Cara, I have been following the dialogue on your sister-in-law’s problem with Brokeback Mountain and I am starting to get a number of highly disturbing impressions about her. You are quite worried about her, but I am starting to get a little worried about you. There seems to be much more going on within your relationship with this woman than just her glib and scatter-brained homophobia. I do not think that you are going to like what I am going to say, but here goes, anyway…
A number of people on this thread feel that your sister-in-law is a conflicted person who is trying to reconstellate her life at the present time and who might benefit from an intensive period of psychotherapy. I am not so optimistic. Your husband, who has known her a hell of a lot longer and, apparently, a hell of a lot better than you have, has already tipped you off that his sister has always been “impressionable.” What I think he’s telling you, very carefully, is that, with her, there may be “no there there.” In spite of her surface affability (which I am quite sure she has), there may not be a rock-solid personality (a soul, if you will): there may be --- there may never be anything more than --- a ramshackle heap of prejudices and behaviors that periodically collapses and then is reconstellated into --- another ramshackle heap of prejudices and behaviors.
A number of the remarks that you make about your sister-in-law truly reinforce my opinion on this matter. You met this woman long ago at a time when you yourself were “unformed,” and I know from my own personal experience how hard it is to erase, or even to alter, adolescent impressions. You and she go back a long way, and even though you have grown enormously as a human being since, the highly understandable root affection that you have for this woman --- an affection buttressed by the unerasable biographical fact that you met your husband through her --- blinds you to the fact that she has not grown at all. You mention that she had some sort of a nervous breakdown after her freshman year in college, that she returned to school a Christian fundamentalist, and that you cannot understand what happened to her. What may have happened to her, Cara, is that she realized at the age of nineteen or so --- in a way that you did not have to realize --- that she was being overwhelmed by the complexities of life. It’s not merely that she was doubtlessly experiencing some unpleasant things at that time: it may well have been the sheer chaotic quantity of the life experiences themselves, above and beyond their pleasantness or unpleasantness, that overwhelmed her. From such a perspective, her retreat into Christian fundamentalism was neither a mistake nor a failure of nerve: it was the only thing that she could do in order to protect herself from being destroyed by the complexity of modern life!
And her retreat into Christian fundamentalism --- into a ramshackle heap of prejudices and behaviors --- has worked for her, at least until recently. You say that your sister-in-law’s husband “has his good qualities,” but your sister-in-law probably married him for his no-nonsense cut-n-dry approach to life, where the whites are super-white, the blacks are super-black, and there are no agonizing grays. And she has gotten a great deal out that relationship for the past twenty years, not least her four children. But she did not realize when she married the man that his so-called “good qualities” were premised upon a potentially explosive bipolar personality. And now that the couple is entering middle-age, the dark side of that bipolar personality is really starting to take control (as, sadly, it so often does in a certain kind of middle-aged man). The marriage is very deeply in trouble; your sister-in-law knows it; she has already gone to a lawyer to discuss the legal possibilities for a separation; the husband has gone to marriage counseling only as a result of this; and your sister-in-law does not truly believe that he is able to stay on his medications, despite his promises to do so. The prospects for the marriage, I am sorry to say, Cara, are not good. And maybe you --- and your more insightful and thus more guarded --- husband know it.
At some point in the future, your sister-in-law is probably going to “crash” again, and she is going to have to find yet another ramshackle heap of prejudices and behaviors to get her through the next couple decades of her life. Now maybe psychotherapy may can help her find another refuge from the chaotic complexity of life, but I am doubtful. Psychotherapy can only work in crisis situations when the “there there” in the person is really to move on to another level of life experience. But at the risk of incurring your anger, Cara, perhaps psychotherapy cannot really work with your sister-in-law because she is incapable of moving on to another level of life experience --- and that because there is no “there there.” You may want to regard your sister-in-law as a conflicted soul in torment, but perhaps she is actually nothing more than periodically dysfunctional mass-minded person.
Unconsciously, you may already know much of this and, hoping for the best, you are trying to help provide her with a new psycho-social structure into which she can move forward with her life. But her reactions to Brokeback Mountain are clearly signaling you --- at least I think that they are clearly signaling you --- that, as “impressionable” as she is, she is not going to jump your way. It’s just too much for you to ask now --- or even twenty years ago --- from her, and she seems to telling you through her reactions to the movie to stop asking. The psychological problems that your sister-in-law may be having at the present time may be far less dangerous than the political problems that you are opening up for yourself by trying to press her in the way that you do. After all, as you yourself admit, moderation is not one of your strong points. And danger lies there for you in that lack of moderation…
You really need to talk with your husband more about this situation, and I would not be surprised if he advises you to be a little more careful around your sister-in-law. Because I sense that a nasty crash is coming in your sister-in-law’s life, a crash that you did not cause, that you probably cannot help, but that might damage you in the process. You have worked too hard and too long to get the psycho-socio-political consciousness that you have, Cara, to let anyone upend it. As your sister-in-law’s problems might, if you are not careful. Sometimes, as Shakespeare tells us, discretion is the better part of valor, and sometimes it is better to fold one’s hand rather than to throw good money after bad into the kitty. So be careful, Cara, be careful!
Speaking more generally, do you people see why it is so hard for movies like Brokeback Mountain to get made? Most art in our society exists to put us to sleep, and most of the films that we see are nothing more than a primitive version of “the feelies” against which Aldous Huxley warned us in Brave New World. But when something like Brokeback Mountain comes along, the grave cultural and political danger that real art always poses to a society suddenly reveals itself way out in the open. Plato did not expel the poets from his utopia merely because he had a tin ear, you know: he realized, just as many fundamentalist Christians today realize, that art can be dangerous. Have you noticed just how silent the fundis actually have been over Brokeback Mountain? Yes, yes, there have been complaints and even sporadic demonstrations, but no mass opposition. As yet. Why? Because the supreme artistry of Brokeback Mountain has flown under their radar scopes and temporarily stunned them with its emotional truth. But you just wait… Ten years from now the fundi reaction to Brokeback Mountain will be white-hot, and very, very sophisticated. Cara’s troubled relationship with her sister-in-law in 2006 is but a faint reminder of the chaotic social and political trouble to come for all of us in this community – and for many who do not know the first thing about it yet..