{"id":2415,"date":"2006-01-18T11:54:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-18T11:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/01\/mark-steyn-on-brokeback-mountain\/"},"modified":"2006-01-18T11:54:00","modified_gmt":"2006-01-18T11:54:00","slug":"mark-steyn-on-brokeback-mountain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/01\/mark-steyn-on-brokeback-mountain.html","title":{"rendered":"Mark Steyn on Brokeback Mountain"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Mark Steyn<\/a> reviews Brokeback Mountain<\/a><\/i>, and echoes my query<\/a> regarding whether the film is really all that pro-gay anyway:<\/span><\/p>\n

I like Ms Proulx\u2019s books not because of the characters or the plots but because she\u2019s spent much of her life roaming the same turf I have \u2013 Vermont, Quebec, Newfoundland \u2013 and she\u2019s got a tremendous ability to capture the essence of the land, and in particular the way a harsh land shapes the character of its people. She began writing fiction in the Seventies, for Gray\u2019s Sporting Journal<\/i>, which wanted hunting stories about men called Zack, and she co-founded a local newspaper in my part of the world called Behind The Times<\/i> (\u201cAll The News That\u2019s Kept Till Now\u201d), and in both she did a better job than most liberal progressive artsy types do of accepting country folk as they are. \u201cI lean toward realism, not myth,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

But when you take a short story and make a movie of it realism turns all mythic. For a start, Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar become two rising male stars \u2013 Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. You get a big orchestral score and tag lines on the posters (\u201cLove Is A Force Of Nature\u201d) and, though the western literary tradition is not just Zane Grey and Bret Harte but also Willa Cather, when you put your fellows up on screen in cowboy hats on horses against the big sky of Wyoming, it looks far more explicitly like a gay take on the manliest of Hollywood genres: Queer Eye For The Straight-Shootin\u2019 Guy<\/i>. . . .<\/p>\n

And from that point on the film settles down into not so much a \u201cgay western\u201d but a gay version of Same Time Next Year<\/i>: the kids get older, the Sixties become the Seventies, Ennis divorces, Jack grows a moustache, but they still go up the hill thrice a year for \u201ca couple of high-altitude fucks\u201d, as he puts it. Which, to be honest, is a better summation of their relationship than \u201cLove Is A Force Of Nature\u201d.<\/p>\n

In fact, across two-and-a-quarter hours, there\u2019s not a lot of evidence of \u201clove\u201d, as opposed to a much-needed sexual release. For its urban audiences, Brokeback<\/i> is a new wrinkle on one of the oldest gay fantasies: the masculine man who likes sex with men. So it\u2019s a gay love story with ungaylike protagonists \u2013 Straight Eye For The Queer Guy<\/i>. In the distaff answer to lezzie porn for het men, for the gals it\u2019s a gabby chick flick with uncommunicative tough guys.<\/p>\n

But by the end of a bleak portrait of failed lonely lives, with one of the lads cheating on the other with ranch-managers and Mexican rent-boys, you\u2019re not even sure how gay-friendly the thing is: are the men bad uninterested parents because society\u2019s forced them to live a lie or because they\u2019re the sad self-destructive prisoners of their sexual appetites? And, if it\u2019s such a \u201cbold\u201d \u201ccourageous\u201d \u201cground-breaking\u201d film, isn\u2019t it a little ridiculous that a gay male love story has Miss [Williams] and Miss Hathaway both baring their breasts with straight abandon while Messrs Ledger and Gyllenhaal\u2019s penises remain discreetly tucked away? Instinctively, Ang Lee seems to understand that even this film\u2019s audience wants to keep some things closeted.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For whatever that\u2019s worth. I also got a kick out of the opening paragraph of another Steyn column from further down the page:<\/p>\n

Just in time for Christmas, Hollywood released a gay cowboy movie, Brokeback Mountain<\/i>, whose very title sounds like a definition of unsafe sex. \u201cHomo On The Range\u201d, as the jaunty headline writers of the Bay Area\u2019s SF Weekly<\/i> called it, stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger as a couple of cowpokes (sheep-pokes, technically) who like to make \u2026well, I was going to deploy Shakespeare and say \u201cthe beast with two backs\u201d, but I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s the phrase. Maybe Roy Rogers could stroll on and sing \u201cA Four-Legged Friend\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And lest anyone wonder, I don\u2019t agree with everything Steyn says when he fuses politics and cinema. But he does have a way with words \u2014 and my sisters and I sing \u2018A Four-Legged Friend\u2019 every now and then, because it was featured in one of our favorite Bob Hope movies ever, Frank Tashlin\u2019s Son of Paleface<\/a><\/i> (1952)!<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Steyn reviews Brokeback Mountain, and echoes my query regarding whether the film is really all that pro-gay anyway: I like Ms Proulx\u2019s books not because of the characters or the plots but because she\u2019s spent much of her life roaming the same turf I have \u2013 Vermont, Quebec, Newfoundland \u2013 and she\u2019s got a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nMark Steyn on Brokeback Mountain<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Mark Steyn reviews Brokeback Mountain, and echoes my query regarding whether the film is really all that pro-gay anyway:I like Ms Proulx\u2019s books not\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/01\/mark-steyn-on-brokeback-mountain.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mark Steyn on Brokeback Mountain\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Mark Steyn reviews Brokeback Mountain, and echoes my query regarding whether the film is really all that pro-gay anyway:I like Ms Proulx\u2019s books not\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/01\/mark-steyn-on-brokeback-mountain.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"FilmChat\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2006-01-18T11:54:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Peter T. 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