You don’t have to live in Wyoming
I went to see Brokeback Mountain last night. The positive buzz around the film had succeeded in convincing me I wouldn’t like it, but it turns out that none of the reviews I’d seen actually get to what the film is, I think, really about, and so miss what makes it, in fact, such a marvellous film.
The most common reponse has been to praise the film as a universal love story, and it was this that provoked my initial hostility. I have no time for films about characters sacrificing their happiness in the face of social convention. I can’t stand The Remains of the Day, for instance — there’s nothing honorable about being the victim of pointless social norms, still less in suffering in silence. If that were all Brokeback Mountain were portraying, it would be at best banal, at worst pernicious. This universalizing interpretation has been challenged for the way it effaces homosexuality from the film, either as a criticism of mainstream responses to the film, or as a criticism of the film itself. However, inciteful as both of these essays are, I think they finally make the same mistake as the position they oppose; they read the film solely through the central relationship, thereby missing the
broader concerns which this relationship illuminates.
I’ve yet to see a review which properly addressed the specificity of the setting of the film. 1960s Wyoming has been assumed to simply represent A Place That Doesn’t Like Fags, and nothing more. But that’s untenable as an explanation of the very precise moment which is beautifully rendered in the film’s design. Far from being either universal or a love story, the film is both more specific in its location and broader in its concerns: its theme is, fundamentally, the gender dynamics of late fordism. Looking at it this way also helps explain a number of scenes which would otherwise be distinctly troubling.
There are three scenes which particularly emphasize this aspect, and against which we can then interpret the rest of the film. Shortly after Ennis gets married, we see him and his wife in their little house out on a ranch somewhere, where Alma is attempting to coax Ennis to move to live in the nearby town. This scene concened me; Alma’s pleading and wheedling portrays a prennial female stereotype, one that is doubly worrying in the context of Ennis’s attraction to the wilderness which is bound up with his love of Jack. But why accept this moralizing interpretation? We’re prepared to take Ennis’s behavior as conditioned by his social circumstances, and implicit in the film is the suggestion that we extend this perspective. Alma is no happier with the gender role she has been assigned than Ennis or Jack, or any of the other characters.
Skip forward to Ennis and Alma living in town. Ennis rushes into the supermarket where Alma works, dumping the kids with her so that he can head off to work out on the ranch. Throughout the film, Ennis uses the nominal responsibilities of his employment to assert what he thinks is some kind of agency. But is it really? At this point, is it possible to construe the wage laborer’s freedom to enter the workforce as liberation (if it ever was)? This sets up the later scene where Ennis berates Alma for leaving the house at dinner time to take on an extra shift at the supermarket. What happens to the idea of work as liberation when waged work can no longer be construed as freedom through a gendered opposition? This is not a transhistorical question, but one which arose in the specific time and place in which the film is set.
This set of issues, once seen, can be located throughout the film. We can see the complex of class and gender identities in the middle-aged and middle-class Jack’s paunch and moustache in the later part of the film; we can see it right at the beginning, when Jack and Ennis confront the power of their employer, both of them already damaged by the society they were born into (and these early scenes make it clear that the film is not about the consequences of the chance event that happens up in the mountains). This is also what makes the film so powerful as a story of class struggle (in John Holloway’s sense, as a struggle against classification). The central role of structure is made most explicit in what I think is the last scene in which we see Jack and Ennis together. Jack raises again the possibility that the two of them could live together; Ennis’s response is hyperbolic: Jack, he say, might as well imagine that the river would flow with whiskey. On one level, this looks like a simple instance of bad faith, like Ennis’s continued insistence that he can’t leave the life he knows because he needs to keep his job. But, just as the need to sell one’s labor is very real under capitalism, what Ennis’s response reveals is that, in the face of overdetermined social structures, any better future will appear to be not only contingently unattainable, but necessarily, structurally, impossible (and does Jack, finally, really believe that his utopia is any more possible?).
There is much more in the film than a love story, or even a gay love story. But it’s also worth saying that the situation which Jack, Alma, Lureen and Ennis are forced to negotiate, is not the situation we confront today.
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It’s a good film in to which I mostly read that it was about the two characters’ struggle to deal with the impossibility of realising their dream scenarios any more than one weekend in a blue moon. Tied in with this is a fairly universal point about the aching for a younger, less responsible existence that is explicitly denied with ‘maturation’. In dealing with the incompatibility of their dreams and aims, Ennis arguably takes the more honest stance of living in complete isolation and casual labour rather than Jack’s [un]willing adoption into the system…
Comment by Muzza @ 2/27/2006 6:38 am
I’m sure you’re wrong, but man it’s a great idea. I wish I knew how to quit you.
Comment by leila @ 2/28/2006 1:46 am
I think the negation of suffer is the wrong side of capitalism.
Comment by Heraclitus @ 3/1/2006 12:59 am