Daniel Mendelsohn’s commentary on Brokeback Mountain in the New York Review of Books has been making the rounds the last few days. For many good reasons: it is an extraordinarily well-expressed piece, and counters a lot of the more ludicrous hyperbole of the wall of critical thought surrounding the film. It describes, at great length and with almost no room for error, why Brokeback Mountain is, contra the many critics who say otherwise, a specifically and necessarily homosexual love story.
It is one of the most damaging pieces of film criticism I have ever seen.
On one hand, I truly hate to attack the piece, because I am sympathetic to, and even in agreeiment with Mendelsohn’s aim. That is, he takes objection to the general critical consensus that the film is not about “gay men,” but about universal truths. He lays out a lengthy defense of the view that this story, as it is told, could only be about gay men, and that the critical consensus is flawed because it takes the view that there is a specific thing called a “gay man” that is incompatible with that thing called a “cowboy.”
I wish to both agree and dissent with this point. Yes, there are reviews which suggest it’s not a film about “real” homosexuals because they are more interested in rodeos and pickups than Joan Crawford films, and those reviews are so wide of the mark as to beggar belief. And, like Mendelsohn, I think one of the film’s most politically important ramifications is that it explodes the myth that all gay men are queens, as I mentioned in my review. But Mendelsohn misrepresents the position of many reviewers in dismissing the “no true gay man” fallacy. In fact, many reviews (including my own), make a point that Jack Twist is gay, and is aware of it, whereas Ennis Del Mar is something else: he is in love with Jack – not Jack’s gender, not Jack’s body type, but the core being of Jack. These reviews suggest that Ennis is not “gay” because there is no man, other than Jack, that he is capable of loving. That there is no woman at all that Ennis could love is not insignificant, nor ignored. I would argue that this is a much bolder position for the movie to adopt than any “gay identity” paradigm – you love who you must, irrespective of their or your gender (that is, the film engages with the idea that “gay,” just like “straight,” or even “bi” is an inherently limiting way to view the self).
Here is why I have a very hard time hating Mendelsohn’s argument: it appears to be based in a sincere desire that Brokeback Mountain function as the great mainstream breakthrough for films about gay men. That every man, woman or child who sees this film is seeing it to gain insight into the life and character of a closeted gay man. This view is appealing (I do not know whether Mendelsohn is himself homosexual, or if he is writing from the perspective of a concerned liberal, but either way his investment in this idea is natural and clear), represents an inappropriate and objectionable limitation not just on Brokeback Mountain, but on the thematic scope of the cinema itself.
Mendelsohn destroys his entire argument in the same sweep that he makes it:
“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.”
I have no doubt whatsoever that he truly believes that Brokeback Mountain is first and above all a story about and for the gay men who know the pain of hiding one’s homosexuality. But he is wrong, and I need to go no further than his own quote to prove it. Let us take that phrase – erotic self-repression and of the social intolerance that first causes and then exacerbates it” – I could start listing the films that take that as their primary theme, but there is a nearly inexhaustible supply and I have better things to do with my life.
Mendelsohn makes a surpassingly weak attempt to head off this line of attack, claiming later in the article:
“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.”
I can only assume that Mendelsohn does not actually watch films, or indeed any other dramatic art forms. I have suggested before that the closest analogue to Brokeback Mountain of which I am aware is David Lean’s Brief Encounter, a film which doesn’t even have to resort to “different religious or ethnic groups” to prove my point: it is the story of two white upper-middle-class Brits who want very much to be together and hate themselves for it very much. Or perhaps Mendelsohn views the line, “It’s awfully easy to lie when you know that you’re trusted implicitly. So very easy, and so very degrading,” as a positive affirmation. Even in the relatively sunny Hollywood artifice Casablanca, there’s a distinct and unmistakable edge of self-loathing on the part of Rick and Ilsa for continuing to feel things that should be long dead.
My complaint with Mendelsohn’s article isn’t however, that he gets things wrong on the facts. By and large, I think his points are good, even if he makes them a bit too generally. What bothers me is his aim: as near as I can tell, he doesn’t want straight viewers to sympathise with Jack and Ennis. His complaint is that the majority of film critics are calling Brokeback Mountain “universal.” No it isn’t, he retorts. Why on Earth does he do this? What sort of demented view is it that universality is a bad thing? Frankly, if I thought that Brokeback Mountain was a film about – AND ONLY ABOUT – the pain of being a gay man in the closet, I wouldn’t have liked it very much, if at all. It certainly wouldn’t have been my second-favorite fiction film of 2005. The reason I responded to the film so positively is precisely because it is universal, because even though I have never experienced the exact situation that Jack and Ennis go through, I can still identify with them and their love. It is not because I feel sorry for them, which is what Mendelsohn seems to suggest is the ideal aim of the film.
Mendelsohn basically suggests that we treat Brokeback Mountain as a message film. Before I get myself into a trap, I do not want to suggest that dramatically successful stories cannot contain social messages. To go no further than this past summer, I found The Constant Gardener to be a very remarkable film for its political themes as much as its psychological ones. But absent the psychological themes, and The Constant Gardener becomes Syriana, a tedious harangue and diatribe. Or, God forbid, the Oscar darlings Crash and Good Night, and Good Luck., two films whose theme is their political message, and as such are about as emotionally engaging as a ninth grade civics textbook.
There is a concept that I first heard expressed by Roger Ebert, but I am certain it predates him, and likely the cinema itself: the more specific a story’s focus, the more universal its implications. This applies to gay cowboys as much as anything. An extreme example would be Citizen Kane; here is one and only one man in the history of time who could “identify” with that story, and he tried to have the film destroyed. But in its microscopic depiction of one very specific man, the film opens into one of the finest, if not the finest critique of the mistakes we make in the name of ambition that has ever been filmed. “Ambition” is a much easier concept to identify with than “wealthy, myopic, paranoid journalism godhood,” but if Orson Welles had made a film about “ambition,” it would have ended up as an incoherent vagary. There are no good stories about archetypes.
A more cogent example is Ozu Yasujiro’s Tokyo monogatari. If we followed Mendelsohn, we would be obliged to focus on how not-Western it is, how much the family is Japanese, how theirs is a specifically and exclusively Japanese experience, and we would be right to do so. The reason the film steps into transcendence, though, is because this altogether Japanese story is so familiar – every family I know is somehow exactly like this very particular Japanese family, and that is why Tokyo monogatari matters – not because it tells me about people I will never know and am nothing like, but because it makes me confront all of the reasons why I don’t always get along with my mother.
Movies – and all dramatic art – aren’t really about what they’re “about.” It is how and why they are about those things that create theme. A movie about race looks like the tedious Crash or the amusingly dated Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf is “about” race, but it uses race as a prism through which to view deeper truths. And along the way, it still manages to explore race in a more intellectually and morally satisfying way than Crash or Guess…
I would argue that ultimately, all representational drama considers one or more of the following themes:
-The desire to communicate
-Society and the self
-Love and sex
-The relationships within families
-Moral autonomy and moral choice
-God’s relationship to creation
Try though I might, I could think of no theme that isn’t covered by one of those (and there’s overlap even in what I have). The purpose of criticism – indeed the purpose of merely viewing or reading – is to determine which of this six points is discussed within a text, and what method that text uses. Catharsis comes when the method used triggers a sense of familiarity or empathy within the audience.
Brokeback Mountain, according to this schema, is primarily about love and sex, and the desire to communicate. The first is obvious, the second because the tragedy of the film grows out Ennis’s refusal to admit the truth to himself and Jack, and his growing sense of internal resentment that he cannot be honest and open. Secondarily, the film is about society and self, because Ennis’s inability to communicate derives directly from his flawed beliefs about his responsibility to society (to be heterosexual). It is about these things through the prism of a story about gay cowboys. So on one hand, Mendelsohn is correct, because a closeted gay man with years of feeling the self-loathing Ennis shows is going to have the strongest possible cathartic reaction to the film. But Mendelsohn fails to observe that catharsis comes in all forms, and while I have never hated myself because of my sexual desire, I know what it’s like to deny myself love because it wasn’t “right” or “appropriate,” and I know what it feels like to be full of self-loathing for it.
Roger Ebert’s review of the film contains what remains my favorite observation from any film critic in 2005:
“I can imagine someone weeping at this film, identifying with it, because he always wanted to stay in the Marines, or be an artist or a cabinetmaker.”
Mendelsohn would deride this (he does level criticisms at Ebert, but not this passage) as trying to take out Teh Gay: what’s manlier than a Marine? And if a Marine cries, it can’t be about homos. Or maybe, Ebert actually believes what he’s writing. That Brokeback Mountain is in fact about the closet; and it is about gay men; and it is about a gay man and a straight guy who just happens to be love with him; and it is about how that guy lost his chance to be a cabinetmaker; and it is about how I never asked that girl out the summer before college and how I still fucking regret it. You can’t limit art. Art’s nature is to be about whatever it makes the audience feel or think – it’s out of the hands of the artist, and it’s definitely out of the hands of the critics. If you found Brokeback Mountain tedious and shallow, then it was for you. If you found it to be a perfect description of everything you were afraid of before you came out, then that’s what it was for you. And there’s no reason to say that a straight man watching this film can’t start crying for himself, if that’s what the movie is for him.