I had another thought about Brokeback Mountain a day or two ago, and although I’m not sure quite how far I can push it, I thought I’d toss it out there and see what happens.
I was flipping through my copy of Scandalizing Jesus?, when a thought occurred to me. In a nutshell, I found myself wondering if the controversy over Brokeback Mountain was kind of like the controversy over the sex scene in The Last Temptation of Christ.
On a few levels, both films are rather conservative, when you think about it. Last Temptation reaffirms the misogynistic, patriarchal, call-it-what-you-will view that women are a lust-inducing distraction from the higher spirituality to which men are called; while Brokeback, as I explained in my most recent post, reaffirms that those who are the most “sexually free” will be punished somehow. Both films also indulge in female nudity to a degree to which they never indulge in male nudity. And so on, and so on.
Many people said the sex scene in Last Temptation was wrong, not simply because Jesus shouldn’t be doing that — a point that the film actually affirms, when Jesus accepts Judas’s rebuke and calls an end to the dream sequence by going back to the cross — but because We Don’t Want To Have To See It. And likewise, those people who have objected to the gay sex in Brokeback seem to be reacting not so much because of the narrative context in which it is set, but rather because We Don’t Want To Have To See It.
It may be the visibility, period, of gay sex that is the cause of all this controversy. Whether the gay sex is ever actually affirmed by the film in any particular way is kind of immaterial. It is visible, and that’s what matters; for some people, that is breakthrough enough — or, depending on one’s perspective, offensive enough.
Am I on to something, or is this just wack?
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