Brokeback Mountain and the New Western History
Director Ang Lee’s fine film Brokeback Mountain is often popularly referred to as the “gay cowboy movie.” But Brokeback Mountain is more than just a gay film. It contains universal themes for anyone in life who has let society’s expectations or one’s own inhibitions deny personal happiness. Nevertheless, with the film’s attention to lavish Western landscapes and the “macho” cowboy image of protagonists Ennis (Heath Lodger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal), it is difficult to disassociate Brokeback Mountain from the Western genre. Like the scholarship of the New Western Historians, Lee’s film suggests that the West is a complex place where there is more than meets the eye.
The New Western History of scholars such as Patricia Nelson Limerick and Richard White have expanded our Western horizons by including the voices/stories of women, Native Americans, Asians, Latinos, and common laborers. Recent Western scholarship also focuses upon the ambiguity and paradox of the American West. Long noted for its championship of individualism, the West was settled with the support of government programs and financing, big business with the capital to exploit the region’s mineral wealth, and collective enterprises such as unions and irrigation projects. In addition, Western settlement was characterized by an urbanization largely ignored by Western cinema and the popular imagination.
Yet, the sense of ambiguity at the heart of the Western experience is most evident in Brokeback Mountain. The West as a sense of place is beautifully developed in the film with shots of snow-capped mountains, clear streams, full moons, and broad vistas. Yet in this film set during the 1960s and 1970s, this beautiful environment is a battleground between the Forest Service and sheep ranchers who resent governmental protection of wildlife. While Jack and Ennis are exploited as cowboy laborers, it is in the relative freedom of nature that they are able to openly express their love for one another.
But Jack and Ennis are hardly independently wealthy, and they cannot escape the rather stifling small town environments of Riverton, Wyoming and Childress, Texas, where the two cowboys attempt to deny their love by forming traditional families. These relationships are emotionally empty, and one gains sympathy for the wives and children who are impacted by the unfulfilled love of Ennis and Jack.
Larry McMurtry, who co-wrote the screenplay, is well acquainted with the conformity of small town life in the Texas Panhandle. McMurtry’s fictional Thalia in The Last Picture Show is a place much like Childress, where Jack tries to settle down. But a place like Childress will have little tolerance for Jake when, unable to establish a lasting relationship with Ennis, he seeks out other males for sexual companionship.
Ennis, who is monogamous in his male love for Jack, takes fewer risks than Jack. He learned his lesson early when his father took him to observe the body of a gay rancher who was beaten to death by his neighbors, and Ennis speculates that his own father was one of those involved in the murder. Of course, Wyoming is also where the openly gay Matthew Shepard was killed in 1998 in an infamous hate crime.
Brokeback Mountain, thus, suggests that the West is hardly a region where the individual is free from the constraints of social expectations and mob violence employed to enforce social norms. Of course, the small towns of the American West are hardly unique in their fears of sexuality outside of traditional heterosexuality. Rather than the great exception where the individual may reinvent himself as in the literature of Owen Wister or Frederick Jackson Turner’s safety valve, the American West mirrors the same intolerance and conflict exhibited in American society east of the Mississippi. The Puritanical fear that sexuality must be controlled in order to form the City Upon a Hill is a fundamental part of the American experience and is hardly limited to any one region of the nation. Brokeback Mountain is, accordingly, both universal and regional, well reflecting the ambiguous legacy of conquest highlighted by the New Western historians. Lee’s film allows for a more inclusive West, although sexuality in Brokeback Mountain is still defined along the polar extremes of homosexual and heterosexual. On the other hand, Brokeback Mountain may even encourage a new reading of traditional Western film texts such as Sam Peckingpaugh’s Ride the High Country (1962). When the Randolph Scott character dies in the arms of his old friend played by Joel McRae and mutters, “I’ll see you in the high country, partner,” perhaps a new note of ambiguity regarding gender roles will register among those viewing the film. And perhaps some day in the future people like Ennis and Jack will feel free to pursue their dreams in a West and America where the sexual identity of all citizens is respected and protected.