Sharrett, Christopher, Department of Communication (March 2009). “Death of the Strong, Silent Type: The Achievement of Brokeback Mountain.” Film International, no. 37.
excerpt from Page 26
American Gothic
Ennis’s visit to the Twist homestead in the penultimate scene provides clues to much of the film, and explains why Ennis is necessarily the strong, silent male. If the Twists are representative of the American family, one has little choice, failing truly revolutionary options, but to shut up and put on a determined look that projects courage and conceals pain.
The Twist farmstead, weathered and tumbledown on the outside, incredibly stark and chilly in the interior, is a version of Grant Wood’s much-debated, omnipresent 1933 painting, American Gothic. The painting is indeed gothic, conveying the horror of Middle America as seat of repression and absolute order. The film has its correlates for Wood’s glaring farmer, hand clasping a threatening pitchfork, his female companion averting her gaze, her dress fastened tightly at the neck, and the peaked gothic (which is to say barbaric) gable of their wooden house behind them. John Twist (Peter McRobbie) is almost an Expressionist ghoul from the Weimar cinema, his words to Ennis (laying down the law about Jack’s final resting place) threatening beyond their actual content. Jack’s meek, frightened-looking mother (Roberta Maxwell) is not mentioned by name, even in the final credits, so irrelevant is she to the world around her, and even her own household.
If Lureen and Alma are marginal to their worlds (Lureen less so than Alma since she is a somewhat phallicized woman, internalizing the father’s values and running his affairs), Jack’s mother is the film’s final statement about women in patriarchal society—she has learned to mind her place to survive. Her small kindnesses to Ennis certainly don’t go unnoticed by her husband; they are permitted since they don’t disturb the way things are. The mother might be said to suggest a tiny potentiality within an awful setting, but her presence seems more involved in suggesting how the best of humanity can survive regardless of social systems, rather than hope for transformative change in the future.
This small, economical scene is one of the cinema’s most devastating portraits of patriarchal society. Jack’s early comments about the father’s utter failure (‘can’t please my old man, no way’), especially as a mentor (‘never taught me a thing’), find pointed meaning in the scene. As does Ennis’s story about his own father forcing him to look at the body of a dead gay man in a Wyoming drainage ditch, the patriarch both outright murdere(Ennis’s rumination about the father’s complicity is persuasive) and child abuser, his legacy forever imprinted on Ennis’s shattered psyche.
The last scene, with Ennis alone at his trailer, is exceptionally bleak, modified only a little by the arrival of Alma, Jr. and her announcement of her wedding, which momentarily cheers her father – if the concept of joy has any application to him. Contrary to several critics, I don’t read this scene as a poignant affirmation of marriage, with Ennis (alone after Alma, Jr.’s departure) sadly mourning the marriage to Jack that never happened. The scene’s emphasis is on desolation rather than what-might-have-been. After all, there is no evidence that Ennis would have accepted a union of any sort with Jack, his every gesture refusing that kind of intimacy out of fear of society and himself.
The film’s last shots are of the bloody shirts, the postcard of the mountain, and the trailer window pointing to a frontier that no longer exists, as all possibility is foreclosed. The strong, silent American male has come to a cul de sac, that is the place to which the American ideal of civilization has led. Ennis’s stoicism, his playing by the rules in the hope of something better, has simply produced his erasure
Full article:
http://www.atypon-link.com/INT/doi/pdf/10.1386/fiin.7.1.16Christopher Sharrett is Professor of Communication and Film Studies at Seton Hall
University. He is author of The Rifleman (Wayne State University Press), editor of
Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmodern Narrative Film (Maisonneuve Press),
and Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media (Wayne State University Press), and
co-editor of Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film. His work has appeared in Cineaste,
Cinema Journal, Framework, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Film International,
Kino Eye, Senses of Cinema, and other publications, including numerous anthologies.
About Film InternationalFilm International started in 1973 as Filmhäftet in Sweden and has through the years recruited contributors among the most distinguished scholars and journalists around the world.
