what do you mean this isn't a gay cowboy movie?!!

Rating: 10/10 (20 January 2006)

I have spent the last several hours reading user comments here about BBM (I got up to page 11). Everybody has said pretty much everything that can be said about the astonishing quality of this film in all possible aspects. And I was very very pleased to see how, almost universally, everyone was overwhelmingly moved by the sheer experience of it on the emotional/visceral level. At the same time, as I read on, I became more and more annoyed by so many of the commentators, gay and straight alike, wanting to 'neuter' the story by asserting the primacy of it's so-called 'universal' theme of thwarted LOVE at the expense of the specific example of it presented in the film. What is astonishing about this film is precisely the fact that the universality of "LOVE" in all of it's heavenly AND earthly pleasures and pains plays out to the fullest between homosexual couples AS WELL AS heterosexual ones. A few years back we got the straight version of this theme in Wong Kar Wai's IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, a nearly equally astonishing ravishing film. And I don't recall any reviewer of that film feeling it necessary to down play the heterosexuality of the couple involved. As a gay man, I had absolutely no problem with the fact that they were straight. It never even occurred to me to want to 'explain away' that seemingly essential aspect of their story. As a gay man who came of age in the late 50s, I learned without having to think about it how to twist the straight stories that constituted the social environment of this world to fit my own personal needs. Given only a little imagination, any heroine can be morphed into another hero. By and large heterosexuals never find themselves in the position of needing to do this. This kind of 'make believe' is foreign to their lived experience. Until now that is.
BROKEBACK MOUNTIAN has changed all that. It is precisely the fact that it is about the blooming of love/lust between two seemingly 'ordinary' (and at first seemingly straight) young country boys in the outback of Wyoming that gives the film it's astonishing visceral impact. I do not think it is now possible for a 'love story' about a straight couple to achieve such a level of impact on an audience. We've been there and done that ad nauseum. No, BBM is the utterly astonishing experience it is precisely BECAUSE it is about the socially doomed sex/love relationship between two men. Not two stereotypically 'gay' men of the "Will & Grace" type or like that pathetic caricature of a gay man in that awful film of Tod Haynes. But rather real flesh and blood MEN whose maleness is unquestionable.
This then brings us to the real crux of the 'problem' with BBM: in a word SEX. Sex between two very hot & virile men who could have had any woman they wanted (and did) and yet who only knew truly mind boggling passion in their physical sexual experience with each other. It is precisely THAT which dooms their love for each other. It is precisely THAT which is the 'forbidden' about their love for each other. 'Love-buddies', if you will, only become 'problimatic' when they veer too close to becoming 'F-buddies' (if I'm not mistaken, one has to be 'coy' about these things on this site.) After all, BUTCH CASSIDY & THE SUNDANCE KID was a huge huge success. It was very easy to ignore the 'homoerotic' guts beneath the platonic skin. And that is what I see happening now with the response to BBM. People are desperately trying to hide the 'wolf' of real men, not just having sex with each other, but having the most rapturous sex of their lives, sex beyond anything they ever experienced with a woman, under the 'sheepskin' of some kind of sexless platonic 'ideal' called L O V E.
Both Ennis and Jack were sexually functional with women. But they were only sexually ALIVE with each other. When Jack resurfaced into Ennis' life with his postcard, what nearly drove Ennis crazy was not just the prospect of seeing his ole buddy. It was rather the prospect of becoming ALIVE again in Jack's arms in the throws of their sexual passion. When Jack finally arrives they both try as best they can to maintain a buddy/buddy stance. That lasts about 10 seconds. And it is Ennis who breaks that impossible illusion, throwing all caution to the wind and in his sex/passion crazed state drags Jack, not into hiding, but rather to the foot of the stairs to his own back door where he practically devours him with kisses to the utter horror of his wife who, at that precise moment, has come looking for them. What so blows her mind, is less that he is kissing another man, but rather the total abandonment of his passion. She had never seen her husband that totally and unabashedly ALIVE before.
Ennis and Jack are not mere 'symbols' for some kind of sexless platonic 'ideal'. They are very real men who were nearly starving to death for want of the nourishment they got from their sexual passion for each other. It is the sexual component of their relationship which gives it it's overwhelming power. To rob it of that, would leave us with just an empty not very noteworthy sheepskin. And BBM would not be the movie it is.