April 14, 2006
Brokeback Mountain Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 04:30 PM EST I finally saw Brokeback Mountain last night. I found it a beautiful and moving film, as everything I had heard about it led me to expect; I was more surprised at what a great classic love story and classic Western it was too, in its way. The very greatest, most mythic love stories have been tales of love that is taboo. Heloise and Abelard, Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet are all loves that are too big and wayward for civilization itself. Brokeback Mountain is the same. The story couldn’t be older, but in an age where being a member of the enemy clan or a celibate religious order won’t do anymore for setting love against all of society, homosexuality is a natural (though it is a taboo that has rapidly eroded, and for that reason the story begins back in 1963). And it’s also very much a tale of the dream of the American West. In Brokeback Mountain as in so many Westerns, the glorious mountainous West is itself a central character, the unspoiled land beyond the confinements and contradictions of the cramped settled world. The high country where the two lovers’ romance is born is rapturously beautiful, unsullied and unpeopled, with gorgeous, soaring mountains, pure streams, and endless skies almost too blue to believe. The mundane land that the two must descend to from there is unrelievedly flat and desolate and stuffy and squalid in every scene. These two worlds are played off each other for the entire film—right down to its very last frame. The symbolism is straightforward and unapologetic; it works because it is presented with utter conviction, no less than, say, the symbolism of liberating night versus soul-deadening day in Tristan und Isolde. The open West is the ideal of spiritual redemption and liberation, exactly as in so much of American literature and in so many Western movies. The movie brought two great American novels immediately to mind for me. The first is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. If that is a love story at all, it is a muted, chaste, preadolescent one, with race standing in for sex. But race was the defining taboo of Huckleberry Finn’s time as surely as homosexuality is of ours, and Huck and Jim, like Ennis and Jack, repeatedly escape, with limited success, into a primeval American Western landscape, in that case the wide Mississippi River. The second novel is Lolita. Vladimir Nabokov, in his dark comedy, had the genius to choose a love that not only was forbidden when the book was written but will and should remain forbidden, and that is, in fact, unforgivable. Again the love sends the lovers (only one of whom truly loves) fleeing into an American dream landscape, one that covers almost the whole nation, East and West, North and South, one where the conceit of the purity of the open land (like the purity of love itself) is mocked even as it is evoked, since the escape is to motel after motel after motel. F. Scott Fitzgerald, at the rhapsodic end of The Great Gatsby, writes of “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world.” That is the same vision of prelapsarian perfection, but in a feminized incarnation that has been ravaged by man and time. The West of the imagination, and the Western, has always been about a rugged, tough masculine landscape, and about man trying to live up to it, and being tested by it, rather than overwhelming it. How strangely appropriate, then, that the Western, in its latest apotheosis, should get a tale of monumental, mythical love that is love between two men.
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