Thoughts on fiction and homosexual sex
Currently getting much ink and a respectable number of customers in theaters around the country,
Brokeback Mountain has caused me to take another look at the story that is the source of the movie.
Annie Proulx is a writer of considerable skill who has built up a critical and public following with books like
The Shipping News,
Accordion Crimes,
Close Range and others. The last book listed is a collection of short stories in which "Brokeback Mountain" appeared. I have read the three books listed, some time ago, and enjoyed them for the writing and characterizations. I have not seen the movie. I don't know if I will.
The longish story that produced the story of star-crossed lover-cowboys brought a mixed response from me as I read it. Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar are in almost every way archetypal cowboys. Very physical men who have pared down their responses to life accordingly, long on action and short on verbalization and introspection. The slow and skilful depiction of their gradual attraction, suddenly exploding into physical coupling on a cold, snowy night in a shared sleeping bag, sets the story on a tragic course unintelligible to the two men.
If Jack and Ennis had a wider range of references in life and experience, they might have been better able to deal with their attraction, to understand what was happening to them. They think they can leave what has happened on that isolated campsite right there, not carry it with them. The rest of the story works out their failure to leave their experience at that campsite, and to escape themselves. They each marry, have children, try to leave the other alone except as a friend.
The incongruity of their cowboy archetypes and the mutual sexual attraction they feel appears intended to highlight the tragedy of their denial and incomprehension. For me, the incongruity provoked what I am sure was unintended laughter; Proulx often presents limited characters failing to cope with situations misunderstood and baffling to them, with humor of a very wry sort intended, I am sure. The humor I felt did not have this effect in "Brokeback Mountain." My laughter was pretty much of the sort you feel when slapstick is suddenly presented, with no connection to the broader story.
The exact scene which produced my inappropriate response was as follows, as Ennis's teeth are chattering in the cold, while Jack is wrapped in his large bedroll:
"Jesus Christ, quit hammerin and get over here. Bedroll's big enough," said Jack in an irritable sleep-clogged voice. It was big enough, warm enough, and in a little while they deepened their intimacy considerably. Ennis ran full-throttle on all roads, whether fence-mending or money-spending, and he wanted none of it when Jack seized his left hand and brought it to his erect cock. Ennis jerked his hand away as though he'd touched fire, got to his knees, unbuckled his belt, shoved his pants down, hauled Jack onto all fours, and, with the help of the clear slick and a little spit, entered him, nothing he'd done before but no instruction manual needed. [emphasis added]
The above passage presents the sexual union of the two cowboys as though they were undertaking an unexpected job of work relating to stock. They unceremoniously spit on their hands, and go to work. The scene's incongruity simply made me laugh.
Later in the story, the cowboys meet again after acquiring wives and children, producing a scene which did elicit a feeling of loss and tragedy in me, but not for the two cowboys. On the landing outside the front door of Ennis's apartment, they fall together, lips locking, oblivious of Ennis's wife opening the door a crack, and seeing them. Ennis and Jack take off "for a few drinks," eventually ending up in a motel, writhing on the sweaty motel bed in sexual release. As they leave Ennis's place, the echo of his wife Alma's "misery voice" trails after them, "Ennis-" she begins, but they are gone. There is the tragedy for me in this story. A wife and mother discovering that not only is her husband unfaithful to her, but he is not even the man she believed him to be; it does not lessen the unfairness to know that he has similarly deceived himself as to what he is.
I don't think I will go to the movie.
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