Brokeback Mountain is easily one of the most poignant and heartbreaking queer movies I have come across. Talking about this movie would involve the consideration of a love affair between two men who are otherwise known as heterosexual in their own personal lives and also have heteronormative families. However, meeting with each other sparks off a series of incidents in their communication and attachments which would render their relationship to be called a homosexual relationship.
We don’t have the power to label them specifically with any labels of the LGBTQIA++ community, because we are an audience outside of their relationship and their personal identity, however we are involved enough as an audience to explore the facets of their relationship. When they first look at each other, outside Joe Aguirre’s office, Ennis Del Mar (played by Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) are unknowingly objects of each other’s gay gaze. As gazers, these two men can appreciate each other for who they are, not for whom we’d like them to be, as is the case in other mainstream movies. To gaze at images that reflect our “inner selves” is a powerful and profound experience, all the more so for its rarity among queer people. The shot where Jack sees Ennis through the reflection of the mirror of his car is one the first instances we are introduced to queer gaze in the film.
Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain earned a reputation for being “the gay cowboy movie” in the months and even years after it came out, though this pithy description of the film definitely misses the mark on the complexity and depth of the situation of these two men in love. However, whether these two men are “gay cowboys” or “bisexual shepherds” is a question to be pondered about. When these two men meet for the first time, they stand with awkward distance from each other. There is intense staring between the two of them, but their interactions aren’t friendly, as would their era would dictate how interactions between two “masculine” men be.
However, how Any Lee slowly breaks apart the hyper masculine air between them is what we need to study. When they are at Brokeback Mountain, looking after the sheep, their horses and dogs, it’s only the two of them. Slowly their interactions start to become softer as they loosen up and their communication changes from pushes, and brushes of fingers and pats on the back to longer embraces. They become less tense, less guarded, and most importantly, less subtle. Notably, Jack breaks the touch barrier when Ennis gets injured and Jack gently takes a cloth to clean blood off Ennis’ face. This moment is significant– Jack makes the first move towards a more vulnerable relationship and even though Ennis shies away from the touching (with all the surly grumbling of an embarrassed bear, innuendo fully intended), it opens the door for more touching.
This is where even their gazes start to change. The looking away from each other’s eyes, avoidance of gazes when one feels another’s gaze on them, turns into a more mutually accepted intersection of gaze where the two of them allow themselves to really “look” at each other. The initial gazing, (which is primarily when mother is unaware of the other person’s gaze) is mostly lust, but it soon develops into more of love as they open up emotionally to each other and seek respite in each other’s arms.
One particularly notable point, however, is a scene with a lack of gazing that is almost more telling than the other scenes, because it introduces our first scene of explicit sexual attraction. Ennis is using one of their water rations to bathe himself. The camera is unfocused when it comes to his body– his bare frame is blurred– and the entire focus is on Jack. As Jack peels a potato and smokes a cigarette, he is very noticeably concentrating on his work, but his shallow breathing and twitchiness is clearly meant to show that he’s highly aware that Ennis is naked and only a few feet away. Here is where we break the sexuality barrier, much like we had broken the touch barrier before– at this point, we have confirmation that there is sexual tension, and that at some point, someone will want to act on it (we’re led to think that the initiator might be Jack, considering that we focus primarily on his sexual attraction in this scene but, it’s Ennis who initiates).
This is also an important subversion of Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in which Mulvey argues that the Desirable Object being looked at is a) female and b) fetishized. Here we have a scene intended to have erotic undertones, yet the Desirable Object is male, out of focus, and very intentionally not being looked at (and perhaps if Ennis were female, this would have been a different scene entirely). So there is complete reversal of the heteronormative male gaze in this homoerotic relationship between these two men.
That night when they finally break their sexual barrier, there is a dominating air in Ennis who takes Jack from behind and Jack who responds to it with stoicism. Even if the sexual tension between them was volatile, the sexual act in itself was uncomfortable and rough and that is because these two subjects are aware they are violating a heterosexual masculine code. So the next morning is again followed by avoidance of gaze, until the next time they act upon their sexual impulses which is different from the rough situation they had met earlier. They touch each other lovingly and shower gentle and passionate kisses. They are more welcoming of affection now since they have broken the walls of stoicism that had stood in them when they realised that they were vulnerable because of their sexual tension.
Both men end up married to women whom they appear to care for and likely have some kind of attraction to, but it is notable that while their sexual relationships with their wives can be complicated, their sexual relationship with each other comes with the kind of natural passion that one would expect more from a marriage. So the “normalcy” of heteronormative relationships is broken because even when they have heterosexual marriages with children they clearly are in love with each other and pasisonately kiss when they meet each other after a long time.
They become more friendly towards each other and also physically affectionate and playful, which is seen by their employer from a distance. This man acts as the personification of homophobia and quietly acts to separate the two men because of their increasing friendship. The breakdown of toxic masculine barriers is torturous to the employer’s fixed heterosexual gaze that guards off any relationship other than one between a man and woman. Ennis’s wife, Alma Del Mar (Michelle Williams) sees the two men making out, and her gaze as an outsider is uncomfortable but it also acts as a lens through which the audience gets to know about the passion of the relationship between Ennis and Jack which they had to brush under the carpet because of a heteronormative society.
While Brokeback Mountain would meet critical acclaim — even earning Lee the 2006 Academy Award for Best Director — the content was, of course, not everybody’s cup of tea. It was a definite challenge to mainstream heterosexual pairings. Celebrations and condemnations aside, Brokeback Mountain is so memorable because of the uncertainty of its ending, where Jack’s death is uncontested but its cause remains up to interpretation. Ennis receives a postcard from Jack with the word “Deceased” stamped on it and soon has to come to terms with the loss of his lover. Ennis calls up Lureen Twist (played by Anne Hathaway) to discuss the circumstances surrounding his lover’s death. It’s a tough scene to watch, as Jack’s two partners discuss the loss of their beloved with extreme tension, as it is uncertain how much Lureen knows about the two men’s relationship. Whether Jack was really killed in an accident or was a victim of hate crime, we would never know. As Lureen Twist tells her story of how Jack died to Ennis, the camera cuts from her closeup to one of Ennis, then to a long shot of a grassy field next to some railroad tracks, where three men are beating Jack to death — the kicks to Jack’s groin reinforce the idea that this is a hate crime. It is conventional in film editing to cut from a close-up of an actor’s face to another scene to indicate that the following scene is from that character’s imagination, but this is not always the case, and viewers are left to decide whether the murder is all in Ennis’ head or if they are being presented with the truth behind Jack’s death.
Towards the end of the Film, Ennis visits Jack’s house and even if he is denied Jack’s ashes (Jack had told his wife that he wishes to be buried at Brokeback mountain, which is a testimony of his love for Ennis) he is allowed to go up to Jack’s room. He breaks down seeing the bloodied shirt inside Jack’s wardrobe and is allowed by Jack’s mother to take it home.
During the final scenes of the movie Ennis’s daughter Alma Jr. (Played by Kate Mara) surprises him with news of her engagement. Even if he tries to escape from attending the event at first, he gives in at last. After Alma leaves, Ennis walks over to his closet to visit his and Jack’s shirts, which are now inverted, with Jack’s shirt inside his and hung next to a photograph of Brokeback Mountain. Tears again come to his eyes, and he utters the iconic line, “Jack, I swear,” . It’s as if the separation from Jack and their inability to finally be there for each other had only left them with Brokeback Mountain. That was what Jack had told him when they met after a long time and fought with each other, “I wish I knew how to quit you. And, so what we got now is Brokeback Mountain! Everything’s built on that! That’s all we got, boy, fuckin’ all. So I hope you know that, even if you don’t never know the rest!” Even if Ennis was unable to act on his feelings for Jack in the fact, he decides to be there for his family in the present . In a way, Brokeback Mountain isn’t just a symbol in which two men who are taught to be vehemently masculine by the society break their boundaries and accept their feelings for each other and engage in a “forbidden” intimacy. It is also symbolic of the realisation of the need to accept love over rigidity of societal expectations in mid century rural America.
With a heart-wrenching screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, thoughtful direction by Ang Lee, and strong performances by the supporting cast, Brokeback Mountain continues to be one of the most celebrated films of heteronormative subversion using gaze and homosexual interactions in the genre of queer and LGBTQIA++ cinema. This subversion of looking and touching within masculinity culture fits Brokeback Mountain squarely in the queer film tradition. Ang Lee captured the complexity and conflict of breaking these barriers in a sensitive way, and compels us to think about the way men look, touch, and love each other, and how we as a culture prevent them from doing that.
Written by Sambrita Bhattacharyya
Edited by Anusha Khan
Featured image via Daily Motion
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