| Brokeback Mountain |
[19 Feb 2006|09:06am] |
Wow, if Heath Ledger had exaggerated that swagger any more he would have fallen over.
My ex-flatmate (male, straight) once told me that the reason that straight guys are homophobic is because their own sexuality is aggressive. They therefore assume that gay men are in possession of the same type of aggressive masculinity and this constitutes a personal threat. If this is true then Brokeback Mountain could actually feed homophobia with its overt and unanalysed interpretation of ‘gay’ sexuality as being violent.
This is not a movie about queerness. This is a movie about straight men who like to fuck each other. There isn’t really anything new about straight men who like to fuck each other. They have existed forever. And they all have their little Alma’s waiting diligently at home with the dinner in the oven.
I really didn’t get what the point was. Why did these guys apparently mean so much to each other? All they did together was camp and fuck. There was no meaningful emotional or intellectual conversation and absolutely no sign of anything that I would even remotely link to the word love. Yet we were meant to believe that if Ennis had the courage to run away with Jack they would live in blissful harmony, bashing the shit out of each other while they fucked and reaffirmed that they weren’t no queers.
Jack put it succinctly when he said that their relationship was nothing but an occasional “high altitude fuck”. The only thing they got from each other that they couldn’t get from their wives was an extra penis and an oversized helping of violence.
So why were they depicted as wanting more? They had the perfect arrangement. They both owned decorative, subservient wives at home and they had each other in the mountains.
The only thing they didn’t have was acceptance from society. Boo hoo. Lets go back to ancient Greek times then, where men could fuck each other as much as they wanted as well as owning wives and children.
The movie seemed to suggest that manly men have more of a right to be queer than non-manly men. Ennis talks of the “tough old birds” and the unfairness that they were killed. Would it have been all right for them to die if they had been flaming pansies?
For women the message was ‘don’t marry a gay man’. If you marry a straight man everything will run swimmingly. Or conversely if you do marry a gay man by accident, don’t find out about it and he will be good to you until he gets gay bashed to death.
After seeing this movie I am really, really disturbed by the fact that Green Left Weekly described it as “an intimate story of queer love”. This is what they think queer love is? Interesting. Also completely incorrect because this movie had no queer women in it. So queer love means testerical males assaulting each other while kissing. Right. Glad I’ve got that one sorted.
Silly me. I thought queer love meant a re-negotiation of hetero-normative sexual relations.
Whatever. This movie was stupid.
|
|
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
_allecto_'s journal