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.