The Peaks and Valleys of “Brokeback Mountain’s” Love Story
(***Warning: sporadic spoilers throughout.)
On the off chance that you’ve missed this film’s 2005 release, please note that this article spoils several pivotal plot points of Brokeback Mountain.
Ang Lee’s harrowing “Gay Cowboy Western”, Brokeback Mountain is a love story that leaves a hollowed-out ache in your chest for two angsty ranch hands in Wyoming and their torturous, decades-long, mountaintop love affair. It is praised today for its unmistakable homoerotic turmoil and the raw, animalistic love between two nineteen-year-old “cowboys” that grow old together, or rather, apart.
In one 1960's Summer, Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) wind up in the rugged peaks of Wyoming’s Brokeback Mountain herding sheep and scarfing down beans by the light of a fire. Smothered by too much time with one another and only a single tattered tent between them, Jack and Ennis, touch-starved and hypermasculine, start a romantic relationship. They become twisted up in their own homophobic notions and turn from playfighting to true, harrowing violence toward one another at the realization that they are tightly wound in a homoerotic relationship. It goes against every 1960's Western American value.
The film is inarguably beautiful. It takes place in Wyoming but was filmed in Alberta, Canada in the Canadian Rockies. The vast, elevated landscapes that encompass Jack and Ennis’ relationship seem fitting for this setting. Their love is stretched so thin over such harsh terrain, and their meetings in the wooded mountains nicely draw attention to how outcasted they are from society.
Fifteen years since its release, Brokeback Mountain’s elevating tale that reeks of internalized homophobia is romanticized as one of the first gay love stories ever to make it to the mainstream big-screen — despite the film never using the term “gay” to describe Jack and Ennis’ relationship. There’s just something about homoeroticism mixed with an agonizing forbidden love that audiences just eat up.
Perhaps it is so romanticized because it is more easily digestible to a mainstream audience to see their two favorite, straight, white, cisgender male actors tell this story than to see two very capable LGBTQ+ actors, already starved for lead roles due to their queer identities, tell the same story.
The problems with Brokeback being recognized for being a huge stride in LGBTQ+ representation in film and television go well beyond its casting issues.
Jack and Ennis’s story is one full of fear, guilt, shame, unfaithfulness, and domestic violence. It is yet another example of why films with gay main characters are only widely accepted when they feature the distress, torment, manipulation, and/or death of an LGBTQ+ character for the sake of drama. This doesn’t necessarily mean that this is at the fault of Ang Lee, or that this was his intent, just that this is a common way to rile up an audience.
Ang Lee suggests much more than unrequited, impossible love with Brokeback Mountain. He draws the audience into the life of these two cowboys beyond their love for each other. The very things that keep Jack and Ennis from each other are still very much prominent stumbles in the stride for queer equality, especially in the rural parts of America in which Jack and Ennis reside.
Jack and Ennis are undoubtedly in love, despite their circumstances, but theirs isn’t a typical fairy tale that can be swallowed up by heteronormativity and be effectively regurgitated with the same emotional weight. If Jack and Ennis were in a heterosexual relationship with one another, would their story be as tragic and heartbreaking? Probably not. Their internal and romantic struggles have almost everything to do with the fact that they cannot be together because of their sexual orientation.
Granted, this film may not have been as effective in delivering its overarching theme had Jack and Ennis wound up together in the end, it doesn’t mean anyone necessarily had to die to get the point across.
Ennis is wrought with the nightmarish fear that he will be sought out and murdered by homophobes and this worry shapes his relationship with Jack. Jack suffers both physical and emotional abuse at the hands of Ennis, who will only make time to see him every four years or so, and only in the mountains where they first met. Both men are married with children by the time they grow old together. They hide in the shadows of a heteronormative lifestyle and communicate only by postcard when they wish to see each other again. It is evident that they both have significant passing privilege. The fact that they are even able to hide behind a heterosexual narrative in the first place shows what their privilege has to show for their success.
Nevertheless, each time they reunite, Ennis lashes out at Jack’s advances, often punching, kicking and swearing at him before leaving him in the Wyoming dust to go back to his wife and kids. This continues on for decades and the visits between them grow sparser as time goes on.
The film drags at points in its depictions of Jack and Ennis’ unhappy marriages and the ways in which their lives grow distant from one another. Jack is more embracing of his queer identity, or at least is quieter with his suffering, whereas Ennis rages at Jack for what can never be. Their last visit together ends with Jack’s famous quote, “I wish I knew how to quit you” that should be seen less as a romantic gesture and more as a sign of distress for the emotional turmoil that Ennis is putting Jack through by stringing him along.
When Jack dies at the end of the film, it is implied that he was killed at the hands of homophobes. Ennis seems to be the last to know and is left alone to grieve and mourn the loss of the relationship that could never be due to the timing of their love. Lee leaves us with the poetic imagery of Ennis clutching Jack’s bloodied button-up in the closet of his trailer, sobbing. It’s rather fitting, and haunting all the same.
The wretched ache that stays with us as the movie ends should not be confused with longing for the reconciliation of Jack and Ennis’ relationship but instead, be seen for the ways it shed light on the dangers of homophobia. Hate crimes have not died down, but are just more expertly covered up. Homophobia has only dwindled.
Upon further inspection, Brokeback Mountain does just as much to highlight what havoc homophobia wreaks on queer relationships as it does to shed light on Jack and Ennis’ romance.
Ang Lee’s work is revolutionary for the ways it showcases the injustices of the mid-twentieth-century that carry weight even in today’s times, not because it was one of the first films to boldly represent a gay couple (if you can call them that) because it certainly wasn’t. It is well-deserving of the legacy it has earned over the years, but maybe for the wrong reasons. It never hurts to give it another watch through a new perspective.
