The Unintended Politics of Brokeback Mountain

Published on Friday, February 3, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

by Bill C. Davis

Brokeback Mountain has transcendent imagery, organic, poetic language, and honest, loving acting. All elements in this movie accumulate to create a gut-wrenching, illuminating mythic human narrative. As it penetrates the emotional psyche of audiences, without one character uttering a single political thought, this movie has shattering political implications. It concretizes and complicates, in the best sense, what has been debated as an abstraction and broadcast on TV as a cartoon. When asked if he had seen the movie, Bush gave a befuddled and flustered denial, as if he had been asked if he took an illegal drug recently. He was anxious for it to be known he did not take the movie in lest anyone think he was looking to have his thinking confounded or his moral certainties polluted. Beyond the times and locales in which these two men fall and continue in love, the back story of one of the men is key both personally and politically. As a boy, his father brought him to view the desecrated body of a man who stepped over the social, cultural, sexual line that the boy as an adult now steps over. That murder was both a criminal and political act for which no one had to suffer any justice. The image was a protein planted in the brain of a young boy by a deranged patriarch. It was an invisible fence put up in the landscape of his social consciousness and ultimately his emotional life. As an adult he defied this interdiction. The physical expression – the passionate kiss – the tender touch - the irresistible pull and penetration – all political acts – all acts of defiance even though he never thought of them as either. The need for secrecy and deception occurs to the two men as an unconscious reflex. The oppression is internal and external. This is the success and challenge of the omnipresent patriarch. Our lover is threatened with death for the thing that has revealed itself to be the most essential aspect of his existence. What moved him to embrace this essential thing in the face of the graphic consequences he held in his memory is mysterious and heroic. He was the embodiment of a house divided against itself and he moved toward his unique humanity in spite of the pre-ordained death sentence that was drilled into his senses. This is personal and political. This is rebellion and an exquisite erotic declaration to the open skies and the rocky, rolling countryside. Last month the US backed an Iranian initiative to deny United Nations consultative status to organizations working to protect the rights of gay people. At this level both governments acted much like the mindless father who led his son to view the savaged corpse of an outcast. The message – from Iran, US and the other governments who backed this initiative – is what one of the characters in Brokeback Mountain warns his lover – “if this thing grabs hold of us in the wrong place – at the wrong time – we’re dead.” The politics of that statement are in the questions that must follow – where is the wrong place? What is the wrong time? (Apparently even a gay bar in New Bedford Ma. in 2006 is the wrong place and time.) The poignancy of this movie is that the two men in “Brokeback” most likely didn’t think they even had the right to suffer what they were suffering – or that they were entitled to whatever happiness they could sneak in away from their proscribed lives. One of them was ready to make the bold move to ordered permanence – the other had the internal brand of his father’s edict. Humanity in all its variations, and when and where it can have full expression, is political. Protecting human rights is the reason societies organize and legislate. In cracking open the nucleus of this particular human experience Brokeback Mountain takes something exceptional and makes it universal which is the mark of great art and which, intended or not, creates and clarifies political action. Bill C. Davis is a playwright – www.billcdavis.com