who is one of those gays who you would never guess is gay because it is not obvious in his mannerisms, his dress, his speech or anything -- tells me that that's what he wants: truly masculine men, which is why married hetero men are so attractive to him: they're the ultimate in masculinity because they are with women, and, to use his words, "every fag knows a real man fucks women." Not my words, his words, okay? Please don't attack me on something I didn't say, I'm just throwing it out there. Now, that's only one gay man's opinion, but he's sucked a lot of married male dick, so I'm guessing he knows a thing or two about it.)
Anyway, many thanks to Esperanza for her interesting posts on BBM that made me think and ramble like this.
So, okay, bedtime, wahhhhh...
I felt the need to comment on her posts, because there was such cogent thought -- and outrage -- behind them. But it turned into much more than a comment, and it focused on a lot of things Esperanza never said, just things that have irritated me about the promotion of Brokeback, and the entertainment buzz about it, so here it is...
Trying to make this brief (after 2am...ha! Going for broke!).
I understand the outrage of "is this still where we're at?" -- I actually do. Because, on the brink of 2006, and in Chicago, I'm going, "No, we're not there -- not us in Chicago."
But at the same time, I think that, unfortunately, YES, in many parts of this country, that IS where we're still at: "Hey, should we go beat those two queer cowboys to death with firewood, or should we just go get some beers?" "Nah, let's get some beers first." (spit)
Eddie Izzard has a great bit in the DVD of Dress To Kill where he was in some rural town and a man came up to him with his kids in tow and said to Izzard, "Talk British to my kids!" Like it's another language...
To get back to the topic at hand, I found myself wondering, while I watched Brokeback Mountain, if Ang Lee was intentionally evoking memories of Mathew Shepard (the young man beaten and left for dead tied to a fence-post in Laramie WY in '98) and James Byrd, Jr. (the black man dragged to death tied by his ankles to a pickup truck, also strangely in '98).
I totally sympathize with the commie pinko elitist intellectual urban living perspective Esperanza mentions, living in Chicago as I have all my life, and I sympathize with the frustrated thoughts of "c'mon, guys, come OUT, be freely GAY, and get a ROOM already!" But it's really easy for me (or Esperanza, or Nathan Lane) to forget, because we live in huge cities where everyone who wants to can fly their freak flag openly 24/7/365, that people don't get to do that in many parts of the country... at least not without some major consequences, depending on where they are. That's precisely why places like NYC, Chicago, Atlanta, SF, etc. became "gay meccas" -- because people in small towns or rural areas knew they couldn't just get away with being who they really are back where they came from. And it isn't something you really realize until you do a lot of interesting road trips through the heartland or out West, 'til you get out of major urban areas and see what things are really like in, say, Indiana or Kansas or wherever. We think we are so enlightened as a country... Are we?
I mean, Kansas several years ago passed state legislation to put creationism in biology class... and then it got cleverly changed over to "intelligent design." I praise that federal judge's recent decision that "intelligent design" cannot be taught in biology class in public schools, because it is about religion and religious beliefs -- but the fact that he did his homework and discovered that it got changed from creationism to "intelligent design" by means of a massive "find and replace" in the text they were using in those schools shows that, yes, in 2005, this is still where we, as a nation and society, are at. Is this happening in the UK? In Germany? In France? Certainly not in the Netherlands. No, in those countries, science is science, and religion is religion, and they keep them separate.
Personally, I found the film Philadelphia a major snoozefest and nothing to write slash about because it was such a buzzkill for my otherwise happy slashy thoughts. There was NOTHING homoerotic about Philadelphia for me; it utterly failed to press my slash buttons in all the ways various BBC miniseries and things like Forever Knight HADN'T failed to press my slash buttons. I remember thinking at the time I saw Philadelphia that it was very strange that a movie with a "real" (as in *canonically*) gay couple was so much less homoerotic than a variety of TV shows which had no openly, canonically gay characters! But it was because Philadelphia was so cowardly and conservative in its portrayal of homosexuality that it was so non-homoerotic.
But BBM pressed my slash buttons from the moment I saw the trailer which, I think, was months ago in the late summer. I had wanted to see it from then on, and I have seen it, and I'm not disappointed. The trailer had LOADS of angsty homoeroticism, and the film did as well. But I'm not the kind of person who must have happy endings for everything, because I know that's not how real life turns out all the time. I feel ripped off when I see a tragic story suddenly have its dark rug pulled out from under it to give a happy ending imposed by the studio and producers. I hated the Spielberg ending to AI; I wanted the Kubrick ending we never got to see.
I am fine with filmmakers and authors leaving things open, unresolved, messy, with loose ends... because to me, sometimes such endings are more realistic. But I also know that kind of realism, from the standpoint of narrative storytelling (as well as the stages of sexual arousal and climax which theoretically parallel narrative storytelling: introduce characters, introduce conflict, rising action, climax, denouement -- or so I learned in Film Techniques I when I was a silly young thing), unresolved endings with loose ends or open interpretations are also very unsatisfying for audiences. Audiences want some kind of resolution, some tying up of everything that went before.
MAJOR SPOILER -- STOP READING if you don't want spoilers!
This is why we have tearjerkers when we don't have happy endings. And BBM is being marketed as a kind of chick flick. It does tie things at the end, but not the happy way.
There are several reasons I thought of both Matthew Shepard's and James Byrd, Jr.'s deaths at the hands of intolerant rednecks while I was watching BBM. For one, Ledger's character Ennis reveals to Gyllenhall's character Jack that when he was a kid, his father took him to see the body (in a ditch, no less) of a queer who was dragged by his penis behind a truck until it was torn off, and then he was beaten to death. The father intends it as a lesson in the unacceptability of homosexuality. But this actual lesson Ennis learns is (which made a huge impression on the boy Ennis) how to live with his gayness in a way that would not get him killed.
And, at the end of the film, when Ennis finds out from Jack's wife that Jack died, the story she gives him is that a hubcap blew off a tire he was pumping up and sliced up his face and throat, and he bled to death. But the visual that accompanies her words is three guys beating to death another guy, and it is unclear if it is the queer cowboy Ennis saw dead in a ditch as a young kid, or if it's three cowboys beating Jack to death for being much more openly gay than Ennis ever would be, making the story the wife tells Ennis the "official story" she was given by local law enforcement. I would have to see BBM again to be more certain of this, or (preferably) have the DVD to freeze-frame through with as much clarity as possible. But I think that the guy being beaten to death was Jack, Ennis' lover.
END SPOILERS
Also, Matthew Shepard was killed in Wyoming, which is where Brokeback Mountain supposedly is located; and Jack (Gyllenhall) later moves to Texas, which is where Jack Byrd, Jr. was dragged to death behind a pickup. Is it coincidental that these two states where such horrifying hate crimes occurred are used in the film? I don't think so, although I have not read the original Annie Proulx short story to know. In fact, it might be interesting to find out when she wrote them and whether the same details are in the story as are in the film.
Finally, BBM portrays a twenty-some years long relationship which starts, if I remember right from my single viewing of BBM so far, in the 50s or 60s, and ends in the late 70s or 80s. Now, to put it in perspective, from 1980 to 1992 (and later!) President Reagan, that lying scumbag, and later ex-Reagan Vice President-turned-President George Bush, Sr., another truly evil man, were still refusing to deal with the reality of AIDS precisely because it was perceived and portrayed as merely a "gay disease" and their right wing religious conservative supporters were hailing it as a homosexual plague that would "rid" our society of gays.
Under those circumstances, what chance was there really that two gay cowboys could have been openly and happily gay in most rural towns of the west? Slim to none, I'd wager.
And, while I understand Esperanza's objection to outdated cliches like tragic romantic heroines ala Nicole Kidman's consumptive singer in Moulin Rouge, one of the reasons these things have power is precisely because they are familiar. I personally found Moulin Rouge to be derivative of at least three different Italian tragic operas that were about a hundred and fifty years old, most notably La Traviata (Verdi) and La Boheme (Puccini), especially in major scenes where (1) Ewan McGregor's character throws his money at Nicole Kidman's character totally, egregiously, obviously, blatantly ripped off from La Traviata!) and (2) the singer makes up with her lover right before she dies of consumption, ripped off from La Boheme.
But as offended as I was on behalf of the old Italian masters, I also found Moulin Rouge to be wildly visually entertaining, musically interesting, and a fairly good version of "the same old thing in brand new drag." Maybe it was because of my familiarity with the operas from which Moulin Rouge liberally stole that I was all right with Rouge itself -- and also because I know a lot of the composers who wrote operas also stole from the legends, myths, and popular stories of their day. So, in their own ways, the opera composers had "Moulin Rouge"d pre-existing stories, so I couldn't really hold it against Baz Luhrman for doing the same thing.
Tragedy has power to affect us because it is so universal. Cliches do too. That's why the bad women in Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! had to die, the same as Carmen the temptress has to die in Bizet's opera -- or Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction. When people do wrong things, or get themselves mixed up in situations that are too big for them or where they've misjudged the emotional dynamics or investment of the other person has put into it, conflicts and problems occur. In their own ways, these are fairy tales for adults in the same way cliches like "the blond chick always gets killed" is an adult fairy tale type of theme for horror/slasher flicks. They are road maps in what not to do, in the ways not to live your life. And, yes, they are often fundamentally conservative illustrations of the unpleasant consequences of immoral behavior. Not just portrayals of victimhood.
Of course, all of these cliches can -- and must -- be subverted. And along came Joss Whedon and Buffy... to shift the horror and vampire paradigm. (Praise the lord!!)
So I guess we are still waiting for the Buffy-like subversion of cliches of tragic gay love like BBM. (Incidentally, there is an indie documentary called Gay Sex in the 70s coming to Chicago (http://catalog.frameline.org/titles/gaysex70s.html) which I'm eager to see, although even the blurb about it mentions that few first person witnesses are alive to tell today's young gay men about it.)
But, I have to ask -- is Prick Up Your Ears (about Joe Orton and his long-time male lover) a tragic cliche? Or is it a fundamentally conservative film? Or both? (If you've never seen it -- damn! talk about hot and openly gay slash! A young Gary Oldman in leather hat and jacket in an abandoned building telling a male stranger "Handle my balls"! PUYE is a slash must-see!) Or what about Cruising? (Ah, the young Al Pacino, undercover cop pretending to be gay so he gets picked up in leather bars... by a psychokiller, but not before we see a lot of leather bar excesses and promiscuity. And a very young James Remar... most recently recurrent as Samantha's lover Richard in the last season or so of Sex And The City.)
SPOILER WARNING (STOP READING if you don't want Prick Up Your Ears spoiled for you!) There is no doubt that Prick Up Your Ears ends tragically, and that that tragic end (Joe's murder and his lover's suicide) is a consequence of Joe's actions -- his promiscuity, when his monogamy-minded long-time and long-suffering lover (basically, live-in spouse) couldn't take his infidelity anymore. In that respect, Joe's murder at the hands of his lover Kenneth is no different than that of any philandering husband, such as Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction. Except that instead of the psychotic other wo/man killing him, it's the male equivalent (Kenneth) of the Anne Archer character who kills Joe (Douglas in this comparison), and then offs himself. Now imagine how much better (or worse) Fatal Attraction might have turned out if Anne Archer had killed Michael Douglas and then herself!
Now, isn't showing the brutal murder of a promiscuous, philandering lover a fundamentally conservative portrayal of the morality of fidelity and the immorality of infidelity -- regardless of whether the couples in question are opposite sex or same sex? Isn't that, after all, why Spanish temptress Carmen is killed by Don Jose in Bizet's opera -- because she quickly moved on from Don Jose to the more attractive toreador, and Don Jose simply can't accept it? It's the same exact reason why Joe gets killed by Kenneth. And so the promiscuous lover is "punished" for his/her behavior by being killed, as an adult fairy tale to everyone everywhere not to fuck around on your loving spouse, or they might off you, too.
And isn't that the conservative spin some gays put on the polyamorous and/or promiscuous gays who grab much more of the headlines than the staid, long-settled same sex couples that are all over this country? "They're making us look bad. We're not all like that." Well, yes, that is true... but are those who maintain that gays are just like everyone else -- want to settle down and raise kids -- fundamentally conservative? Or are they in the majority? Or are the happily promiscuous gays in the majority? And what about all the closeted bisexuals, for that matter? I don't even know the answers, I'm just throwing all this out there. END PRICK UP YOUR EARS SPOILERS.
Another thing that bugged me about BBM: here in Chicago, a local capsule review (by an openly gay reviewer) of BBM said that seeing it "makes one hanker for the sort of unabashed queer stories found outside the mainstream." (http://spacefinder.chicagoreader.com/movies/briefs/29111_BROKEBACK_MOUNTAIN.html)
To which I rather irritatedly wanted to reply -- after I'd seen BBM -- dude, the whole point of BBM is that they are not unabashedly queer. They're nervous, jumpy, angsty, and closeted. And, further more, they're technically not even queer -- they're bi.
That's the other thing that I increasingly find irritating about American society in general -- and the promotion of BBM -- is the continued compartmentalization of people into only one of two boxes: gay or straight. It ain't that simple, people, if it ever was (and it certainly wasn't in ancient Greece or Rome, from whom our forms of government and many societal traditions are supposedly descended... hello!). Situational homosexuality (whether of prison or military service) does not automatically makes one gay. It didn't then, and it doesn't now. That's why I like evolutionary biology; it reveals that there's an awful lot of same-sex activity going on between reproductive members of various species of the animal and bird kingdoms. Like anyone who's ever had two same sex pets could tell you... But the point is, just becaues these men had a long term love (and sex) relationship does not mean they were gay. If neither married and neither had had kids, then I'd put them in the gay box. But they both did. This, to me, makes them not entirely gay -- and obviously not entirely straight, either. Must they be put in one box or the other?
And, finally, as to Esperanza's question "how unreliable a narrator is this?" about Ledger's character Ennis -- well, maybe he's not so reliable a narrator. But, then again, perhaps he is the most reliable narrator, because (1) what is a reliable narrator, when (getting all postmodern on ya) objective "reality" may not exist and the interpretation of reality often depends on one's perceptions, and no two people perceive a given situation exactly the same way? (SPOILER!!! DO NOT READ if you don't want spoilers!) And (2) Ennis (Ledger) is the most reliable narrator, because he's the one who is still alive, and because the only other potential narrator of the love story may have, through his more open behavior, gotten himself killed, if my perception of Jack's death in my one viewing of the film was correct. So how reliable is the narrator who can no longer narrate because he's dead? (she asked rhetorically) If his perceptions were accurate, then shouldn't he have been able to see that his actions would lead to his death? And since the other narrator's different actions (closeted) lead to his survival, doesn't that make him the most reliable narrator, at least because he more accurately perceived the dangers of not being closeted? (END SPOILER!!!)
I'll grant you, the end of BBM wasn't an ending I was happy about, and it's one I would hope becomes less common in real life (maybe through films like BBM showing the devotion and emotion between the two men and the cruelty of the way they are treated and must hide their essential selves), and undoubtedly is more uncommon than it would have been in the late 70s or 80s in rural cowboy Texas or Wyoming. And I realize Esperanza is talking about the films reception now, not how the cowboy manlove relationship would have been perceived back then -- but then again, Matthew Shepard was killed in '98, so that's still pretty close to now.
So, for now, in this world -- "in these United States" (who knows how many hate crimes still go unreported or unprosecuted in the Laramie, WY-like towns of our country?) -- the ending of BBM was an ending I could accept as realistic. It wouldn't have been realistic for two male lovers in NYC, or SF, or Chicago -- but for rural Wyoming or rural Texas, whether I like it or not (and let me be clear:I don't like it!) -- it wasn't a wildly inaccurate ending. Just because I don't like it doesn't mean it can't be true or realistic.
And, since I have been considering making a huge change (moving to a much less populated state) in my own life after I finish nursing school and have a much more portable "skills set," I've been forced to look at the realities myself. I'm not kidding myself that I'm going to find a lot of never-married, childless and frisky heterosexual women of about age 38 like myself in rural towns I might find myself living and working in, if I do make this change. (Lots of divorced women with kids and second or third husbands, maybe... which isn't to say Chicago doesn't have those women -- it does -- but that it has never-married, single het women in their late 30s and 40s in way larger numbers and proportions than Kalispell, Montana does, because in many rural communities, to live that lifestyle is to fly a freak flag and make people around you uneasy, either because you're an unknown heterosexual quantity, or because you're labled the town slut or town lesbian.) I'm not going to kid myself that I'll be able to pop down to the local cinema to see movies like BBM in those towns -- let alone subtitled foreign films. I'm not going to kid myself that the BodyWorlds exhibit I found so fascinating is going to come to a town of a couple thousand people in the middle of corn fields or cattle grazing land. And I'm certainly not going to be getting season tickets to the opera because there won't be an opera house for hundreds of miles, and if I find one, it's not going to be Lyric or the Met.
I'm not trying to badmouth rural areas by any means -- every place has it's good points and bad points. Rural areas have their charms, which are abundantly apparent to me: For one thing, random drive by shootings seem to happen a lot less in such towns, as well as those situations where old ladies get carjacked and driven around in the trunks of their cars from ATM to ATM (true story; happened in Chicago recently) or where people get their fingers cut off so the criminals can more easily steal their rings (another true story which happened in Chicago recently). And there are going to be a lot of people who are damned nice, and not suspicious, not rude, not distrustful, and not out to con me out of every last dime, like all the con artists and panhandlers and career criminals we have in Chicago. Every time I go anywhere rural, sorry to contribute to the cliche, but I am amazed at how nice and trusting people are by comparison with many people in many parts of Chicago... and I'm sad that I have become such a hardened city dweller that my initial response is to think "Why are these people being so nice? What are they planning to pull?" Because here, the niceness often comes accompanied by solicitation for charities you never heard of that don't exist and the money goes directly in the pocket of the con man smoothly lying to your face.
(One more advantage to rural living: sure there is no escape from mold or grass and tree pollen anywhere in the US. I've checked this out! Seriously! BUT -- I'm not going to have to wheeze my way through too many Ozone Action Days in Kalispell, Montana like I do every summer in Chicago, when I'm forced to choose to either contribute to the problem by driving my own car whyile simultaneously protecting my lungs with my A/C in my car, or to not contribute to the problem by taking public transit (and greatly increasing my chances of having an asthma attack, by standing in the ozone while waiting for the bus and train, that puts me in the ER).
Finally, one last comment on a BBM-related entertainment show blurb. Normally I would never watch Extra or ET or Access Hollywood, but I happened to be up really late (like, past 1:30am) one night recently when they were talking about the "gay cowboy themed" (their words!) BBM. They had a Ebert and Roeper blurb where the two were talking about BBM's box office potential. (As I understand it, it made all its money back in the first weekend it opened, which was only in select cities like NYC and LA, and didn't include Chicago until a week later. So put that in your pipe and smoke it. Hmph.)
Okay, truth: I dislike Roeper, always have since before he went on Ebert and Roeper, and I really disliked the fact that he was chosen as Gene Siskel's replacment for the Siskel and Ebert show. First because he is a silly hack writer for the Chicago Sun-Times who won his journalistic (if you can call it that) column at that paper by entering a contest. Okay, maybe he deserved to win that particular contest, and he did have some journalism background. But... the guy has no film scholarship history, no knowledge of the history of cinema, certainly not in the way Ebert does or Siskel did or people like Pauline Kael or even David Ansen. (There is more about Roeper's lack of qualifications at http://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=679)
But, that having been said, I still occasionally watch Ebert and Roeper, cringing a lot when Roeper talks.
Anyway, so they were asked on Extra or ET or whichever show it was, whether or not BBM would make money as a "chick flick." Ebert very reasonably pointed out that it's well known that men like to see two women kissing, and he wondered aloud if women would like to see two men kissing.
To which Roeper snapped, dismissively, before Ebert even finished the sentence, "Nope."
And I found myself thinking, You idiot, you have no fucking clue, do you? What demographic do you think has been buying and reading Anne Rice's ultra-homoerotic (not to mention polymorphous perverse) vampire chronicle novels for, like, twenty years -- and putting them at the top of the NYT best-seller list every time a new one comes out? Do you never surf the web? Do you have any idea how much slashfic there is out there -- for LOTR, let alone Starsky and Hutch -- you moron!?
But, clearly not. Richard Roeper: clueless hack for the 00s. And I get the impression he's an ultra-conservative bastard masquerading as a hip yuppie. Eh, maybe it's just me...
At any rate, I do see BBM as presenting one major detour from the stereotypes of gay (bi, whatever) men -- and that is, they're not androgynous, they're not going to leave Wyoming or Texas and become hairdressers, they're never going to become feminized -- they are, and remain, in most all other ways except preferring each other's company, traditionally masculine. I'll admit my reasons for appreciating the slashiness of the BBM male lovers are because of the angst, which I have a major thing for... But it's also because (1) their failure to become flamers fuels more of my everyman slashy fantasies than Will&Grace ever could. And because (2) I think it is more realistic about the existance of those "invisible" gays in America. There are a lot of gay bars here that gay construction workers, cops, and delivery men go to -- men who are not suspected in their regular or work lives of being gay (at least, not by non-gays), simply because they don't look like the stereotypes that all non-gays have been trained to perceive as gay. And, yes, those are the guys who sometimes mess around on their wives with other men.
(Incidentally, a gay friend -- who is one of those gays who you would never guess is gay because it is not obvious in his mannerisms, his dress, his speech or anything -- tells me that that's what he wants: truly masculine men, which is why married hetero men are so attractive to him: they're the ultimate in masculinity because they are with women, and, to use his words, "every fag knows a real man fucks women." Not my words, his words, okay? Please don't attack me on something I didn't say, I'm just throwing it out there. Now, that's only one gay man's opinion, but he's sucked a lot of married male dick, so I'm guessing he knows a thing or two about it.)
Anyway, many thanks to Esperanza for her interesting posts on BBM that made me think and ramble like this.
So, okay, bedtime, wahhhhh...