BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
it Feels STRANGE now that, back when Heath ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal were cast as cowboys in Ang lee’s Brokeback Mountain, people thought playing characters in a same-sex relationship would permanently knock their careers out of shape. it was risky, kissing another man on screen when, people seemed to argue, there were plenty of parts going that required you to snog a woman.
Fast-forward 14 years and straight actors are more than happy to play LGBT roles — from rami malek to Timothée Chalamet via Cate Blanchett — so much so that a higher degree of devotion to understanding queer themes is now expected of anyone signing up to such a project. Wherever you stand on the issue, it’s clear we’ve come a long way.
in Brokeback Mountain,
adapted from a New Yorker
story by Annie Proulx, cowboys ennis del mar (ledger) and Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) are hired to tend to the flocks atop Brokeback mountain one summer, where they quickly begin a relationship unlike any other. But life back on the ground is unlike life on that undisturbed vista, and soon they must return to society, abandoning their simpler, more rural way of life for something altogether more pragmatic and tempered.
Both men marry and become fathers, but are soon back in each other’s orbit. down from the blissful mountain, where society has seemingly unwritten rules about what emotions men are allowed, both cowboys find the weight of the armour they must wear exhausting. The love that came so naturally that neither had to even speak it into existence suddenly sits on the surface of their lives, like oil on water.
elements of Brokeback,
such as the societal rejection of homosexuality, have begun to feel dated. Contrast with Francis lee’s agriculturally adjacent God’s Own Country,
where the two men identify as gay even if they don’t wear it on their sleeves. The threat of being outed, or even being discovered, has perished; Josh o’connor’s Johnny saxby is plagued by more modern problems. And in
Call Me By Your Name, in the vague idyll of ‘somewhere in Northern italy’, liberal values extinguish any potential anxiety about a same-sex summer romance.
But, at the time, Brokeback’s
mainstream success — notably in suburban areas such as Portland, Houston, dallas and denver — was a powerful indicator that LGBT stories had a broader place in pop culture outside of New York and los Angeles. it may have lost Best Picture to Crash at the 2006 oscars, causing Proulx to lament that, “We should have known conservative heffalump Academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture.” its legacy, though, has outlived the fraught zugzwang of awards circuits, whereby every decision seems to be a controversial one.
The story of ennis and Jack is largely one of wasted potential and an elegy to lives not lived. That alone could be Brokeback’s
ultimate legacy; it came at a time when the reality of being out and gay was inherently tragic — and that tragedy was an important, necessary thing to communicate to audiences. The stories it has helped spearhead are vast, from the mainstream (Moonlight, Can You Ever Forgive Me?) to the lesser-known (Spa Night, Beach Rats), all with one shared goal: to continue Brokeback’s
examination of sexuality, to ask difficult questions about the emotional well-being of men. long may it continue.