"Gay Cowboy Movie"

Rating: 9/10 (20 July 2019)

The essence of Brokeback Mountain is wholly grasped within the teasing meme "gay cowboy movie." Brokeback Mountain is about the clashes between two worlds. At the first sight, Brokeback Mountain seems so western with its sceneries, costumes designs, music scores, vernaculars, etc. Tensions instantly surface when Ennis and Jack, two masculine high school dropouts from Wyoming, reveal their feelings towards each other. Brokeback Mountain stands out as a continuation of the western tradition and a bold deconstruction of every element western movies once possessed. Ennis, whose life path has been completed deviated for the sake of Jack, could have lived a happy life with his wife, daughters and hourly jobs. In fact, he attaches to his philosophy of life all the time, silently supporting his own family with his hard work. While Ennis never doubts the idea of nuclear family, Jack has envisioned a bold solution: to move to a ranch and live together henceforth. Hence it can be derived that neither of them actually has imagined another way of living, i.e., to move to Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, etc., and to start a brand new life. After all, the mountains and country life are what they grow up getting used to and what define their core identities as distinct individuals.
The tragedy of Brokeback Mountain lies in the inherent incompatibility between the old world and the new world. In this sense, Ennis and Jack face the dilemma a Norwegian woman Nora used to face. In the closing of A Doll House, Nora is such a woken woman who seeks a new livelihood in a male-dominated world. But Ennis and Jack lack both revolutionary qualities and fearless spirit of Nora. They even do not possess a proper term to define their sexuality. Without higher education and contact with the outer world, Ennis and Jack become two wandering ghosts unsure about their fates.
Strangely, no one knows better about the feeling of dis-belonging than the director Ang Lee himself, an East Asian migrant squeezing himself into Hollywood. Eventually, Brokeback Mountain is a love letter to all the "outsiders" struggling to fit into either world. The question posed in this movie is about human condition that lingers and will never fade away.