Shepherding RomanceReviving the Politics of Romantic Love in Brokeback Mountain By BARBARA KOZIAK
[1] The recent film, Brokeback Mountain, directed by Ang Lee and based on Annie Proulx’s short story, received an overwhelmingly admiring response from newspaper and magazine film critics, won a series of prominent film awards, and roused a large, fervent fan base. Several large on-line discussion forums created in the months following the film’s release analyze every scene, symbol, and character, and remain to this day communities with interests that have expanded beyond the film. Coinciding with the emergence of You Tube and a new amateur video culture, fan enthusiasm created both lyrical tributes and hilarious parodies on video websites. A mini-Brokeback tourist industry emerged, with one website devoting itself to mapping and photographing every shooting location for every scene. These web-based responses culminated in net-generated cultural activism and even the popular naming of a new syndrome, “Brokeback Mountain Fever.”
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[34] In the end, what has elicited so many fans is certainly the deliberately etched romance narrative, and the density of the characterization, locale, and geography, that repay extensive interpretation and analysis. It is also that combination of longing and grief, a communal experience of grief for two characters, which has affected viewers. Many people reported being sleepless the night after first seeing the film, going back to see it again and again, with each viewing revealing different dimensions, and for weeks finding themselves tossed by waves of grief as though they themselves were unrequitedly in love. The desire to understand the experience drove many to seek out forums to share the experience. “Brokeback got us good,” Jack’s line to Ennis, would be the byline for the forums. The heart of the “Ultimate Brokeback Forum” community (
http://davecullen.com/forum), the largest forum, with over 7,000 registered members, resides in the topic threads devoted to every imaginable aspect of the film—every significant scene has its own topic; separate threads are devoted to, for example, symbolism, music, to every actor, and to “Brokeback Mountain Fever Support” and “How Brokeback Affected Me.” Although other forums exist, including
www.ennisjack.com, with more than 4,000 members, community.livejournal.com/wranglers, principally a slash forum for posting new writing that incorporates the original characters, with more than 2,000 members, and
www.bettermost.net/forum, with 1200 members. The David Cullen forum is the largest and the most active on a variety of fronts. The community this forum created engaged in varied actions to recognize and disseminate the power of Brokeback, first by using small donations to pay for an advertisement run in the trade newspaper, Variety, reminding readers that even after the surprise Oscar loss, it was the most honored movie of the year. Next, a campaign was launched to have members donate copies of the DVD to U.S. public libraries, especially rural libraries. Finally, with volunteer editors, the group recently published Beyond Brokeback, a book compilation of the best forum posts about the personal effects of the film (Ultimate Brokeback Forum).
[35] The book in particular evinces the impact of the film as a romantic love story, but also as a galvanizer of personal and political action. While forum participants are a self-selected group and their posts were further selected by volunteer editors, the book's pieces reflect the extraordinary combination of personal, emotional, and political transformation and engagement incited by the film. The effect crossed sexualities of gay, straight, bisexual, or ambiguous, and some were inspired to search out old friends and lovers while others were inspired to quit jobs or seek therapy. The most common general understanding of the film viewed it as a warning to those who had lost, or never found, courage or hope in various spheres of life—a warning about the half-life Ennis tried to live—but of course the most persistently noted loss was of transcending love.
[36] Many posters emphatically write about the place of romantic love in their own lives. Some straight posters were newly dissatisfied with their marriages or, conversely, realized they had been taking their partners for granted; others took the step to leave their straight relationships and commit to same-sex partners. For some gay men, the movie was a revelation of the possibilities of romantic love against the constrictions experienced even with a gay male culture of multiple short-term partners or else just an unexplained emotional constriction. A gay, thirty-six-year-old journalist, for example, realized he had understood heterosexual love stories only intellectually, but with Brokeback he could finally feel the paradigm: "Is this what mainstream love stories . . . feel like for heterosexuals?” (93). Similarly, a sixty-one-year-old man writes, "They've allowed me to feel what real love must feel like. I was straight and married for seven years; after I had a gay partner for fifteen years, but no love, just settling. Now I feel that I deserve to know what real love is” (210). A forty-three-year-old man who in his youth engaged in an intense friendship with a male roommate writes, “I thought that coming out would remove the unseen obstacles and make finding love easier, but now . . . I see that hasn't been the case. I've found plenty of this and that, but never anything approximating the heart-binder that started it all” (81). Another gay man, happy enough in a secure, comfortable relationship, fell into a passionate love affair, eventually ending it to avoid hurting his partner. Now, after seeing the film, he questions whether he made the right decision (82). Thus some men were actually introduced for the first time to the paradigm scenario of romantic love. Previously, they had been unable to identify with heterosexual stories, and the scenario was missing from their experience of gay culture. Others who had experienced passionate love now had the transcendent value of love affirmed by the experience of the film. At the same time, some straight viewers were reminded of the same paradigm but were able to identify or care for same-sex characters. Thus, that old model of romantic love was resuscitated but in a communal context; people were talking about movie, and therefore often about love, en mass.
[37] The forum participants talked about love but seemed to come to the forum through a shared emotive experience. These discussions were incited by a complex and multi-layered communal sharing of grief, longing, and joy, a potent mix of emotion dubbed "Brokeback Mountain Fever." One poster described leaving the theater stunned and pulling off the road to cry (10). Another wrote that she "would wake up in the middle of the night with scenes and music from the movie in my head, weeping uncontrollably" (181). The grief seemed to be both directed at the characters themselves, as many viewers felt a maternal affection for the two young lovers, or even a vicarious state of unrequited love for a character or the film as a whole, but this was also entangled with surprise grief from their own lives. One poster describes a broad, encompassing grief that crosses demographic lines, saying the film “opened a bottomless well of sadness in them that they didn't know existed” (54). In fact, as the poster notes, Annie Proulx thought that because of the recent death of his father, Ang Lee could evoke the dirge-like quality of the story. At the same time, an erotic longing was mixed into this grief and precisely set the grounds for grief. Probably the best articulation of this fever was posted by “Valkyrie:” "After I saw the movie for the first time, I was stunned and could barely talk. Images and scenes flashed through my mind. I could hardly sleep. And then it started: waves of pleasure rolled over me, sometimes like lightning flashes sizzling through my body, again and again . . . I kept seeing the love scenes repeatedly with my inner eyes. And I started feeling aroused most of the time. Sometimes I cried from grief and pain, but then the pleasure waves started again” (205). Thus the film portrays not only the hoary romantic love narrative, but through its reconfiguration of elements, particularly I believe through its reconstitution of masculinity and its challenge to the heteronormativity of love, evokes a common audience response that recaptures the vicarious emotional feel of orthodox romantic love. A significant audience, in other words, fell in love, passionately and bodily with the film, with the characters, and with the actors. In the early days there was a rush to see the film over and over again, and the forum posters confessed or boasted of the number of their visits to the theater, some seeing the movie ten to twenty times. A similar upsurge in viewings and interpretative dissections came with the release of the DVD in 2006 and the added bonus of being able to stop, rewind, capture, and manipulate images from the film. Now posters are able to delve into the question of, for example, what Ennis and Jack whispered to each other at the start of the second tent scene (consensual answer: Ennis: “I’m sorry.” Jack: “It’s alright, it’s alright.”). The obsession, the grief, and the longing, all components of “Brokeback Mountain Fever,” perfectly encapsulate the emotional experience of classical romantic love.
http://www.genders.org/g50/g50_koziak.html
