Why I Hate Brokeback Mountain

In Bressler's section on Queer Theory, he mentions Brokeback Mountain and gives a list of various people's opinion on the movie. I figure, since this movie is theoretically supposed to be about people like me and for people like me, that I'd add my opinion.

I hated Brokeback Mountain, and I hated people's reaction to it.

It wasn't just the reaction of people on the Right. Not every movie review that didn't like it was condemming it for bringing down the wrath of God. But there seemed to be a recurring theme in all the reviews I read: it was too graphic.

Too graphic.

Too graphic.

This movie was mild compared to similar R rated movies, quite honestly. The only reason that it got the "graphic" label so consistently was that it was gay. You switch out one of the guys with a girl, I highly doubt that anyone would have complained.

Please forgive me for linking to TVTropes, but:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BuryYourGays

If you really, really wanted to make a statement about gay rights, if you really wanted your movie to defy stereotypes about homosexuality, you'd have the gay couple live happily ever after.

I'm not saying that you can't have literature that ends in tragedy for gay people, but:

1) Pretty much all mainstream culture follows this trope

2) It still plays into the stereotype that gay love ends in tragedy, even when it's trying to portray said relationships positively. It's hard to realize how pervasive and how influential this sort of thing can be.

For example, I write short fiction, and I feature lots of stories with gay male characters. But I've noticed a rather unsettling recurring theme: it always ends in tragedy. And true, maybe I just prefer to write tragic stories. But my straight characters have gotten happy endings. It's an almost subconcious thing: if I'm writing a story with a gay main character, it will not end well.

Maybe Brokeback Mountain wouldn't bother me so much if wasn't touted as so progressive, so subversive. If this had just been an art house flick about gay cowboys eating pudding that no one had heard about, I probably wouldn't even care. But then everyone talks about how great it is, and I wonder if they're seeing the same movie I'm seeing. I wonder if they're seeing a movie where gay men are portrayed as promiscuous adulterers betraying their poor put upon wives. I wonder if they're seeing a movie that is almost overbearingly modest called "graphic." I wonder if they're seeing a movie that's so cloyling unaware of how ignorant it is about gay life.

In a way, it kind of reminds me of Hostel. Now, Brokeback Mountain is superior to Hostel in pretty much every way. But Eli Roth tries to claim that the movie isn't homophobic while ignoring the fact that his main villain fits pretty much every bullet point of the monstrous homosexual: he's a cheater, he's promiscuous, he preys on younger, heterosexual men. Roth can claim that this is critiquing homophobia somehow, but I'm reminded of what someone said about anti-war movies: it's impossible to make an actual anti-war movie, because any movie portraying war inevitably glamorizes it. You can't create this image of a monster whose inhumanity is so closely linked to his homosexuality, and then wink at me and tell me it's "ironic." There are limits to irony, despite what post-modernism tends to say, and we've rather clearly hit the limit.

That's one of the nice things about the death of the author, I suppose. When an author creates a work and says something about it that is clearly untrue, you are allowed to call them on it. Otherwise, Narnia wouldn't be an allegory, Farenheit 451 would be about political correctness, and Hostel would be a feminist film. As long as you can back up what you are saying, you are free to say it, regardless of what the author says otherwise.

So I guess that in the end this blog post wasn't really about Brokeback Mountain. But it related, tangentially, to the topic, and I hope that's good enough.