I’ll go see it….’ (5) So even before it was properly released there were predictions that the film would expose the fault lines between America’s progressives and backwards – ie, between those who are gay-friendly and those who are less so.
A journalist on one liberal website said: ‘I’m highly sceptical that a movie about gay cowboys, however good, will find a large mainstream audience. A couple of months ago Charles Krauthammer, a columnist with the Washington Post, predicted that, come Oscar night, ‘ Brokeback Mountain will have been seen in the theatres by 18 people – but the right 18 – and will win the Academy Award’ (4). It was widely assumed – by both liberal and conservative commentators – that Brokeback Mountain would bomb in America’s generally Republican ‘red states’. I don’t know what is more sad: their depiction of their fellow Americans as animal-like automatons, or their current reliance on what is essentially a date movie to do their dirty work for them. Now, some of these same liberals seem to hope that Brokeback Mountain will snap these lizards out of their narrow thought patterns. This echoes the snobbish discussion about Bush-supporters during and after the Presidential elections in 2004, when one well-known Democrat-leaning commentator declared that ‘thanks to the Bush campaign’s unremitting fear-mongering, millions of voters are reacting not with their linear and logical left brain but with their lizard brain and their more emotional right brain…’ (3).
Brokeback-philes are depicted as open-minded and possessed of free will Brokeback-phobes are said to be regimented in their thought processes (‘under a spell’) and unwilling to try new experiences. This captures an inherent snobbery in much of the discussion about Brokeback Mountain: if you’re a good, nice, sensitive liberal you will see the movie (as Sunday Times columnist Andrew Sullivan says, ‘Blue state liberals felt it some kind of social duty to see the film’) if you’re a bad, insensitive, probably Bush-supporting conservative you will fail to see the movie.
Notice how an individual’s ‘progressiveness’ is judged by his attitudes to gay marriage and gay co-workers, and how his unwillingness to see Brokeback Mountain is put down to some kind of brainwashing. eeing a movie about two gay men could make you feel like an even bigger man.’ (2) But there is still some good in your heart…. ‘Your skittishness over this movie has a lot to do with the degree to which society has failed you. He reckons that seeing Brokeback Mountain might sort the straights out. Apparently they are ‘under a spell, reinforced by years of conflicting televised gay stereotypes and manly cowboy imagery’ (although, ‘considering that most of us were brought up in an era of intolerance fearmongering, it’s miraculous that you guys aren’t even more screwed up in the head’, he says, generously). He says many of America’s straight men, even the ‘progressive’ ones who ‘support same-sex marriage and invite their gay co-workers to parties’, cannot seem to ‘get over their insecurities and take those last few steps to see this landmark film’. In the San Francisco Chronicle, one columnist has started using the phrase ‘ Brokeback phobia’, rather than homophobia, to describe straight men who are refusing to see the film. What they really mean is that this film means more to them as an effort in social engineering than it does as an artistic endeavour.
Singing the praises of Brokeback Mountain has become a shortcut to demonstrating your superiority over a certain class of people.
Rather, they are talking about its social impact now, and their hopes that the movie will change ‘social attitudes’ among the apparently gay-unfriendly or even homophobic masses. Most of the action takes place in the Mid-West and the love affair unfolds in isolation on and around the desolate Brokeback Mountain in many ways, the film is set outside of society. Limited-Run T-shirts, hats, hoodies, jackets, wallets and bags Independent & UncompromisedĮstablished for Life.What do Gyllenhaal and others mean when they say the film is important socially? They’re not talking about its depiction of US society in the 60s and 70s, which is fleeting and narrow. We talk male birth control, Bruce Willis (we watch the opening scene from “The Last Boyscout.epic) and talk some joke stealing. We talk about buying drugs in Florida, going to Universal Studios on mushrooms and he tells us how he found out how his dad died. Tito is back on the Lobo Den in his fourth appearance.