Dale Carpenter's newly posted critique of Brokeback Mountain has provoked spirited debate in gay papers where it's been publshed. My own supportive views toward the film have already been stated, but here are some other interesting takes.
Guest blogger Ross Douthat of the Atlantic, on Andrew Sullivan's
site, has positive things to say but
also argues that:
The straight men are all either strutting oafs, bitter bigots like Jack Twist's father, or "nice-guy" weaklings like Alma's second husband, whose well-meaning effeminacy contrasts sharply with Ennis's rugged manliness. Jack and Ennis are the only "real men" in the story, and their love is associated with the high country and the vision of paradise it offers-a world of natural beauty and perfect freedom, of wrestling matches and campfires and naked plunges into crystal rivers-and a world with no girls allowed. Civilization is women and babies and debts and fathers-in-law and bosses; freedom is the natural world, and the erotic company of men. It's an old idea of the pre-Christian world come round again-not that gay men are real men too; but that real men are gay.
Blogger Tim Hulsey is critical of some of the critics,
observing that:
David Letterman in particular has conducted a one-man crusade against the "gay cowboy movie," and Nathan Lane famously performed a minstrel-show Broadway parody of Brokeback on the Today show.
That the openly gay Lane would attack the film is less surprising than it would seem: I suspect that gay men who have adopted an ironic "camp" sensibility as a personal defense mechanism will prove especially resistant to the film. When I saw Brokeback in D.C.'s Dupont Circle, one young gay man heckled the screen, Rocky Horror style. He sounded like the sort of fellow who was beaten throughout high school, and who learned that a withering wit can be the best defense of the powerless. In a strange way, he seemed to belong on the screen with Jack and Ennis.
And finally,
this piece by a gay escort is surprisingly sad, as he predicts
a rise in his clientele:
Students graduate, soldiers return to citizenry, and so the one-shot lovers must say goodbye. And like Jack and Ennis, many of my clients went on to pass year after wistful year in a life nature never truly intended. Until something happened. ...
Ostensible business trips to the coast will be scheduled, where men like me lie in wait. After the second or third time a man trucks back home to International Falls from the multiplex, and then maybe the gay bar, in Duluth, the family computer's potential to track down his bible camp paramour may prove too tempting. Men will take risks after seeing this film.
Which may, I suppose, lead back to Carpenter's concerns about
hurt wives and abandoned kids (or alternatively, liberated souls
now free to love). But whatever your response, a film that provokes
reactions this strong is a force to be reckoned with, I
reckon.