a kfi radio caller called it rape -- au contraire

Rating: Null/10 (25 January 2006)

...the first coming together scene was perceived as "rape" by an LA-area radio caller who identified himself as gay. The next caller, a straight black man, thought quite the opposite. People do indeed leave this film with different ways of processing it, based on their individual lives and natures. A gay person who had a safe coming out might have seen the first sex scene as rape. A wounded heart, straight or gay, may have seen the same scene as a turning point for a person who needed love desperately but did not understand how or why or where to find it, until that moment. From my animus perspective it was not at all rape, it was a mutual moment in time where one human embraced the pain and release of another's, hard and rough. It was one human being tender enough to see another's suffering and to allow that person, whom he already had fallen in love with, to divest himself of some suffering. To find some pleasure together, which created a bond stronger than either could have foreseen. Together the characters were their true selves. Ang Lee brings them to real life as people whom you and I might know, and how wonderful for them -- for any of us -- to understand another and to be understood for moments in time that are brief yet feel like eternity. But be torn apart because of bigotry, hatred and acts of violence that have roots in society. What a horrible shame. The theme of unrequited love, of breaking up, is dealt with honestly and honorably. The pain of love lost could rip a person apart inside and who doesn't know that feeling?. But in Brokeback it began to resonate within, until the love experienced became a cloak to bring out from time to time in bittersweet remembrance. Personally I left the theater at 12:30 pm and drove an hour back up from the desert to my own little mountain abode, tears streaming in the moonlight and feeling more whole than I had felt in a long time.