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转一篇国外《断背山》影评，转自断背山影迷俱乐部（台湾网站，繁体字）。
一篇斷背山影評的翻譯----------譯者：不詳
在忠於Annie Proulx 的短篇小說基礎上改編的新電影斷背山，和小說本身一樣，倍受稱譽。這是兩個同性戀男人之間的故事。兩個同性戀男人，在有些人看來，貌似這樣說有點怪異，對於另外一些人，覺得彆扭的則是不得不這樣說。之所以感到彆扭，是因為正如眾所周知，這是一個發生在1963年懷俄明的兩個年輕牧場工人墜入愛河，然後在接下來的二十多年中偷偷摸摸的繼續這段折磨人的感情的故事。另一方面，當大多數人聽到同性戀這些詞的時候，映入腦中的形象不可能是一個衣著破爛的從獵鹿和騎馬中取樂的年輕牛仔。
前面說到人們因為不得不把他們稱為兩個同性戀的男人而感到彆扭，是因為不論在商業廣告還是在那些帶有奉承色彩的評論中，都不斷反復強調這樣一個觀點：斷背山實際並不是一個同性戀的故事，而是一部有著博愛色彩的廣泛適用的浪漫史詩。一個突出的地方是：來自全國各地代表不同意識形態差別出版物的評論家為了減弱特定的同性元素都跑去研究內容深度問題。在這部電影官方網站上隨機抽一個所收集的評論就可以看得出來。華爾街日誌的評論家說：“愛情故事來了又走，但這一個會永遠停留在你身邊，不是因為愛人是兩個男人，而是因為這個故事充滿了生機和希望，是真正的浪漫傳奇。”洛杉磯報則稱這部電影是一個需要用心去感受的動人的愛情故事，和以前的那些主流電影一樣，它講述了人們的心是怎樣以神秘不為所知的方式結合在一起，只不過這裏的主人公碰巧都是男人而已。
確實，在電影發行一個月後，大多數評論都憤慨地抵制那種把它僅看作是一部牛仔的同性戀故事的看法。“它蘊含的深意要比表面的描述大多了，”明尼阿波利斯（美國的一個城市）的明星Tribune不屑的說，“這是一個人類共有的故事。”這種獨特的華麗的側重點突出體現在這部影片的廣告上，廣告影射出了製作人那可以理解的心情，即不希望斷背山被當作那種舒適的交易市場，它是一個博愛故事，不管它的時間地點和人物有什麼特別的地方。（在影片製作人給評論家們的長達49頁的壓縮本中，有關同性戀的詞如gay和homosexual自始自終沒在兩個主人公身上用過）“這部電影和美國精神有關。”一個目前的印刷廣告宣傳活動中這樣說道。這則廣告是Heath Ledger帶著牛仔帽露齒而笑的畫面。幾周前，一家緊跟金球獎之後立即開展行動的電視廣告則打出了男主人公擁抱他們妻子而不是他們彼此的畫面。
這種模糊電影主題和內容的態度在金球獎上更明顯，電影拿走了幾個主要的獎項---最佳劇本獎，最佳導演獎，最佳銀幕獎。當從電影中截取的一小段蒙太奇片斷播放的時候，它被稱為是一個蘊滿衝突的故事。接下來，宣讀最佳演員提名獎的人是這樣描述Heath Ledger所扮演的人物的：一個困在複雜愛情裏的牛仔。李安得獎之後說了一句話：這是一個博愛的故事，我只想把它拍成一個愛情故事。
因為我和其他人一樣都很欣賞這部電影的多個出彩之處，因此對我而言，有必要在影片的宣傳和接受方式上來抗衡一下這個特別的觀點。把斷背山當作一個愛情故事甚至是一部關於人類博大情感的電影來看，是對它一個很嚴重的誤解，並且這樣做的話，會不可避免的減弱它所應取得的成就。
不論是靜態的敍述還是動態的表現，斷背山都是一個關於見不得光的同性戀的悲劇，關於那種會招致情感上和道德上毀滅性後果的自我壓抑，還有加深這種悲劇的罪魁禍首---社會的不寬容。
電影裏的愛情故事簡要來說是這樣：一個夏季，兩個在田園詩般的懷俄明山上牧羊的孤單的年輕人，沈默寡言的 Ennis和興致勃勃的Jack，上了床，然後彼此相愛。影片中唯一表現他們在愛河中盡情快樂的是一個簡短的鏡頭：兩個光著上身的年輕人在草地上追逐著打滾。那個場景是沈默的，無聲的，讓人不安，意味深長：因為我們發現我們看到的其實是他們的老闆在監視他們的時候從望遠鏡裏看到的場景。
在那之後---因為他們對彼此的摯愛不能被他們將過的世俗生活所接受---不幸來臨了，最終毀了這兩個人以及他們邂逅的卻用無情來對待的每個人。到影片結尾處，確實，整個家庭都廢掉了。Ennis和一個傳統的心地善良的女孩的婚姻解體了，這無情的打擊了她單純的幻想，破壞了她兩個女兒完整的家庭生活；Jack年輕有膽識的妻子，Lureen，則轉變成了一個脆弱的潑婦，她越來越多的精美假髮則代表了掩蓋在夫妻關係之下日益增多的虛偽。甚至連一個討人喜歡的年輕女招待，這個Ennis 離婚之後與之有過曖昧的女人，（原著中只是一帶而過，電影卻擴展開來講）也由於和這個謎一樣的男人的短暫的相識而感到不幸。如果Jack和Ennis 有什麼污點，那也不是因為他們是同性戀，而是因為他們裝作不是；毒害他們身邊人的正是這個謊言。
對Jack和Ennis 來說，隨著時間的推移，那種時隔日久的短暫相會---那些從來沒有捉到過魚的“釣魚之旅”，Ennis的妻子在離婚之後還仍然在為她那些苦澀的日子哭泣----出於對這種快樂生活的恐懼感，他們日益飽受折磨，，如果他們真能夠生活在一起的話。
他們最後在一起時的快樂被彼此的互相譴責破壞了，“但願我能知道怎樣才能忘記你，”這個已近中年的Jack滿眼含淚的喊道，他為自己一直以來不得不在墨西哥男妓的懷抱中尋求性安慰感到羞恥。“正是因為你，我才像現在這樣一無所有，隻身一人，”可憐的Ennis邊捶地邊抽噎道。Ennis說自己一無所有是因為愛上jack迫使他意識到那種沒有發洩方式的激情，明白了自己的性取向，對此他不能視而不見，但他的出身和周邊環境都不許之成為他生活的一部分。在這些年裏，他一次又一次拒絕jack提出的在某個地方一起生活，共同經營一個農場的想法，他被自己的無能為力所困擾，甚至不敢去想像那種快樂的生活可能會是什麼樣的。
他無法展望和自己愛人在一起生活的一個原因是緣於他的一段可怕的童年記憶，影片以回憶的方式展開，八歲那年，他被父親帶去看一個受盡折磨然後被打死的同性戀農場工人的屍體----這段場景預示了jack死時的場景。這段童年心理創傷的引用也暗示了另一個有力的原因，即為什麼斷背山要被當作一個特定的同性戀悲劇來看待。在另一篇反對稱之為“牛仔同性戀電影”的影評中，芝加哥太陽報的評論家，Roger Ebert, 作了一個jack和Ennis困窘處境的表面的比較，聲稱說他們的悲劇是普遍性的，這種悲劇也可能發生在兩個女人之間或者是不同宗教信仰或道德群體之間的戀人---任何形式的禁愛都包括在內，這聽起來很有道理，但卻被嚴重誤導了。不同宗教或道德群體之間的異性戀人的悲劇，本質上來講是社會悲劇；當我們看到悲劇展開的時候，我們肯定會被社會結構的不合理性所激怒，那種阻礙兩個人相愛的社會結構，連戀人自己或許也會責駡和鄙視的社會結構。
但那些戀人們，不管多麼不幸，也從來沒有輕視過他們自己。正如斷背山明確指出的，像jack和ennis這樣同性戀人的悲劇只是第二位上的社會悲劇。他們的悲劇，其實在他們相識之前就已經開始了，從根本上來講是一種心理悲劇，一種不健康的，仇恨的，致命的精神悲劇。羅密歐和茱麗葉（還有我們）也許仇恨外部世界，凱普萊特（茱麗葉家族的姓）也許仇恨維羅納（義大利北部城市）；但因為他們從很早就開始學會仇恨同性戀，所以那些有同性戀衝動的年輕人長大後會經常恨自己：在他們不知道錯在社會的時候，他們都深信不疑的認為自己有毛病。扮演Ennis的Heath Ledger很清楚的明白這一點，他說道：Ennis在童年的時候就被灌輸恐懼，所以他愛的方式讓他噁心憎惡。Heath 也通過他當之無愧精彩的表演巧妙的傳達了這一點。螢屏上，Ennis 的那種自我壓抑和自我憎恨被賦予了令人吃驚的外在形態：笨拙的幾近蹣跚的步態，收斂的姿勢，講話時幾乎張不開嘴；這些有說服力的特徵為我們描繪了一個為自己苦惱，被自己折磨的男人。
不管怎樣，對這部愛情故事，一個悲劇性的電影，我要說的就這麼多。值得讚揚的是，儘管有官方的花言巧語，斷背山的製作人Larry McMurtry和Diana Ossana還有導演李安似乎都很清楚他們就是在做一部關於“櫃子”的電影。這種關於壓抑密閉以及沒實現生活（Ennis痛苦的提到他的生活以一無所有而終結）而引發的空虛的主題在影片中始終如一地通過空間的手法來恰當的表現。被賦予影片同性戀的主題，這種設計顯得獨具意義。這兩個戀人只有在野外才會開心，那兒，廣闊天空豐富的色彩還有那開闊的景觀，都生動地暗示了這兩個男人之間的情感是自然的，天生的，淳樸的。相對照而言，每次我們看到Jack和Ennis在室內時，看到他們家庭生活和社會生活的失敗時，他們看起來不自在，自閉恐懼（Ennis尤其更典型，各方面都是：一個被禁閉在狹小方框裏的人）。當他們為一次“釣魚之行”急切做準備的時候，我們在影片中先看到Ennis在懷俄明，然後是Jack在德克薩斯，這兩個人在打點行裝的時候，各自在自己的屋裏走前走後，像籠子裏的動物。Ennis還差點忘了他的釣魚工具，這只是一個他從來沒用過，每次和Jack出去時用來掩蓋他向妻子撒的謊的一個道具而已。
以櫃子---真實物體的櫃子---為重點的兩個連貫的場景，這視覺對比上的高潮同樣是影片情感上的高潮。第一幕：已經三十多歲的極度憂傷的Ennis 來到了jack的老家，在Jack幾乎空蕩蕩的房間的小櫃子裏，他發現了兩件襯衫---他和Jack的，在斷背山上的那年夏天他們曾穿過的----Jack特地把其中一件套在另一件裏面（那個夏天結束的時候，Ennis以為他把襯衫丟了，直到這裏我們才意識到是Jack故意偷走了）。把襯衫藏在櫃子裏，這個意象給這個故事的悲劇性創造了一個生動的讓人痛苦的視覺象徵。這兩件襯衫互相擁抱著，但他們的主人卻再也享受不到這種歡愉。Ennis站在這個沒窗的小地方，愛撫著襯衫，無聲的哭泣著，他終於明白Jack對他的愛有多深，意識到自己失去的有多大，但一切已經太遲了。
接下來的場景，我們看到了位置倒過來的襯衫。Ennis現在已到中年，獨自一人住在一個舊的，沒什麼傢俱的房車中（這是小說的開頭，小說本身用的是倒敍的方式）。他女兒過來看望他，並告訴Ennis她要結婚了。“他愛你嗎？”這個形容枯槁的父親關切地問道，好像才意識到這才是最重要的問題。當女兒走後，Ennis發現他忘了帶走外套，於是他打開櫃子把衣服放進去，我們看到他把這兩件襯衫掛在櫃門的裏邊，仍然是一件套著另一件，上面是一張舊的斷背山明信片。這時，鏡頭轉向了櫃子旁邊的小窗戶，給了我們一片更開闊的視野，透過這個矩形的框框，我們可以一瞥開滿黃花的田野，山川還有天空。這兩個空間的毗鄰---破舊得密不透風的櫃子，展現一望無垠景色的窗戶----有效地但痛心的揭示了這個男人的悲劇：他曾有過的生活，他曾有機會能過上的生活。Ennis 滿眼含淚，對這櫃子說道，“Jack，我發誓...”他沒有說完這句話，就像他從來不完整的生活一樣。
其中最讓人難受的，但絕不是不典型，是為了暗示斷背山的悲劇英雄們並不是真正的同性戀的觀點而作的那些努力，這種努力到處可見，在三藩市新聞（報紙名）上，評論家Mick LaSalle 爭辯說這是兩個墜入愛河的男人的故事，沒有什麼意義。他們是誰，在哪兒，怎樣生活，怎樣看待自己，從這些方面來說是沒有意義。同樣，從他們怎樣謀生，在國家選舉中會怎樣投票方面來講，也沒什麼意義....
這種情況帶了很多感情力量在裏面，很大程度上是由於它是如此的特殊並且概念不清。這兩個人---牛仔---彼此相愛，但是我們不知道他們是由於是同性戀而愛，抑或是由於愛而是同性戀。如果他們不相識，其中一個或者二人都可能會過上正常人的生活。
這些陳述揭示了大部分影評的錯誤之在，不管他們的意圖有多好。現在來看，斷背山已經獲得了它一直以來從評論家和觀眾等得到的關注，原因很明顯，部分是因為它表面在糾正人們對於同性戀的偏見看法，然後把它引向人們熟悉的美國精神（假如說，這是一個發生在197幾年紐約城裏的兩個內向的同性戀油漆工之間的愛情故事，你就會懷疑還不會有大篇幅的廣告來鼓吹這種“全人類”的主題）。但這部影片的主人公看起來像牛仔這個事實並沒有淡化他們或他們的故事所帶有的同性戀色彩。像LaSalle的評論，還有其他那些努力說服你接受以下觀點的評論：斷背山並不是真正意義上的同性戀，Jack 和Ennis的愛毫無意義因為他們是有可能給共和黨投票的牧場工；這樣的評論只有在你相信同性戀就意味著有特定的外表，生活方式或政治觀點，相信同性戀就是除了性吸引這個赤裸裸事實之外的一切事物的時候才會達到它的效果。
當然，同性戀人數年來一直在證明的一個觀點是根本就沒有同性戀者要有特定的特徵這一說，同性戀者也不是一個很詭異的看起來不同的人。關於這一點，如果那些喜歡發表言論的欣賞者們能夠聽一下斷背山到底要講什麼的話，那斷背山也證明了。（影片與小說主要的出入是那兩場意在強調Jack和Ennis男子漢氣概的戲上，而這當然是很有意義的。一場是Jack在感恩節上成功挑戰他粗俗老丈人的戲，另一場是Ennis在六月第四次野餐會上教訓兩個暴徒的戲，這場戲在Ennis高挺地站在開滿煙花的天空下時達到高潮）
斷背山真正的成就不在於它講述了一個主人公碰巧是同性戀的博愛故事，而在於是一個被成功敍述的讓任何有感情的人都會為之感動的突出的同性戀故事。如果你堅持說Jack和Ennis的故事還可以看，還可以讓人同情，因為他們不是真正意義上的同性戀，如果你認為他們更多的體現了美國精神而不是同性戀，那麼你就是在把他們推回去那個櫃子裏，而那個櫃子的狹小的讓人窒息的空間已經由李安和他的合作者們通過一個美麗淒慘的故事所袒露出來了。
原文(轉自NYbook review)
Review
An Affair to Remember
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Brokeback Mountain
a film directed by Ang Lee, based on the story by E. Annie Proulx
Brokeback Mountain—the highly praised new movie as well as the short story by Annie Proulx on which the picture is faithfully based—is a tale about two homosexual men. Two gay men. To some people it will seem strange to say this; to some other people, it will seem strange to have to say it. Strange to say it, because the story is, as everyone now knows, about two young Wyoming ranch hands who fall in love as teenagers in 1963 and continue their tortured affair, furtively, over the next twenty years. And as everyone also knows, when most people hear the words "two homosexual men" or "gay," the image that comes to mind is not likely to be one of rugged young cowboys who shoot elk and ride broncos for fun.
Two homosexual men: it is strange to have to say it just now because the distinct emphasis of so much that has been said about the movie—in commercial advertising as well as in the adulatory reviews—has been that the story told in Brokeback Mountain is not, in fact, a gay story, but a sweeping romantic epic with "universal" appeal. The lengths to which reviewers from all over the country, representing publications of various ideological shadings, have gone in order to diminish the specifically gay element is striking, as a random sampling of the reviews collected on the film's official Web site makes clear. The Wall Street Journal's critic asserted that "love stories come and go, but this one stays with you—not because both lovers are men, but because their story is so full of life and longing, and true romance." The Los Angeles Times declared the film to be a deeply felt, emotional love story that deals with the uncharted, mysterious ways of the human heart just as so many mainstream films have before it. The two lovers here just happen to be men.
Indeed, a month after the movie's release most of the reviews were resisting, indignantly, the popular tendency to refer to it as "the gay cowboy movie." "It is much more than that glib description implies," the critic of the Minneapolis Star Tribune sniffed. "This is a human story." This particular rhetorical emphasis figures prominently in the advertising for the film, which in quoting such passages reflects the producer's understandable desire that Brokeback Mountain not be seen as something for a "niche" market but as a story with broad appeal, whatever the particulars of its time, place, and personalities. (The words "gay" and "homosexual" are never used of the film's two main characters in the forty-nine-page press kit distributed by the filmmakers to critics.) "One movie is connecting with the heart of America," one of the current print ad campaigns declares; the ad shows the star Heath Ledger, without his costar, grinning in a cowboy hat. A television ad that ran immediately after the Golden Globe awards a few weeks ago showed clips of the male leads embracing their wives, but not each other.
The reluctance to be explicit about the film's themes and content was evident at the Golden Globes, where the film took the major awards—for best movie drama, best director, and best screenplay. When a short montage of clips from the film was screened, it was described as "a story of monumental conflict"; later, the actor reading the names of nominees for best actor in a movie drama described Heath Ledger's character as "a cowboy caught up in a complicated love." After Ang Lee received the award he was quoted as saying, "This is a universal story. I just wanted to make a love story."
Because I am as admiring as almost everyone else of the film's many excellences, it seems to me necessary to counter this special emphasis in the way the film is being promoted and received. For to see Brokeback Mountain as a love story, or even as a film about universal human emotions, is to misconstrue it very seriously—and in so doing inevitably to diminish its real achievement.
Both narratively and visually, Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy about the specifically gay phenomenon of the "closet"—about the disastrous emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression and of the social intolerance that first causes and then exacerbates it. What love story there is occurs early on in the film, and briefly: a summer's idyll herding sheep on a Wyoming mountain, during which two lonely youths, taciturn Ennis and high-spirited Jack, fall into bed, and then in love, with each other. The sole visual representation of their happiness in love is a single brief shot of the two shirtless youths horsing around in the grass. That shot is eerily—and significantly—silent, voiceless: it turns out that what we are seeing is what the boys' boss is seeing through his binoculars as he spies on them.
After that—because their love for each other can't be fitted into the lives they think they must lead—misery pursues and finally destroys the two men and everyone with whom they come in contact with the relentless thoroughness you associate with Greek tragedy. By the end of the drama, indeed, whole families have been laid waste. Ennis's marriage to a conventional, sweet-natured girl disintegrates, savaging her simple illusions and spoiling the home life of his two daughters; Jack's nervy young wife, Lureen, devolves into a brittle shrew, her increasingly elaborate and artificial hairstyles serving as a visual marker of the ever-growing mendacity that underlies the couple's relationship. Even an appealing young waitress, with whom Ennis after his divorce has a flirtation (an episode much amplified from a bare mention in the original story), is made miserable by her brief contact with a man who is as enigmatic to himself as he is to her. If Jack and Ennis are tainted, it's not because they're gay, but because they pretend not to be; it's the lie that poisons everyone they touch.
As for Jack and Ennis themselves, the brief and infrequent vacations that they are able to take together as the years pass—"fishing trips" on which, as Ennis's wife points out, still choking on her bitterness years after their marriage fails, no fish were ever caught— are haunted, increasingly, by the specter of the happier life they might have had, had they been able to live together. Their final vacation together (before Jack is beaten to death in what is clearly represented, in a flashback, as a roadside gay-bashing incident) is poisoned by mutual recriminations. "I wish I knew how to quit you," the now nearly middle-aged Jack tearfully cries out, humiliated by years of having to seek sexual solace in the arms of Mexican hustlers. "It's because of you that I'm like this—nothing, nobody," the dirt-poor Ennis sobs as he collapses in the dust. What Ennis means, of course, is that he's "nothing" because loving Jack has forced him to be aware of real passion that has no outlet, aware of a sexual nature that he cannot ignore but which neither his background nor his circumstances have equipped him to make part of his life. Again and again over the years, he rebuffs Jack's offers to try living together and running "a little cow and calf operation" somewhere, hobbled by his inability even to imagine what a life of happiness might look like.
One reason he can't bring himself to envision such a life with his lover is a grisly childhood memory, presented in flashback, of being taken at the age of eight by his father to see the body of a gay rancher who'd been tortured and beaten to death—a scene that prefigures the scene of Jack's death. This explicit reference to childhood trauma suggests another, quite powerful, reason why Brokeback must be seen as a specifically gay tragedy. In another review that decried the use of the term "gay cowboy movie" ("a cruel simplification"), the Chicago Sun-Times's critic, Roger Ebert, wrote with ostensible compassion about the dilemma of Jack and Ennis, declaring that "their tragedy is universal. It could be about two women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic groups—any 'forbidden' love." This is well-meaning but seriously misguided. The tragedy of heterosexual lovers from different religious or ethnic groups is, essentially, a social tragedy; as we watch it unfold, we are meant to be outraged by the irrationality of social strictures that prevent the two from loving each other, strictures that the lovers themselves may legitimately rail against and despise.
But those lovers, however star-crossed, never despise themselves. As Brokeback makes so eloquently clear, the tragedy of gay lovers like Ennis and Jack is only secondarily a social tragedy. Their tragedy, which starts well before the lovers ever meet, is primarily a psychological tragedy, a tragedy of psyches scarred from the very first stirrings of an erotic desire which the world around them—beginning in earliest childhood, in the bosom of their families, as Ennis's grim flashback is meant to remind us—represents as unhealthy, hateful, and deadly. Romeo and Juliet (and we) may hate the outside world, the Capulets and Montagues, may hate Verona; but because they learn to hate homosexuality so early on, young people with homosexual impulses more often than not grow up hating themselves: they believe that there's something wrong with themselves long before they can understand that there's something wrong with society. This is the truth that Heath Ledger, who plays Ennis, clearly understands—"Fear was instilled in him at an early age, and so the way he loved disgusted him," the actor has said—and that is so brilliantly conveyed by his deservedly acclaimed performance. On screen, Ennis's self-repression and self-loathing are given startling physical form: the awkward, almost hobbled quality of his gait, the constricted gestures, the way in which he barely opens his mouth when he talks all speak eloquently of a man who is tormented simply by being in his own body—by being himself.
So much, at any rate, for the movie being a love story like any other, even a tragic one. To their great credit, the makers of Brokeback Mountain—the writers Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, the director Ang Lee—seem, despite the official rhetoric, to have been aware that they were making a movie specifically about the closet. The themes of repression, containment, the emptiness of unrealized lives—all ending in the "nothingness" to which Ennis achingly refers—are consistently expressed in the film, appropriately enough, by the use of space; given the film's homoerotic themes, this device is particularly meaningful. The two lovers are only happy in the wide, unfenced outdoors, where exuberant shots of enormous skies and vast landscapes suggest, tellingly, that what the men feel for each other is "natural." By contrast, whenever we see Jack and Ennis indoors, in the scenes that show the failure of their domestic and social lives, they look cramped and claustrophobic. (Ennis in particular is often seen in reflection, in various mirrors: a figure confined in a tiny frame.) There's a sequence in which we see Ennis in Wyoming, and then Jack in Texas, anxiously preparing for one of their "fishing trips," and both men, as they pack for their trip—Ennis nearly leaves behind his fishing tackle, the unused and increasingly unpersuasive prop for the fiction he tells his wife each time he goes away with Jack— pace back and forth in their respective houses like caged animals.
The climax of these visual contrasts is also the emotional climax of the film, which takes place in two consecutive scenes, both of which prominently feature closets—literal closets. In the first, a grief-stricken Ennis, now in his late thirties, visits Jack's childhood home, where in the tiny closet of Jack's almost bare room he discovers two shirts—his and Jack's, the clothes they'd worn during their summer on Brokeback Mountain—one of which Jack has sentimentally encased in the other. (At the end of that summer, Ennis had thought he'd lost the shirt; only now do we realize that Jack had stolen it for this purpose.) The image —which is taken directly from Proulx's story—of the two shirts hidden in the closet, preserved in an embrace which the men who wore them could never fully enjoy, stands as the poignant visual symbol of the story's tragedy. Made aware too late of how greatly he was loved, of the extent of his loss, Ennis stands in the tiny windowless space, caressing the shirts and weeping wordlessly.
In the scene that follows, another misplaced piece of clothing leads to a similar scene of tragic realization. Now middle-aged and living alone in a battered, sparsely furnished trailer (a setting with which Proulx's story begins, the tale itself unfolding as a long flashback), Ennis receives a visit from his grown daughter, who announces that she's engaged to be married. "Does he love you?" the blighted father protectively demands, as if realizing too late that this is all that matters. After the girl leaves, Ennis realizes she's left her sweater behind, and when he opens his little closet door to store it there, we see that he's hung the two shirts from their first summer, one still wearing the other, on the inside of the closet door, below a tattered postcard of Brokeback Mountain. Just as we see this, the camera pulls back to allow us a slightly wider view, which reveals a little window next to the closet, a rectangular frame that affords a glimpse of a field of yellow flowers and the mountains and sky. The juxtaposition of the two spaces—the cramped and airless closet, the window with its unlimited vistas beyond—efficiently but wrenchingly suggests the man's tragedy: the life he has lived, the life that might have been. His eyes filling with tears, Ennis looks at his closet and says, "Jack, I swear..."; but he never completes his sentence, as he never completed his life.
One of the most tortured, but by no means untypical, attempts to suggest that the tragic heroes of Brokeback Mountain aren't "really" gay appeared in, of all places, the San Francisco Chronicle, where the critic Mick LaSalle argued that the film is about two men who are in love, and it makes no sense. It makes no sense in terms of who they are, where they are, how they live and how they see themselves. It makes no sense in terms of what they do for a living or how they would probably vote in a national election....
The situation carries a lot of emotional power, largely because it's so specific and yet undefined. The two guys—cowboys—are in love with each other, but we don't ever quite know if they're in love with each other because they're gay, or if they're gay because they're in love with each other.
It's possible that if these fellows had never met, one or both would have gone through life straight. The statement suggests what's wrong with so much of the criticism of the film, however well-meaning it is. It seems clear by now that Brokeback has received the attention it's been getting, from critics and audiences alike, partly because it seems on its surface to make normal what many people think of as gay experience— bringing it into the familiar "heart of America." (Had this been the story of, say, the love between two closeted interior decorators living in New York City in the 1970s, you suspect that there wouldn't be full-page ads in the major papers trumpeting its "universal" themes.) But the fact that this film's main characters look like cowboys doesn't make them, or their story, any less gay. Criticisms like LaSalle's, and those of the many other critics trying to persuade you that Brokeback isn't "really" gay, that Jack and Ennis's love "makes no sense" because they're Wyoming ranch hands who are likely to vote Republican, only work if you believe that being gay means having a certain look, or lifestyle (urban, say), or politics; that it's anything other than the bare fact of being erotically attached primarily to members of your own sex.
Indeed, the point that gay people have been trying to make for years—a point that Brokeback could be making now, if so many of its vocal admirers would listen to what it's saying—is that there's no such thing as a typi-cal gay person, a strangely different-seeming person with whom Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar have nothing in common—thankfully, you can't help feeling, in the eyes of many commentators. (It is surely significant that the film's only major departure from Proulx's story are two scenes clearly meant to underscore Jack's and Ennis's bona fides as macho American men: one in which Jack successfully challenges his boorish father-in-law at a Thanksgiving celebration, and another in which Ennis punches a couple of biker goons at a July Fourth picnic—a scene that culminates with the image of Ennis standing tall against a skyscape of exploding fireworks.)
The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really homosexual—that they're more like the heart of America than like "gay people"—you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed. |
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