Brokeback Mountain and Third-Person Sanity
The roomies and I went to see Brokeback Mountain on the weekend, and I was going to do this up as a general film critic blurb for Happy Feet Movies, but then it got all tangled up in some critical-thinking, self-analysis, third-person-sanity, first-person-insanity thing I’ve got going on inside me, so now it gets the proper full entry treatment.
First of all: the movie.
The Voice of Reason said she expected more. After plenty of hemming and hawing as to “more what?” precisely she meant (more gay? more graphic? more epic? more ground-breaking? what more than Jake and Heath making out do you want woman??) we all settled on this: The Voice of Reason expected more angst. And I’ll tell you, I was surprised because I felt the angst.
Brokeback Mountain is what it is: a slow-moving character piece that tries to stab the audience through its emotional heart with as few histrionics as possible. It is soft and subtle (Sean Penn and Russell Crowe need not apply.) Heath Ledger has to get his point across with wrinkled eyes and tough worker’s hands and the slightest of smiles. He doesn’t have a lot of dialogue to lay it all out for you. Even the showier character, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist, has to hold it all back for the better part of the movie in the presence of the ever-removed Ennis Del Mar. The movie arcs quietly to its conclusion and it won’t hold your hand to get there. In fact, it almost asks you not to shed a tear for these two. They made their choices given the constraints of their world. You’re not there to sympathize. You’re there to plainly witness.
Brokeback Mountain is similar to last year’s Million Dollar Baby in this respect. It only wishes to tell a story about its characters. It does not wish to be controversial in and of itself. But like Million Dollar Baby and its coincidental discussion of life rights, Brokeback will inevitably bring out a discussion of homosexual rights. But Brokeback isn’t about homosexuality. Only the fearful and uneducated will make that assumption.
The real core of Brokeback Mountain is the choice the two cowboys are presented with. As star-crossed lovers they can accept that there is no choice but to live without each other, or they can sacrifice their whole lives to be with each other. Such is the crossroads all ill-fated lovers come to. One of the men is desperate to leave it all behind – the wife, the children, the myriad responsibilities – for the love that woke up one morning on Brokeback Mountain. The other cannot fathom it.
And neither option is perfect. Neither is correct. Neither is morally superior to the other. Neither brings with it the guarantee of elation. Of this, I am the expert of generations of knowledge. If you choose love, you guarantee the resentment of others. The wife, the family, the myriad responsibilities will all look upon your choice as abandonment. If you choose to abstain, you guarantee your own resentment of the life that becomes yours by default. What’s more important: your happiness, or the happiness of those to whom you are beholden?
It’s that feeling that life is not a fairy tale with happy endings that hit a tuning fork inside me. You can decide to be Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor and throw all caution to the wind, or you can decide to be Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn and keep it quiet for propriety’s sake, but either way there’s the possibility you might be screwed. It’s the reason I’ve been playing Rilo Kiley non-stop on NanoBob, and it’s the reason I drown in a river of tears and kleenex when I hear Meredith say “pick me” to Dr. McDreamy on Grey’s Anatomy. And it’s kind of icky and absurd and as a third-person observer of myself I can see that. But as a first-person being myself I can’t quite make it stop, and if it did stop I’d feel like that was the last stop ever.
That’s why I felt the angst of Brokeback Mountain. When Jack Twist’s life of frustration led him to yell “Why can’t I quit you, Ennis?” Oh boy, I felt it. When Ennis replied that his life was nothing because of Jack, I felt it. They loved each other and they could neither move forward nor backward from that point. They couldn’t be in a place where that love never existed and they couldn’t be in a place where that love could exist. Brokeback Mountain is that tragedy at its finest.
First of all: the movie.
The Voice of Reason said she expected more. After plenty of hemming and hawing as to “more what?” precisely she meant (more gay? more graphic? more epic? more ground-breaking? what more than Jake and Heath making out do you want woman??) we all settled on this: The Voice of Reason expected more angst. And I’ll tell you, I was surprised because I felt the angst.
Brokeback Mountain is what it is: a slow-moving character piece that tries to stab the audience through its emotional heart with as few histrionics as possible. It is soft and subtle (Sean Penn and Russell Crowe need not apply.) Heath Ledger has to get his point across with wrinkled eyes and tough worker’s hands and the slightest of smiles. He doesn’t have a lot of dialogue to lay it all out for you. Even the showier character, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist, has to hold it all back for the better part of the movie in the presence of the ever-removed Ennis Del Mar. The movie arcs quietly to its conclusion and it won’t hold your hand to get there. In fact, it almost asks you not to shed a tear for these two. They made their choices given the constraints of their world. You’re not there to sympathize. You’re there to plainly witness.
Brokeback Mountain is similar to last year’s Million Dollar Baby in this respect. It only wishes to tell a story about its characters. It does not wish to be controversial in and of itself. But like Million Dollar Baby and its coincidental discussion of life rights, Brokeback will inevitably bring out a discussion of homosexual rights. But Brokeback isn’t about homosexuality. Only the fearful and uneducated will make that assumption.
The real core of Brokeback Mountain is the choice the two cowboys are presented with. As star-crossed lovers they can accept that there is no choice but to live without each other, or they can sacrifice their whole lives to be with each other. Such is the crossroads all ill-fated lovers come to. One of the men is desperate to leave it all behind – the wife, the children, the myriad responsibilities – for the love that woke up one morning on Brokeback Mountain. The other cannot fathom it.
And neither option is perfect. Neither is correct. Neither is morally superior to the other. Neither brings with it the guarantee of elation. Of this, I am the expert of generations of knowledge. If you choose love, you guarantee the resentment of others. The wife, the family, the myriad responsibilities will all look upon your choice as abandonment. If you choose to abstain, you guarantee your own resentment of the life that becomes yours by default. What’s more important: your happiness, or the happiness of those to whom you are beholden?
It’s that feeling that life is not a fairy tale with happy endings that hit a tuning fork inside me. You can decide to be Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor and throw all caution to the wind, or you can decide to be Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn and keep it quiet for propriety’s sake, but either way there’s the possibility you might be screwed. It’s the reason I’ve been playing Rilo Kiley non-stop on NanoBob, and it’s the reason I drown in a river of tears and kleenex when I hear Meredith say “pick me” to Dr. McDreamy on Grey’s Anatomy. And it’s kind of icky and absurd and as a third-person observer of myself I can see that. But as a first-person being myself I can’t quite make it stop, and if it did stop I’d feel like that was the last stop ever.
That’s why I felt the angst of Brokeback Mountain. When Jack Twist’s life of frustration led him to yell “Why can’t I quit you, Ennis?” Oh boy, I felt it. When Ennis replied that his life was nothing because of Jack, I felt it. They loved each other and they could neither move forward nor backward from that point. They couldn’t be in a place where that love never existed and they couldn’t be in a place where that love could exist. Brokeback Mountain is that tragedy at its finest.
posted by nerdifer at 6:38 p.m.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home