Brokeback Mountain
And All The Craggy Mountains Yield
There are two separate scenes in Brokeback Mountain where each of the two cowboys are confronted by their wives about the nature of their relationship with the other. One you probably remember, and one you probably don’t, and it’s the less showier scene that gives the game away.
The scene you remember is the one where Michelle Williams (who got an Oscar nomination) confronts Heath Ledger (ditto) at a Thanksgiving dinner following their divorce. She complains that Ledger never brought back any fish from his “fishing trips” with Jake Gyllenhall (him, too), and that she tested him by tying a note to the end of his fishing line, which he never found, so what was he doing up there all this time? This leads to a good deal of over-the-top acting, which isn’t that great, but as I said, is memorable, and that’ll probably show up on the Oscar telecast. But that’s not the really interesting scene. The interesting scene is Gyllenhall and Anne Hathaway, when she obliquely confronts him about the same trips, but wonders why he always has to trek up to Wyoming, and why Ledger’s character never schleps down to Texas.
It’s a good question, and a fair one — especially because we later see Gyllenhall drive from Childress, Texas to Riverton, Wyoming and then turn right around and drive to the Mexican border — 18 hours up, 19 hours to (probably) El Paso, and 12 or so hours back home. That’s in a 1970’s era pickup truck, with no satellite radio. Not my idea of a vacation, and you’d think that Gyllenhall would be within his rights to get Ledger to come down to Texas for their next liaison.
So why does he go back up to Wyoming?
That’s a question that director Ang Lee (another nomination) is perfectly suited to answer. Lee is best known for the sublime Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which was just as much about the glory and majesty of nature as it was about Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi and the Green Destiny. Here, Lee has the Albertan Rockies to play with, and his sure-fire aesthetic sensibilities are all a-tingle in the high mountain air. Brokeback Mountain, before it is any other thing, is essentially a pastoral, a hymm to the outdoors and the outdoor life and living in a tent with the one you love, surrounded by the rugged beauty of the craggy mountains all around. Even the title tells us this; it is not “Ennis and Jack” or even “Gay Cowboys Eating Pudding”, it instead refers to the mountains and the sense of freedom and beauty that’s gained from being outside civilization. This explains why they never go to Texas; the area around Childress is anything but picturesque. (Having said that, nothing but love for North Texas — my folks are from Wichita County — but you know what I mean, friends.)
This of course is all of a piece with the canon of screenwriter Larry McMurtry (nominated, too, with frequent contributor Diana Ossana), who has made his reputation on books that contrast the Western skies of the Lone Star State and other locations with the problems of modern civilization, and who knows just what Childress, Texas looks like. Ledger and Gyllenhall are (after a fashion) the spiritual descendants of Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call, mourning a diminished frontier and seeking to leave civilization behind. In their case, they just leave a lot more behind than most other folks.
The diminished frontier is how Ledger’s Ennis Del Mar and Gyllenhall’s Jack Twist get together in the first place. The only available job in that part of Wyoming worth doing for people with no tangible skills seems to be herding sheep up to high elevations where they can graze for free on Forest Service property. Del Mar and Twist show up for the job, get it, and head up to the mountains to spend the summer amidst the natural splendor of trees and rivers and a thousand head of sheep. We see Twist furtively eyeing Del Mar, and Del Mar gruffly spitting out his words as though they were money. (Ledger can’t apparently. manage a decent Western accent, so he talks through the whole movie like his mouth was full of hot oatmeal.) They ride together, herd sheep together, drink cheap whiskey together, and eventually they sleep together, and that is more-or-less the point of the movie.
Del Mar tells himself that the relationship is a “one-time thing”, but it’s not clear that he ever believes that. So he and Jack meet up together, over the course of years, and they go back up to the high country and frolic naked in the streams, and ride horses and have monosyllabic conversations about how the world would be different if everything wasn’t the same. And in between the occasional high-altitude rendezvous, they go back to their wives and try to live as conventionally as they can manage.
It is here that Lee most flagrantly puts his thumb on the scale. The pastoral tug of Brokeback Mountain only works if Lee can make it look attractive — make it look necessary — compared to the rest of civilization. Del Mar’s home town in Wyoming is flat and gritty and ugly enough for even the most discriminating connoisseur of ugliness to relish. Twist’s ranch-style home and farm-equipment dealership don’t look a lot better, especially coupled with his overbearing father-in-law. It’s easy enough to make the great outdoors look beautiful and inviting, but maybe a little harder to make home and hearth look so unattractive, and Lee manages both. (Lee does an outstanding job; the only problem he really has is that he doesn’t seem to know from country-western music — except for one outstanding use of a particularly grim Merle Haggard song.)
This does not, of course, address two primary questions. First, it doesn’t address why they don’t just go fishing; you’d think you’d do a little fishing up there, no matter what your sexual orientation is. Second, it doesn’t address the moral issues attendant to pastoral love. I am not speaking here of homosexual love, necessarily. Brokeback Mountain introduces that question — wouldn’t it be grand, it seems to say, if the world celebrated gay-cowboy relationships instead of violently condemming them — but doesn’t dwell on it. Instead, its concern is more universal, and that’s all to the good. What would happen, it asks, if we followed our instincts and lived in a setting where pastoral love was not just something in poetry?
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.There will we sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.There I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroider’d all with leaves of myrtle;A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair linèd slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;
Well, who wouldn’t want to live that way if we could? That is to say, if we could bring an XBox 360 and an iPod, and if we could get Orville Redenbacher popcorn and Canadian icewine and nachos from the general store. Wouldn’t it be better if we could leave civilization behind and merely spend our lives enjoing the natural world and each other’s company? (Read into “company” whatever sorts of activities — carnal or otherwise — that you prefer.)
The traditional, historical response is that civilization is worthy and worth fighting for, and that the pastoral life is an illusion, a dream, something that can’t stand the scrutiny of reality, no matter how much we wish for it and want it. Jack Twist advocates for the pastoral setting, for a remote life spent with Ennis — but then we see, towards the close of the movie, just how bleak the life he intended would have been, living in a corner of his parents’ farmhouse on the dusty Western plains. Ennis is the traditionalist, and he argues for sacrifice, for putting jobs and responsibilities and children over pastoral frolicking and high-altitude intercourse. And it is his will that prevails, despite the costs. In the traditional, values-laden world, his is undoubtedly the right choice, the normal choice, the responsible choice. It is the choice that we hope we would make for our own lives.
Where Brokeback Mountain becomes transcendent, where it shatters the mold of the genre it has created, is there at the end, where we see the lonely, heartbreaking place where Ennis’s choices have left him, and Lee dares to ask the question — has it been worth it? Has Ennis made the right choice after all? And what would have the craggy mountains yielded?