June 26th, 2013, DOMA and Prop 8 - Struck Down

Rating: 10/10 (27 June 2013)

There are 2225 reviews of this film here at IMDb. On this momentous day when a good measure of marriage equality has been recognized by the Supreme Court of the United States I would like to add the 2226th. When I first saw this movie I was with my partner of 13 years and it was December of 2005. For the next two days I was in a state of sensory overload. And no matter where I was or what I was doing, this film, it's characters, and the story, ran unbridled through my head. We went back to see it again two days later. And then again the next day. And finally, a total of somewhere around fifteen times. I'm not sure because I lost count around ten.
We held hands as we watched this film pour over us like a waterfall from this giant screen and for the first time understood, in a way we couldn't have ever understood before, the power of "the big screen". For the first time we understood what other couples experienced as they would watch films like "The Shop Around the Corner", "Romeo and Juliet", or "Shakespear in Love", in the giant format. It was overwhelming. For the first time in our lives we weren't watching from the outside. The raw emotion, love, hurt, happiness, and sadness was in "our language". And so over and over again, we sat in a dark theater, holding hands, and watched our lives for the first time, role by on a giant screen. We could have gone fifteen more times.
Our story, on paper, didn't resemble the one in Brokeback Mountain. We were actually very happy and loved and accepted by our friends and families. The tragedy of this story, though, was that Ennis could not bring himself to live the life he was meant to live and enjoy the richness of what could have been. He let the world decide his happiness. Or, unhappiness as it were. I found that heart breaking; and felt maybe just a touch of survivors guilt along with the sadness.
A month later, coming home from visiting our families for Christmas, after these numerous viewings of this film, I was thinking about the part of the story that dealt with the regret for what might have been. The part about how this man diminished the importance of his happiness to the point of no longer believing he needed it or was entitled to it. Either way the result was the same: living in a prison without bars. I then took a moment to reflect on our lives together and asked myself if there was any way in which I/we might be doing the same thing to ourselves; and I remembered that about ten years earlier we had talked about getting "married". It would have only been a private ceremony for family and friends with no legal standing but it would have been an important public declaration of who we were. Ultimately we didn't go through with it. And the reason we didn't go through with it shocked me as I realized it, in that car, driving home, that Christmas. We had diminished it mentally and emotionally to the point that we no longer believed we needed or even deserved it. Mostly because we couldn't have it, for real.
But in fact now, in 2005, we could get legally married in Massachusetts. Thinking about that film, thinking about how those characters had deprived themselves of a happiness they could have had, I proposed to my partner. I told him that I thought we had bought into the lie that we didn't deserve this, or it wasn't important, or that it didn't matter, because that's what most people believed. I told him how much I loved him and how I didn't want to wake up 13 more years from now even more disconnected from what our true happiness could be. Should be. We married in Boston a month later in January of '06. We flew there from Texas and faked a residence by using a friends home address, opening a bank account, and putting our friend's utilities in our names. Even though it felt a little like a cold war spy mission, the ceremony was very moving for us and our one witness.
So, this film changed our lives in an unexpected way. I will never forget sitting in that theater, holding hands with my now husband, and seeing that film tower over us like a skyscraper from that giant screen. It is still overpowering thinking about it today, June 26, 2013, as we are now recognized as legally married in the eyes of the U.S. Federal Government. Is Brokeback Mountain also a great film? Absolutely. Is this a very good film review? No. But there are 2225 film reviews here to argue the merits of what I believe to be a terrific film. At this moment in time it is my intention to take the opportunity to say what a life changing film this is. My husband and I just celebrated 22 years together on our last anniversary. Today we celebrate equal justice under the law. But it was this film, back in 2005, that revealed to us the invisible bars we had wrongly accepted and placed around our own lives, and opened up the opportunity for us to rectify the injustice we had done to ourselves. And today, the U.S. Supreme Court has delivered us a long overdue measure of justice and removed it's bars from around our lives. This is a great film. And it was a life changer for us. And today, June 26, 2013, I just wanted to mark this historical moment.