[Brokeback Mountain] doesn't offer any model of successful heterosexual masculinity, or of successful heterosexual relationships in general. The straight men are all either strutting oafs, bitter bigots like Jack Twist's father, or "nice-guy" weaklings like Alma's second husband, whose well-meaning effeminacy contrasts sharply with Ennis's rugged manliness. Jack and Ennis are the only "real men" in the story, and their love is associated with the high country and the vision of paradise it offers - a world of natural beauty and perfect freedom, of wrestling matches and campfires and naked plunges into crystal rivers - and a world with no girls allowed. Civilization is women and babies and debts and fathers-in-law and bosses; freedom is the natural world, and the erotic company of men. It's an old idea of the pre-Christian world come round again - not that gay men are real men too; but that real men are gay.
Ross Douthat
No comments:
Post a Comment