Straws and Camels

You know, I like making titles for my blog entries. Most of the times, it allows me to be clever, even if I'm probably the only person who revels in my own cleverness. For example, I'm going to do a no-no and explain the title of this entry. Straws and Camels seems like an unusual combination of words, no?

Ask yourself, when have you heard straws and camels together? If your first thought about straws is drinking straws, then you're on the wrong track. I'm talking about hay. There's a phrase that, unless English is not your native tongue, that you should have heard that goes "the straw the broke the camel's back". I suppose the imagery is that there is some limit at which a camel's back would break, and that this limit can be measured to an individual stray.

In it's popular parlance, it means that there have been a series of things that have been bugging a person, but they've managed to keep quiet. However, this is the "last straw", and the person is going to burst, typically in a fit of rage.

And you'd think that's what I'm going to write about, but it's not.

I'm going to talk about Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain. Ang Lee has had an unusual career. His first well-known film was The Wedding Banquet. This tells the story of a Taiwanese man working in the United States. His parents live in Taiwan and want him to get married. In countries that have a great deal of history, such as all of Asia, marriage is a big deal.

It's such a big deal that marriage is taken out of the hands of the person getting married, and put into the hands of parents. Perhaps the country that still embodies this the most is India (and Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, and all the other countries in the subcontinent). Arranged marriages are still extremely common. Parents pick spouses for their children, based on the goodness of the other family. Are they a good family, of the right caste, of the right educational background?

Even countries like China, Japan, Taiwan, etc. that have long since abandoned arrange marriage still believe in the importance of getting married by the time a person is 30. I remember watching a Chinese variety show (this form of entertainment, which faded from American television, is still popular in Asian television) where a famous woman singer was approaching thirty. The emcee asked when she was going to get married. She was rather coy about the answer, but it begins to show you the kind of societal pressure that's on people to get married.

You'd never see that kind of pressure on a talk show. Could you imagine David Letterman asking, say, Madonna (were she Ritchie-less), when she was going to get married? Maybe once upon a time, this was a big deal, but with divorce rate as high as it is, people are more reluctant to get married, so it's hardly raised, but hardly seen as unusual.

Anyway, The Wedding Banquet deals with how a gay Chinese man lies to his parents, tells them that he's dating a Chinese girl and plans to marry her. They come for a visit, when a chef who served under this man's father insists on making a fabulous wedding banquet. If anything, we have Ang Lee to blame for food-based themes. He followed this film up with Eat, Drink, Man, Woman about a chef who's lost his ability to taste food, and his travails with his three daughters.

Both of these films were made in Taiwan. Most people think of Ang Lee as being from Taiwan, which he is, but he received his training in film in the United States at NYU film school. He even served as an assistant on one of Spike Lee's student films. Thus, Ang is quite familiar with English.

His breakthrough in English-themed films started with Sense and Sensibility, where Emma Thompson was both star and cowriter. He followed this up with the excellent The Ice Storm, Ride With The Devil, a little seen Civil War drama starring singer, Jewel, and Hulk.

Even though Hulk tanked, people are looking forward to Brokeback Mountain, about two cowboys played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. I've only seen Gyllenhaal in Donnie Darko, which is an excellent cult film. I haven't seen that much of Ledger. A little bit in A Knight's Tale. From that, I wasn't sure how good an actor he was. It's the kind of role that many a prettyboy takes on.

However, he showed some acting chops in the generally unremarkable The Brothers Grimm playing bookish, Jacob Grimm.

There has been speculation in the gay community how explicit the sex scenes in Brokeback Mountain will be. Rumor is that Ang Lee wants to hold back from being explicit. It's difficult to say how important love scenes are for the film. Dave despises what Spielberg did to The Color Purple where the lesbian scenes with Whoopi Goldberg were underplayed to make the film more palatable to the viewing public, even if Alice Walker's book is far more explicit.

There are several reasons to add more explicit scenes to the film. The first reason, and most important, is that it contributes to the storyline. For example, one could imagine that it's the kind of passion that the two leads have for each other that keep them in each other's minds. Especially in a repressed setting, showing how far they go may be key to their relationship.

The second reason, which can't be underestimated, is that a gay crowd simply wants to see it. I recently watched Take Me Out. The story could have been told without nudity. It wouldn't have detracted from the story that much, and yet, it would have killed the audience it got. As much as gay play-attending audience loves good plays, it never hurts to have a little eye-candy on the side. It's surprising, really, that non-gay films don't play up the sexuality more. Perhaps the hottest of those films I can recall is Y Tu Mama Tambien, which is nevertheless, a great, great film.

The third reason is for straight audiences. The more gay love scenes are played in mainstream films, the more straight audiences will be accustomed to seeing it. Right now, it's still very common for guys to be squeamish about seeing unclothed guys, and frankly, even women have this problem, too. Yet, the more often it's seen and portrayed, the more audiences get used to the idea, and don't think of it in negative terms. It becomes a countervailing force to the homophobia that surrounds sports and the military.

Ironically, many films that have gay characters are invariably played by straight actors. I watched the British film AKA, often compared to The Talented Mr. Ripley, about a working class teen who pretends to be the son of minor royalty. He hangs around the jet-set, spends other people's money, and what's more, it's a true story.

In one of the scenes, they are at one man's beach house, and Dean, who's the guy pretending to be who he's not, goes into a bedroom, where his sugar daddy and an American hanger-on are in the bed, the sugar daddy having fallen asleep on top of the American. Both are nude. Now, all three are played by straight actors.

In the voice-over commentary, the director pointed out how incredibly uncomfortable the guy at the bottom was lying naked underneath another naked man.

Yet, acting compels people to explore the extent of what will or won't offend them. Good actors can emotionally distance themselves from actions that no other person would even consider. Furthermore, actors learn to be far more emotional than the average person. There's a suggestion that if actors can explore their limitations, that anyone, in principle could.

Now you would think that a conservative Asian country like Taiwan (let's not get into issues of the nationhood of Taiwan for now) would not embrace gay films. Yet, like the German film Maybe...Maybe Not which was apparently hugely successful at the German box office, Formula 17, a gay sex comedy made in Taiwan (and directed by a woman!) was also a box office success.

I don't expect Brokeback Mountain to necessarily be any good. Don't get me wrong. Ang Lee is a good director, but making good films takes a bit of work and luck. He might get it from both ends (so to speak) from conservatives who don't want to see mainstream portrayals of an alternative lifestyle, to the gay community who may complain he hasn't gone far enough. A good story may overcome both.

The film is scheduled to come out at the end of the first week of December, and I suspect the goal is to keep it fresh among Oscar voters. Good films are almost always slated for a December release to maximize the chances of winning an Oscar. Gone are the days when a film like Silence of the Lambs, released in March, wins an Oscar. With no quality films released this year, we're heading to the usual crop of December-released films to make up the bulk of Oscar nominations.

OK, I know the Oscars suck. For the popular audiences, films are nominated that few have seen. For the cinemarati, the truly outstanding films aren't even nominated, for fear they are too difficult, too offensive, or, too non-English. For example, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, director of Tropical Malady, is unlikely to garner any nominations. Tropical Malady is also somewhat gay-themed, though not in the obvious ways that Brokeback Mountain is.

Now that I think of it, there's probably still one community where actors are fearful of portraying gay characters and that's the African American community. While it's not a big deal for Gyllenhaal or Ledger to play gay, it may be a big deal for Jamie Foxx or Denzel Washington to do so. In Six Degrees of Separation, Will Smith plays a young, black gay hustler. Yet, when there's a sex scene, he was advised by friends not to be kissing no guy.

Can Ang Lee work magic in December? We'll see.