The irony of the 60s and 70s

Rating: 10/10 (8 February 2006)

Ennis and Jack live in a world of stunning natural beauty, and I suppose the director meant for it to be that way. But even up to the present, for every breathtaking setting in rural Wyoming there is the omnipresent threat of a rigid and repressive social order that is lethal to variant lifestyles. In effect, Ennis and Jack are as much prisoners of geography as they are of their own hopeless love. The trade off against the mountain beauty of Wyoming is the looming menace of a social order that stamps out unwanted diversity, such as unisexual love, with horrible dispatch. As the plot unwinds into the licentious 70s, Ennis and Jack are faced with the inescapable irony that a few tanks of gas or even hitchhiking and the courage to leave wives and children would have delivered them to a locale where gay relations not only were tolerated but were open and freer than they have ever been in US history. Intensifying the irony is the fact that a trailer for the documentary "Gay Love in the 70s" precedes the showing of Brokeback Mountain. The garbage strewn streets of the East Village or the "gay ghettos" of San Francisco and Los Angeles, while not as awesome and clean as the mountains of Wyoming, would have provided the perfect setting for the domestic conjoined bliss that Ennis and Jack so desired. But they remain prisoners of their own locus on earth and the human horrors concealed therein.