Is it funny? Is it really all that pro-gay?

Last updated on: January 7, 2006 at 3:52 pm by Peter T. Chattaway

Is it funny? Is it really all that pro-gay? 2006-01-07T15:52:00-08:00 Peter T. Chattaway

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I haven’t said much about Brokeback Mountain here yet, partly because I didn’t have to review it and partly because I wanted to mull the film over some more. But a couple of comments made by Tara Ariano in yesterday’s National Post have spurred me to action:

Some members of the crowd I watched it with at a Toronto theatre weren’t quite ready for Brokeback. The woman who walked out about four seconds into the first same-sex sex scene clearly wasn’t prepared, nor were the many adults in their forties and beyond who thought it was absolutely hilarious every time the male leads were caught, by any other character in the movie, showing affection for one another.

But I have been surprised by the lack of pearl-clutching editorials about the movie from right-wing pundits in the United States. Perhaps the culture warriors aren’t up in arms over this one because the central gay relationship ends badly, so that those inclined to view it that way can read it as an anti-gay morality tale. Or maybe being pro-cowboy overrides their anti-gay sentiment.

First, the laughter. I saw the film at an AIDS benefit screening, with an audience that appeared to be predominantly male and gay, and I too was struck by how the audience roared with laughter during the two scenes when Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal are “seen” by others. (To say that they are “caught” implies that the characters are aware that they have been seen, but this is not true in either case.)

I was struck by this because, in both cases, the discovery means negative consequences for the gay male characters. The first time, it is a boss who discovers them, and the discovery means that the two men cannot return to this job (though only one of them really tries to return). The second time, it is the wife of one of the men who sees them, and the laughter was particularly jarring on this occasion, because the film does a very good job of underscoring the heartbreak that the wife feels on witnessing this infidelity.

I don’t know what sort of audience Ariano saw the film with — I don’t know whether it was predominantly gay, predominantly straight, or a roughly even mix — but I wonder if her comments here indicate that the laughter in response to these scenes is a more universal reaction than I had once supposed. (World Net Daily’s David Kupelian reports that the audience around him laughed during the scene of the wife’s discovery, too. Ariano saw the film in Toronto, and I saw the film in Vancouver, and Kupelian saw the film in Portland, Oregon — so this appears to be a fairly broad phenomenon, at least geographically.)

Anyway, I would be curious to know if anyone has yet proposed any theories as to why people are responding to these scenes this way, and if there is something about a moviegoer’s gender or sexual orientation — and the experiences that result therefrom — that is more likely to make him or her respond to a scene this way.

Second, the lack of right-wing outrage. A few of the usual suspects have condemned the movie, of course, but there has been relatively little of that — and, as the New York Times noted on Boxing Day, Christian film critics are, for the most part, being somewhat cautious and even appreciative in their reviews of this film, even as they affirm their opposition to same-gender sexual activity.

For example, my CT Movies colleague Lisa Cockrel may go a bit too far when she says the film has “a graphic gay sex scene” (how “graphic” can it be if there’s no nudity?), but she also notes the “homophobic rage” that is expressed by one of the two men (and given that many conservative Christians have tended to deny that that word even exists, that is a noteworthy comment for all sorts of reasons), and she says the movie “maintains an emotional distance” that allows viewers to interpret the film for themselves:

Brokeback Mountain creates vast plains of space for the audience to interpret Jack and Ennis’ actions and the hopes and fears that motivate them. It’s quite possible that no matter what the viewer believes about homosexuality, he or she will be able to read their own stance on the issue into this story.

This last sentiment is echoed by the National Post‘s J. Kelly Nestruck, who writes, in response to one of Ariano’s comments at the article I linked to earlier:

Speaking of Capote, it’s interesting no one calls it gay-themed movie, even though its main character sleeps with men. And heck, we had a gay detective in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but no serious, searching articles in the New York Times about actual queer private eyes, and what’s that like, and do you have to endure a lot of private dick jokes? Journalists have decided this is an issue film, but I’d like to see it break out of that constricting pen. Ultimately, Brokeback is as gay as you want it to be.

If anything, it has been interesting to watch conservatives dial back their rhetoric, if not their actual inclinations to condemn this film. Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin, for example, originally dismissed the movie as a “pro-homosexual propaganda film” before editing his comments and revising that to “pro-homosexual ‘message’ film“.

Then there is Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News, who — in a celebrated column that was quickly cited by bloggers at GetReligion.org and Rightwing Film Geek — admits that he was inclined to avoid the film at first, based purely on the pro-gay media hype, but then he decided to see it for himself. And not only does he seem to like the film, he even invokes Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor and her definition of “art” in its defense:

What gets lost in the culture-war blitzkrieg over homosexuality are the complex and ambiguous truths that real people live and struggle with. Art that reduces messy humanity to slogans and arguments is not art at all, but sentimentality, kitsch, anti-art – in a word, propaganda. . . .

I found on the Internet a link to the Annie Proulx short story on which the movie is based and was shocked by how good it was, especially at embodying the “concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position here on earth” – Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor’s description of what true artistry does. Though director Ang Lee’s tranquil style fails to capture the daemonic wildness of Ms. Proulx’s version, I came away from the film thinking, this is not for everybody, but it really is a work of art. . . .

Ms. O’Connor once wrote that you don’t have to have an educated mind to understand good fiction, but you do have to have “at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.” The mystery of the human personality can never be fully plumbed, only explored. To the frustration of ideologues, artists like Annie Proulx and Ang Lee undertake a journey to those depths and return to tell the truth about what they’ve seen – which is not necessarily what any of us wants to hear.

I would agree with that, myself. And I have to say that, when I saw the film, I was struck by how relatively conservative it was, given all the hype I had heard about how it was so ground-breaking, and so on, and so on. For one thing, the gay sex is treated rather discretely, while both of the film’s female co-stars get to go topless.

More significantly, the trajectory followed by each of the two male protagonists doesn’t break any particularly new ground, either. Without meaning to give away or suggest too much about the film’s plot, I will simply note that, in the documentary The Celluloid Closet (1995; my commentary), Arthur Laurents notes that Hollywood films always punished the characters who were the most “sexually free”, while Jan Oxenberg complains that the supposed breakthrough movie Philadelphia (1993) offered just another “gay hero who dies”.

Like I say, I haven’t had to write a review of this film yet, per se, but if it gets all the Oscar nominations that everyone expects it to get, then I will probably have to say something in one of my columns in the next few weeks. So for now, I’m still mulling it over.

And I would be curious to know how many critics out there might be complaining that the film isn’t pro-gay enough.

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