Brokeback Mountain Still Feels Like the Future

Twenty years ago this fall, I was a post-grad starting to figure out what shape my adult life might take. The plan was to somehow make a career in theater; to that end, I worked at the box office in a now long-defunct little playhouse in downtown Boston. Dedicated as I was to that medium, I still paid plenty close attention to movies, perhaps especially because I no longer had play rehearsals—where I spent pretty much all of my college years—taking up my free time.

And so it was with great interest that I tracked the progression of a movie that seemed to be ushering the world, and me as a fledgling grownup, into a new age: Brokeback Mountain. I was acutely aware of Jake Gyllenhaal (from myriad viewings of Donnie Darko on beer-stained couches in off-campus apartments) and Heath Ledger (from A Knight’s Tale and 10 Things I Hate About You). And of course, I knew Ang Lee, whose Sense & Sensibility had made my mom swoon ten years prior, and whose The Ice Storm my sister and I had studied as if it was a smuggled document explaining a mysterious lost custom of adulthood. (Plus Christina Ricci and Elijah Wood!)

That these men had assembled to make some sort of gay romance, about gay cowboys, almost defied belief. How could such a thing be, when pretty much the only gay films I was aware of were the underground indies furtively spoken about and shared with fellow travelers, or respectable but often sexless dramas about AIDS? And yet, in late summer of 2005, my beloved Entertainment Weekly reported that Brokeback Mountain had premiered to raves at the Venice Film Festival and would be arriving on American shores in December. The anticipation was close to unbearable.

Though I don’t remember the exact details, I know that saw the movie at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, Massachusetts, a legendary art house whose programming went a long way toward making up for its hard, threadbare seats and the blandest popcorn in town. (Sorry, Coolidge; I still love you.) I can recall that I was both swept away by the movie and a little disappointed by it, that it had only given me some of what I’d so desperately wanted.

Lee’s steady and patient film seemed withholding, its series of snapshot vignettes not allowing for the time to really sit in a moment with these two yearning young men. There was something the film was not showing me, was not letting me savor, and I vaguely resented it for that. I mostly held my tongue about those reservations when discussing the movie with friends. Brokeback was by all measures a rare gift given to us from on high, and I wouldn’t dare show it anything like ingratitude.

In the many years after, I have returned to Brokeback Mountain on occasion, and have learned to appreciate its lilting rhythm, its approximation of the boggling swiftness of years and decades. As one gets older, and further and further from the ages of besotted and star-crossed Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, one more keenly understands the way Brokeback tumbles and drifts along. It is a movie about time as much as it’s about anything else; when you are 22 and hungry for all the immediacy of life, it seems impossible that anything so urgent as Brokeback’s love affair could be made to wait.

Two decades later, I’ve just seen Brokeback Mountain in a movie theater for the second time, as part of the film’s Pride Month re-release. It was a good, pensive experience, to sit alone in a cinema in a sleepy corner of Manhattan’s east side on a blazing hot Friday afternoon, to revisit both the grandeur and intimacy of Lee’s epic. There were all my favorite, long-cherished scenes: the first kiss, the glorious reunion, the shattering phone call between Ennis and Anne Hathaway’s finely realized Lureen. There was something pleasantly ritualistic about watching it all again, unbothered by a phone or a laptop or any of life’s other ambient distraction.

I saw new things, too. Back in the day, I resented how Brokeback Mountain was so often reduced to a “gay cowboys” joke; that reaction was, and is, reductive and bigoted. Watching the film now, though, I see that there actually is some sly humor in the way Lee frames his lovelorn heroes: the jut of Jack’s hip as he leans against a pickup truck in his introductory scene; the tilt of cowboy hats in profile against staggering Rockies vistas. Lee’s shrewd repurposing of Western iconography isn’t exactly new—the Village People, among others, got there first—but it adds a disarming little fizz to what is otherwise, quite reasonably, a serious and downbeat film.

There was also, last Friday, the sinking realization of how staggeringly young everyone was. Not just the actors—Gyllenhaal and Michelle Williams were 23, Ledger was 25, Hathaway was only 21—but the characters, too. These people are just barely stumbling out of adolescence and yet already feeling the immense pressure to settle into lives they are not prepared for—and, in Jack and Ennis’s case, lives they do not want. I don’t think I saw that as acutely in 2005, blinded as I was by proximity—they seemed grownup enough to me. In middle age, I now even more bitterly wish upon these boys the luxuries of contemporary America, the space for noodling and soul-searching and self-discovery that I was afforded long after Jack and Ennis are forced down one-way roads.

Also remarkable is how accessible the film now seems. The film’s cadence, which I once thought played as almost too artfully austere, is fleet compared to the slow cinema of today. Brokeback’s high emotion occasionally borders on the melodrama of classic Hollywood. There is plenty of aching nuance, but the film is, for the most part, generous and entirely legible in its pathology. Lee calmly applies time-tested structure to a story of the margins, bringing a piercing clarity to the stupid tragedy of the whole thing: he illuminates the cruel pointlessness of prejudice, harming anyone it touches. That’s a fairly broad, Oscar-worthy message, far from anything we might call transgressive today—or, really, might have more honestly back then.

I did not cry during the film. I had hoped to relive up some of the bleary, swelling sentiment of being 22 in my smoky post-college apartment, listening to composer Gustavo Santaolalla’s plaintive guitars on repeat and pining, rather dumbly, for my own grand—if doomed—gay love affair. But I suppose 20 years has made me a bit more pragmatic, at least in certain ways. And so I viewed Brokeback Mountain this time as more of a remote object, a faraway but still affecting embodiment of a million unknown stories of the queer past.

After the film, I was surprised to see that within my audience—which was quite full for a 1:30PM weekday screening of an old movie—was a group of teenagers, who looked to be high school students and who flooded out of the theater giddy and chattering. It was a mix of girls and boys—though mostly girls—and I was instantly curious what had drawn them to the movie. I considered going over to them, introducing myself as a journalist (ha), and asking them why they were there. But I am afraid of teenagers, and also didn’t want to break whatever spell the film had just cast on them, so I left them alone.

I did think about them more on my way home, though. Or, rather, I thought about myself, just a little bit older than they were, listening to that Brokeback music and imagining for myself not only a life that would be dramatic and romantic and sexy and sad, but a culture that would robustly reflect that. The success of Brokeback Mountain—it won heaps of awards, and made the equivalent of $280 million in today’s dollars—suggested the dawning of a new era, of a vital sea change. Gay representation in popular culture certainly has grown in the last 20 years. But I don’t think we’ve quite had another Brokeback. There is still the sense of a promise, unfulfilled.

It may just be the dissolution of the monoculture, the decrease in movie attendance amid the mass migration to the scattered huddles of the internet. But something impeded Brokeback’s influence; whatever revolution the film seemed to augur was slowed or diverted in the last two decades. Gay stories did not come pouring out of Hollywood studios, even though the discussion of Brokeback Mountain at the time often implied that a dam had finally been broken.

And now we’re in a new, nasty, regressive moment, one with its own nascent boondoggle foreign war to match those of 2005. It feels like precious little has changed—or, that things began to change, but then a reversion began. As if we are creeping back to the time of Brokeback’s utter necessity. Perhaps that’s why those kids were at the theater last Friday; they’d gone searching for their own generation’s version, found little quite like it, and thus borrowed something from my youth. Maybe they went home that afternoon and called up the soundtrack on Spotify and—oof, what a sad thought—pictured not what might be to come, but instead longed for what once was.

It’s strange to think that Brokeback could now exist like that: as an object of nostalgia, rather than evidence of a burgeoning, bracing modernity. But maybe it’s a little true. We have gone from being on the mountain to dreaming of it, just as Jack and Ennis—tempest tossed, caught in history—did in their day too.