I was in my 20s when I read the original Annie Proulx short story “Brokeback Mountain” in The New Yorker; I was floored by it. First, because it was a Western. I’d spent years reading New Yorker fiction by then, and I didn’t think they went in for Western stuff. No, I figured their genre was more White Bougie Heterosexual Alcoholics in Muted Despair, you know?
I read further and met Ennis and Jack, two sheep herders who eke out a kind of strangled, self-loathing love story on the wind-whipped slopes of a mountain in Wyoming in the 1960s. I then realized why The New Yorker had published it — not so much the story, or the characters, or the setting, but the prose.
My god, the prose. So spare, so austere, so unsentimental — yet you could feel everything that was roiling just below its surface. The steely restraint hard-wired into every sentence was struggling to hold back a wall of emotion — feelings so pure and implacable that they terrified the story’s characters, Ennis especially. Which, duh, is why the story worked so perfectly, why reading it felt like slipping a callussed hand into a worn glove — the language of the story perfectly reflected the emotional state of Ennis, a man who’d wholly internalized a pinched, performative notion of masculinity.
When I read that they were making it into a movie — one that turns 20 years old this year — I figured they’d screw it up. How could they not? Movies can’t capture that kind of internal tension. Whenever they try to secure us a purchase inside a character’s head, they default to voiceover, which is clumsy and distracting. Then I read that nobody involved in the movie — not the screenwriters, director, or lead actors — were gay, and I figured: No yeah, this is doomed. (Today, we’d say that they “didn’t publicly identify as queer,” of course. For good reasons. But back then? Me and my friends? We just shrugged and said, “The straights are gonna blow it.”)
We didn’t talk about identity back then the way we do now. If they remade Brokeback today, the sexuality of the filmmakers involved would likely engender (heh) discussion in the wider culture, not just the queer community, like it did back then. That’s a good thing, generally.
