'Ang Ten

There have been two rather lengthy articles written about Brokeback Mountain

An Affair to Remember by Daniel Mendelson, and

A Picture of Two Americas by Stephen Hunter.

Brokeback Mountain has engendered a great deal of press, even before the director and actors were finally cast. At one point, Gus Van Sant was on slate to direct the film, which would have produced, I'm sure, a far different film, depending on which Van Sant showed up to direct (the director of the blah Finding Forrester or the minimalist offerings of such films as Gerry,Elephant, or Last Days). Ang Lee was tapped to direct, after a moderately disastrous Hulk which Ang saw as a family drama, rather than a comic book yarn, draining the kind of fun that Sam Raimi instilled into the Spiderman franchise.

If you ever look at director's commentary, at least ones that aren't too inane, you find that a good director often has many more ideas going on in his or her head than you ever realize. Certainly, both reviews of this film has made it abundantly clear.

For example, the life that Jack and Ennis lead are often shown indoors, where they are both trapped by their circumstances. The use of closets is shown rather literally.

In particular, when Ennis visits Jack's parents, he visits his room and in his closet, way in the back, he finds a shirt within a shirt, saved from the fight they had up on Brokeback Mountain. It is steeped in symbolism, both the closeted nature of their relationship, and the sense of one holding the other in the image of shirt within shirt.

This notion of closet is revisited once again, as in the final scene, Ang Lee opens his bureau of sorts, which is a kind of closet, and inside hangs the shirt within a shirt, though I've heard that now, the shirts are reversed. I suspect Jack's shirt now sits outside Ennis's.

This scene fills half the screen, the other half being a window to the outside world. The closeted world has the shirts hanging, and a postcard of Brokeback Mountain, and the outside world is shown as forlorn.

In effect, Ang has inverted the two scenes. Where the relationship between Jack and Ennis were always outdoors where no one else had to know but the two of them, and their relationship is seen as natural, the two marriages are often shown indoors, with both being uncomfortable with the strictures of society shown symbolically as enclosed spaces.

Ang likes his symbolism. In The Ice Storm, he uses ice themes throughout (ice cubes, etc) which not only refers to an impending literal ice storm, but the chilly relationships within this film. The loosening of morals in the '70s is seen as something negative.

To be honest, all this symbolism tends to pass me by, and I'm sure directors like Christopher Columbus don't think of their direction in quite this literary Nathaniel Hawthorne sort of way. As a moviegoer, I pay far less attention to this, even as I can look back in hindsight and appreciate it intellectually, if not necessarily, emotionally.

What's particularly interesting about the Mendelsohn's article is that he says the story, far from being a love story that could be about anyone, is instead, he says, particularly aware that the relationship is a gay relationship, and that the director and writers were very conscious of these decisions, even as the actors don't necessarily agree, and have been on record as saying that they (particularly, Ennis) aren't gay.

(Of course, actors not fully getting the film is quite common. Casper Van Dien, who was the "hero" of Starship Troopers, apparently felt he was acting in a straight-up science fiction movie, rather than a satire of military buildup paranoid against an unknown, and thus hated, enemy.)

Although Ennis is never able to fulfill the love he had for Jack (the film, I'm afraid, doesn't make their falling in love particularly plausible--part of it is the age of these actors, who are definitely not 19, which Jack and Ennis are at the start of story) and the only love he has left really is for his own daughter.

In fact, just before the scene of Ennis opening the closet door, he's talking to his daughter about getting married, and asks if she loves him and if he loves her. He decides it's worth giving up his steady, but low-paying job, to be there for the one person left in the world that he does love, namely, his daughter. As she has left, and forgotten to take her sweater, he then opens the door, and you see that he's finally able to deal with his loss.

The words "Jack, I swear" are indeed right out of Annie Proulx's short story. He never completes what he means by this. It seems layered in meaning, as both a person that exasperates him ("I swear I'm going to kill you") as well as a kind of promise ("I swear my heart to you") and possibly even the promise to his daughter to be there.

Ennis's character, by this point, has evolved. Even if he may not be ready to find the next Jack in his life, his temptation by a fine woman who would have cared for him, but would have left him trapped, ends with him hurting her feelings (by not being with her), but at least, he doesn't get remarried. He understands who he is, and even he's slowly beginning to realize he can act on his feelings, and that's most symbolized in the final scene with his daughter.

Perhaps, Ennis means that he swears he'll be able to move on, that the next time, he'd give it all up for love, just as he's given up his ranching job for his daughter.

Brokeback Mountain really splits the realism of needing to support oneself and to raise a family, with the romanticism of falling in love, and being true to that feeling. Ennis, in particular, has always been held back by fear, the fear of death, as he witnessed when he was a boy, and when finally the death has happened, this time to Jack, he knows that maybe, in death, they had lived a life before that, in spite of what everyone else thought.

Brokeback Mountain leaves on an ambivalent note. It's hard to say whether Ennis will ever feel real happiness in his life, even as the film is ending in the 70s, and gays have felt more out than ever. He lives in a world removed from that.

When the film came out, no one thought it was breaking new ground, and yet, despite the kind of gay lifestyle portrayed in shows like Queer as Folk, there are still plenty of people whose lives are more repressed, more behind-the-times than life in a cosmpolitan and vibrant gay scene.

To that extent, much like showing, say, gays in the military, Brokeback Mountain may resonate far more than people would expect.

Already, its box office success is seen as something of a mystery. Ang Lee certainly didn't direct the film in a particularly crowd pleasing manner, and yet, its story of unfulfilled love has a resonance with many (and reflects a theme Ang Lee particularly likes, which he also dealt with in Crouching Tiger---there too, death separates what could have been a relationship that would have made both of them happy, and yet, their loyalty to her dead husband prevents them from doing so).

This is perhaps as much a revisionist Western as, say, Unforgiven, but where that film showed the grit and lack of heroism of cowboys, Brokeback completely subverts traditional Western themes of good guy and bad, of small frontiers, and run ins with Indians.

Instead, Ang Lee presents a truer Western, one where the cowboys (really shepherds) do what they do, which is to herd sheep. There are no Indians to shoot. There aren't fights on horsebacks. This is the mundane, but real life, of people who make their living on the mountains, lacking glamour.

These articles may be serving another purpose, which is to get Academy members who don't find this Oscar worthy material, to rethink it again. I think its chances of winning is reasonably good. It doesn't have particularly strong competition, and perhaps, much like Philadelphia, it resonates with a liberal audience, despite its conservative settings.

The surprising thing, I'd say, is how little is mentioned of Ang Lee's Asian heritage. It's hard to qualify this as a work of an Asian American, since Ang Lee wasn't born in the US, even though his formal film education was in the US (in fact, he was getting his degree at NYU at about the same time Spike Lee was getting his).

So go read the articles while the links are still fresh.