Red State Brokeback?
Every year there are perfunctory tirades about the liberal bias of the Oscars, and this year's conservative bete noir has been "Brokeback Mountain" (as Kerrie Mitchell discussed yesterday). I apologize in advance if you, like me, are suffering from "Brokeback" fatigue, but in the hours before the Oscars I am struck by the irony of demonizing "Brokeback" as blue state propaganda. In many important respects "Brokeback" is more red-blooded than most red staters. This is, after all, a movie about down-and-out, rural Wyoming sheep herders (not, by the way, cowboys), the kind of proudly inarticulate manly men who knock back Schlitz, not Campari. The Hollywood elite are finally paying attention to people who look and act nothing like them, whose values are in fact the opposite of theirs. Yet they're not getting any credit for it.
But first, the conservative critique. Something about "Brokeback" provokes a particularly sharp reaction in many conservatives. This is the year of the gay Oscars, yet a desperate transexual housewife and de-sexed Truman Capote have largely avoided the wrath of the demagogues, who saved up all their bile for poor Jack and Ennis.
"Brokeback" advances Hollywood’s “radical agenda,” says MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough. Syndicated conservative radio host Janet Parshall calls it part of the “homosexualizing of America.” Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly lashes out at the media for pushing the movie solely because it “want[s] to mainstream homosexual conduct.” Conservative movieguide.org minced no words, rating the film just plain "abhorrent."
And all that is after biting their tongues. Stuart Shepard at Focus on the Family advised his members not to raise much of a stink, reminding them that "we learned from 'Last Temptation of Christ' that if it wasn't for the protest, the film wouldn't be remembered today. Our expectation is 'Brokeback Mountain' won't do as well in the heartland, but protest would bump that up."
Perhaps taking his cue from Shepard, conservative critic Michael Medved argued that the conservative reaction has been muted, much to the chagrin of "publicists and activists" gunning for a fight. Yet he couldn't quite control himself, subsquently going on the O'Reilly Factor to denounce it as "not just pro-gay, but anti-marriage" and recommend watching the "family values" "March of the Penguins" as an antidote (clearly he hasn't heard about domestic partners Wendell and Cass).
When our good ol' boy President (who is, perhaps, not a particularly strict conservative, but for argument's sake let's pretend otherwise) was ambushed (attacked from the rear?) last month with a question about "Brokeback," he positively sputtered. "I'd be glad to talk about ranching, but I haven't seen the movie. I've heard about it. I hope you go, you know, heh -- I hope you go back to the ranch and the farm, is what I was about to say. Uh. I hadn't seen it." What the hell was going on there? Gay panic? Or is it possible that Bush panicked at the thought of genuinely down-home ranch hands (not Yale/New Haven Hospital-born brahmins like himself) who happened to sleep together? That doesn't conform very neatly to the myth of Massachusetts and New York radical gay activists shoving their liberal agenda down America's throat (a turn of the phrase amusingly common among anxious critics).
Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute of Concerned Women of America, captured the nature of the anxiety when he told Salon that "I think this shows that Hollywood can pervert anything. Part of the enduring appeal of westerns is the display of brotherhood, unhindered by sexualization. You often hear the phrase 'to be a straight-shooter'. That means to speak plain truths and walk easily amid the natural bonds of affection, without the distraction of misplaced sexual urges. In other words, the audience can relax. Their hero is not going to get weird on them."
"Brokeback" is so successful as a paean to a very traditional kind of masculinity that it's especially upsetting when these macho men "get weird on each other." It's the fact that it's a movie about red state guys that makes the gay stuff uncomfortable.
In an Observer article about Brokeback's appeal as slash fiction for women, Laura Craik writes that "Annie Proulx's is a story of that near-obsolete species, the Real Man: the strong and silent type who broods first and ask questions later, though they'd rather shag sheep than ask any at all. Even without the love story, what a turn-on it is to lose yourself in a story about two men who aren't afraid of dirt, pain and silence. 'If you can't fix it, you've got to stand it,' is not only the most profound line in the film, but also the sexiest."
Where else in Hollywood (so prone to flash and hyperbole) do we hear this quintessentially masculine, understated voice? This is a straight woman's fantasy of masculinity: rugged, laconic, inscrutable.
What's more, the ultimate dream of these Marlboro Men is shacking up in a little cattle ranch in the country and growing old together. There's nothing blue state about that. Toggle the genders, and you've got a pretty old-fashioned movie (not surprising from the director of "The Ice Storm," a neocon critique of the sexual revolution). One could argue that the only way blue staters could stomach such a thoroughly red state movie is if it had some gay content.
As Alexander Hamilton writes, "note that it's not cowboys who are banding together to protest. I have known cowboys, and though they can be reactionary, racist, and homophobic, usually they also tend to be libertarian. They might not see the movie, but its existence wouldn't bother them much, just like the existence of gay people doesn't bother them much, as long as they don't have to deal with them. The people who are getting uncomfortable are exurban, kinda wussy fundamentalists who fantasize about a masculinity they don't actually have. If you made a movie about exurban fundamentalists discovering they were gay, nobody would care because exurban fundamentalists are nobody's masculine icon."
If "Brokeback" wins tonight, it won't be a ratification of the liberal agenda, it'll be yet more proof that we're living in the age of the cowboy (I mean sheep herder).
Comments (35)
If gay male penguins don't float your boat... check out the lesbian swans in Boston's Public Garden
See: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/08/12/thou_art_no_romeo/
(damn yankee latte drinking blue staters! converting even the WILDLIFE to the wildlife...)
March 5, 2006 12:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
I rented the March of the Penguins. I was curious why so many conservative Christians were pushing the movie. Two themes in the movie struck me.
March 5, 2006 2:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Only in the conservative's worlds is $75 milliion worth of tickets no one going to see a movie.
Daniel A. Greenbaum
March 5, 2006 2:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't understand this post. You're neither making sense nor successfully refuting the perspective of conservative pundits who argue that this film somehow advances a "homosexual agenda" or whatever crap they're spewing.
Look, the entire point of the film is to draw attention to the fact that "real men" sometimes have sex with each other. The fact that they're "real men" does not in itself make the movie in some way conservative, traditional, or "red state."
You say, "The Hollywood elite are finally paying attention to people who look and act nothing like them, whose values are in fact the opposite of theirs. Yet they're not getting any credit for it."
We can't take that too seriously can we? It depends on where you put the emphasis on the film. You'd have it that the emphasis is put on the manliness of the main characters. Conservative pundits will have it that the emphasis is put on the homosexuality of the main characters. As a film designed to show that people in 'red states' sometimes have sex with people of the same sex, can we determine which set of pundits is correct? To me, it seems your case is at a disadvantage.
Anyway, I'm sure I'll rack up a bunch of 1 ratings for this post.
March 5, 2006 3:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
I got to thinking to what extent conservatives contribute anything at all to our nation's cultural life. No screenwriters, directors, playwrights, composers, etc. to the best of my knowledge. Some hack novelists like Thomas Wolfe. But that is not surprising, since conservatism is almost by definition a reflection of an unimaginative, leaden, life-denying outlook.
March 5, 2006 3:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
This post is either extremely trite or entirely inscrutable to me. Either way, nothing in it hasn't been said before, many times.
March 5, 2006 3:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
What is a "real man"? Something along the lines of the "real" president currently in office?
As for contributions to our cultural life, I recommend the latest news on one Christian artist in today's LA Times.
March 5, 2006 3:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
You'd have it that the emphasis is put on the manliness of the main characters. Conservative pundits will have it that the emphasis is put on the homosexuality of the main characters.
You're right in the sense that "red-staters" will never look beyond this being a big homo movie to see what Thomas is talking about here.
But I don't think he's trying to turn any conservative's opinions here, and he makes a good case, again, for people who can open their mind to seeing this as more than just a homo movie, to see just how masculine this movie really is.
PS, I gave you a pre-emptive 4. I saw you got unfairly wacked in another post.
Dissent Protects Democracy
March 5, 2006 3:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
As the daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of cattle ranchers and cowboys, I just want to thank you for making that critical distinction between sheep-herder and cowboy. It matters to some of us, anyway.
March 5, 2006 4:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're right. I read and reread this post and it really doesn't make much sense. The one thing I think we can all agree on though, is the "Brokeback" movie fatigue. I'm sick of the subject.
March 5, 2006 5:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
The generally irritating Mickey Kaus is right about one thing vis a vis "Brokeback Mountain" : it is a B+ film (although Kaus clearly has no idea what makes it so).<p> If the surviving lover had avenged the murder of his partner, and possibly taken his own life afterward, it would have risen to the level of revenge tragedy, and might have been one of the thirty or so best films in American history.<p> But as it is it is beautifully filmed and two-dimensional, politically correct. In that sense its conservative critics have a point.<p> Sadly, it is also the best movie in the running this year.<p> "Crash" is didactic liberal propaganda (if you want to make an overtly political film make a satire), as is "Munich". "Capote" like "Kinsey" (the latter of which distorted the questionable ethics of the mid-century psychiatric industrial complex) is a boring biopic (the only un-boring ones are fictionalized, and stylized like "Citzen Kane"), and was only partially redeemed by Hoffman's stellar performance (someone should hire him to play Bloeckman in an adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald's "Beautiful and Damned"). And what was that other film?<p>PS Anyone have a clue why I a) need to code the HTML myself to get paragraph breaks, and b) why it appears not to be working?
March 5, 2006 5:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Clooney just admitted he's "proud to be out of touch" and said why. Said the Hollywood left was out ahead on various issues historically. Good. It's honest, based in reality and isn;t some weasel rationalization to say Hollywood is really representaitve of broad America.
Why can't more people have that honesty? Why the BS and spin? Like I said, leave the idiots, ideologues and such to the rt. wingers and we'll be a lot better off.
March 5, 2006 5:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
lol. Now thats what I call spin!
This need to spin the Oscars to be something other than what they are, is pathetic. Really pathetic. O'Rielly is a complete a-hole, but he can't lose when activists like Chris Thomas serve up that sort of slow pitch over the plate.
Why not just admit: the Oscars are very Liberal, lots of America wouldn't choose the same movies. And that's just the way it is. Maybe that's OK and we don't need to rationalize it or lie about that from Hollywood, SFCA, NYC or New Haven, Connecticut. Maybe adding BS doesn't help bridge the cultural divide. The annual need for denials, pathetic, to spin the Oscars with drivel like "In many important respects "Brokeback" is more red-blooded than most red staters." ... pathetic.
Btw Stewart's opening routine just ripped Hollywood stars, said it's the only time many of the people there vote for a winner. Ouch!
March 5, 2006 5:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think there are a lot of "cowboys" shootin from the hip when it comes to Brokeback Mountain. The movie is based on a short story written by Annie Proulx and first published in the New Yorker back in 1997. If I am correct, the author is 70 years old this year, so the story would have likely been written when she was 60-something. She did a remarkable job in sealing with very complicated and very real human issues.
I am thinking that the whole point of the story is lost when people zero in on the sexuality angle and forget or dismiss the rest of the human drama.
Same sex unions/relationships have been around throughout recorded history. So what's the big fuss? The story deals with ancient human issues and drama. It just so happens that today, the story is told in the context of "sheep-herders". And it is a good story.
A much better story than male prostitute in the White House. That one got pushed back in the closet pretty quick.
March 5, 2006 5:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
"It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own." Henry Adam I agree. Hollywood is ahead of the country on outsourcing good, unionized jobs to countries where production costs are less, and ahead of the country on replacing good jobs at home with low wage service sector jobs (notably in television, where writers and actors are being replaced by a reality TV culture that doesn't pay virtually anything other than travel expenses in any number of cases). Then there are other varieties of hypocrisy, wagging their finger at homophobic America while sustaining a culture in Hollywood where leading men and women can't come out and still have careers as leading men and women, to say nothing of their making movies like "Crash" while themselves never venturing south of the 10 freeway after dark.
March 5, 2006 5:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
"It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own." Henry Adam Wow, so apparently Oscar voters are liberal dogmatists who prefer propaganda to art, and yet homophobic at the same time. I think that pretty well sums up Hollywood today. None of these films comes close to last year's winner "Million Dollar Baby" but "Brokeback Mountain" was the closest to greatness of any of them.
March 5, 2006 8:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Reality television is driven by ratings, not some corporate plan to save money. If you want it to go away, give Americans better taste in television. "Leading men and women" can't come out because of the effect on their fanbase, not because of overpowering bias. And Hollywood outsources much less than, say, the tech support sector.
Your complaints are simply about those areas where Hollywood compromises with mainstream values. An entertainment industry has to do this to stay in business. Your energy would be (marginally) better spent railing at people's expectations of Hollywood rather than the people meeting those expectations.
March 5, 2006 8:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
You may be broadly correct, Bob, but I got to cite Squint Eastwood as an exception. I suppose you could argue that Million Dollar Baby was themed along conservative lines - individual achievment, bootstraps and all that - but personally I thought it was a compelling artistic achievment and added to America's culture life in a positive way.
Anal retentiveness strikes me as one possible meaning of the term "conservative." That's just about the opposite of art. So you might be on to something here.
Neoboho
March 5, 2006 9:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ah, yes. The term "field lice" comes to mind.
Neoboho
March 5, 2006 9:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
As someone who is actually in the business, let me say that you have no idea what you're talking about.
March 5, 2006 9:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
An underated aspect of Brokeback is about class. Jack manages to upgrade his lifestyle at the least by marrying into a rather wealthy family. But the other lover is pinned in by his poor upbringing and wary to the extreme of overdoing it by stepping outside of what his class allows. This could have been in that sense another White Castle, about how generally difficult it is to cross class lines, much less gender ones.
March 5, 2006 10:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Riiiight. And Invisable Man was just another "everyman" story, race had nothing to do with it.
Why all the BS spin? It doesn't help, it just looks idiotic and weasely.
March 5, 2006 10:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
John Stewart ripped on Hollywood hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness (as I predicted) for example the joke on the best actress category for "hagging it up" again, and "acting while beautiful" was brilliant. He quipped Theron was happy to be back in Hollywood after her role portraying women valued only for their looks earning less then men. Ouch!
Also funny was Stewart’s quip after the montage of Hollywood films for good causes, when he said "and none of those were problems ever again" I fell over laughing at that one. While I agree many of those films are great (Capra is one of my favorite directors) the sanctimoniousness was somewhat sickening. The number of films Hollywood has made over the years that are truly inspiring and bring people together for common causes are pretty few. More often Hollywood makes simplistic divisive activist pictures, for both sides, and has it both ways. Historically, they’re a bit like the arms dealers in Syriana, and will sell anything to the highest bidder, on both sides.
All these people defending the Oscars and Hollywood this year, because of BBM or whatever, pathetic. It’s still sanctimonious, still hypocritical, still commercial whoring. SOS.
March 6, 2006 5:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
Look, the entire point of the film is to draw attention to the fact that "real men" sometimes have sex with each other.
Really? If that is true why then is the movie not set in a penitentiary? What is new about the fact that real men have sex with each other, or for that matter sheep, goats and cows? Men readily admit that love has nothing to do with sex. So how is this new?
What about the reality of the downlow culture among men? That they have sex with men but relationships with women.
Homosexuals have long acknowledged that they love the promiscuity of homosexuality and that they enjoy most having a new partner. And most importantly that since the gender of their partner is male, he has no more interest in monogamy than most males where sexual variety is the ultimate objective vs. one constant same partner. Male homosexuals love that their partneer is just as sexually driven without emotionally being encumbered or foisting 'love' on the sex act. There is an avalanche of data to support this.
In short, I think this movie was about the radical concept that real men love each other and show that via sex. Which is why so many people who have same gender sex partners praised this movie and saw it as some type of cinematic mainstream validation of themselves.
The real truth is closer to mainstream America knows that same gender sex is all about lust and not relationships and this movie showed them nothing different...since the so called love aspect, was nothing more than a fleeting 'moment' in time. If that is not recognized for the lust that it is , then folks are in denial.
March 6, 2006 6:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
If you believe the sole purpose of films is to "inspire" you're no better than the sanctimonious, hypocritical left. Nearly all of the films nominated this year fail on traditional esthetic grounds. "Crash" is two-dimensionally didactic rubbish made only slightly more palatable than other two-dimensional didactic rubbish like"The Contender" and "Pay it Forward" by reasonably good directing (although it is as badly lit as almost every film made today [what the hell is the use of all these film schools if no one can even light a room anymore?]). "Capote" fails in the same way most biopics fail. Real lives are messy and circuitious; they rarely hew neatly to classical narrative structures. "Nixon" was problematic, but the real life Nixon's tragedy was worthy of a great film (this is rare). Hearst's real life wasn't quite tragedy, but Orson Welles understood that it needed to be so in order to be a great film. There are genuinely great, overtly political films, and some of them are satires (think "Dr. Strangelove"). "Brokeback Mountain," while falling short of classical tragic dimensions (again it ought to have been a revenge flick) was the best of a mediocre lot, and the only reason it lost was because Hollywood (or at least the academy voters) is more conservative than people think.
March 6, 2006 4:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
March 6, 2006 5:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
bluebell
I thought Brokeback was overrated. Ironically, in some ways it was really very traditional. In the old days, when people in films "sinned" they were never allowed to have a happy ending. Adultery was always punished in the end, as it was here.
March 6, 2006 5:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sure, and "Chinatown" was rich in Orientalism and sexism; it was also the best American film of all time. The trouble with "Brokeback Mountain" - the reason it falls short of greatness - is that it is in the end a protest film (not unlike "Easy Rider") rather than a tragedy. If the surviving lover had avenged his partner's murder and then taken his own life it would have risen to the level of classical tragedy, and might have been one of the thirty or so greatest American movies.
March 6, 2006 6:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think their point was that $75M domestic (and about $120M worldwide) isn't a big box office hit for a picture getting that much press and free advertising. Actually it’s pretty small. Claiming it’s in-tune with the national consciousness is pretty unfounded. That’s based on the facts, and denials probably aren’t very helpful or smart.
2005 Harry Potter did $890M worldwide $290 domestic. Narnia $665M $288M. King Kong $543M $216M. Only Narnia had “political” support of those three, although Potter had some political opposition. All were primarily entertainment movies, so the political aspect was minor.
Passion of the Christ, an extremely difficult to watch cultural identity/political film if ever there was one: $604M world, $303M domestic. That makes it #10 in the all-time domestic hits, which is especially impressive considering it’s the only politically controversial movie in the top 100, excepting perhaps Tootsie #91, though I don’t remember that big of a controversy.
Highest grossers historically worldwide: Lord of the Ring Return of the King, $1.1B. Titanic $1.8B. Domestic: Titanic $600M Starwars $460M.
Denial. It ain't just reactionary conservatives anymore.
March 6, 2006 7:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm sorry man. I've been living in a cabin in Montana for seven and a half years straight, wearing pelts, and eating only the brightly colored berries. So what you're saying is that public displays of insanity are no longer fashionable?
March 6, 2006 8:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's exactly the kind of snotty angst the left doesn't need.
Christians liked MotP for the same reasons everybody else did pretty much. Christ, it was a French environmentalist movie already. Obviously some kooks will read into it, and everyone reads into movies what they want to see. But bashing Conservative Christians for seeing a "wholesome" message about devoted parenting and the beauty of nature? That is just obnoxious.
And btw, the conservative christians are one of the important groups supporting environmental preservation, including penguins, and against global warming. So before some snotty twit goes pissing all over them for MotP, might want to realize they're important allies on the environment which is a lot more important than your stupid identity politics and 'tude.
March 6, 2006 9:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Before posting any further on the finer points of cinema, you might want to demonstrate brains enough to use the signature function correctly. It's already been several posts now...
March 6, 2006 9:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're right man. I'm not just crazy, stupid too. I humble myself before your temple of wisdom.
March 6, 2006 11:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
By the way, aren't you a little old or don't you have anything better to do than abuse the ratings system? People have been complaining about you and this for literally nine months my little friend.
March 6, 2006 11:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Heh heh.
Dissent Protects Democracy
March 7, 2006 8:56 AM | Reply | Permalink