REEL REFLECTIONS

"BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN":
A Parable of the Conversation

David Greiser

This review probably belongs in the Winter 2006 issue of DreamSeeker Magazine rather than the present one. There are two reasons why it could not be included in that special issue on homosexuality. First, the editor decided to forego regular DreamSeeker columns and devote the full magazine to essays on the topic. Second, even if I had wanted to weigh in as a film reviewer, the obvious film for analysis, "Brokeback Mountain," had not yet been released. By including a review in this issue, it is my hope that the conversation from the last issue will be continued.

By this time many readers will have seen or at least read a review of "the most talked-about movie of 2005." Hackneyed clichés aside, "Brokeback Mountain" is a film worth talking about, worth adding to the dialogue begun in the last DreamSeeker. It is a beautifully filmed, exquisitely acted, honestly rendered story about that old Hollywood standby—forbidden love.

The film is all the more powerful because Director Ang Lee respects the arc of the story from beginning to end, rather than attempting to use this specific narrative to deliver a "message." This is primarily a story of one love affair and its effects on two families. It is only secondarily a film about homosexuality in general.

For those who have not seen it, "Brokeback Mountain" unfolds over a 20-year period, 1963 to 1983. It tells of two young ranch hands, Ennis Del Mar (played by Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhall) hired to tend sheep for the summer on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. Ennis is a stoic, barely verbal Marlboro Man, while Jack is more expressive and spirited.

Whiskey and boredom eventually conspire to get the two men talking and, in time, to experience an attraction to each other that is consummated in an awkward, fumbling, romantic encounter that is equal parts passion and pugilism. The following morning the two are barely able to acknowledge what has happened. Ennis mumbles, "This thing we got goin’ is a one-shot deal. You know I ain’t queer." Jack concurs, "Me neither."

The summer ends, the two men part ways, and before long both have married and begun traditional families. Yet their affair continues as a periodic series of trysts masked as "fishing trips" during which, oddly, no fish are ever caught.

Jack holds out the hope that eventually he and Ennis can be together. Ennis demurs, recounting a stark memory of his father dragging him off to view the disfigured corpse of a mutilated and murdered man who had been suspected of being "queer." "It cain’t ever be like that," Ennis says of Jack’s desire for them to be together. "This thing gets a hold of us in the wrong time . . . in the wrong place . . . and we’re dead."

Australian Heath Ledger’s performance as Ennis is an artistic highlight of "Brokeback." His Ennis is verbally clumsy and emotionally clamped down; yet the viewer feels the inner frustration that regularly boils over into violent anger.

In time the two men’s lives fall into lonely patterns. Ennis’s wife divorces him after gradually surmising that her husband is gay. Jack continues his marriage of convenience, seeking emotional solace in short-term affairs and in furtive trips to Mexico for anonymous gay sex.

The emotional fallout of Jack and Ennis’s relationship on their families is explored sufficiently to add depth and truth to the story. Each man finds himself increasingly isolated, his world fragmented into a series of disconnected, unsatisfying relationships as he pines for his one true love. Ultimately each man can allow himself to be fully known only by the other; the cost of becoming vulnerable with anyone else is just too great.

I went to the theater twice to see "Brokeback Mountain." After the second viewing I found myself thinking about the film in light of Mennonite denominational conversations on homosexuality. It struck me that "Brokeback Mountain" serves as a kind of sobering metaphor for our failed conversations as a church. Just as Ennis and Jack are simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by each other, so various parts of our church have experienced attraction and repulsion in attempting to discern a common standpoint on this matter.

Just as Ennis and Jack can’t bring themselves to name their attraction, much less to explore its emotional dimensions, so too our church is only able to discuss this most personal of subjects through a filter of theological abstraction. To name our deepest longings, doubts, questions, hopes, and fears seems to entail too much risk. Despite endless discussions we have failed to communicate. Having failed to communicate, we now dwell in an uneasy coexistence in which even the prospect of another discussion prompts psychological nausea.

Though I hope for the day when we can all be together, my great fear is that the story of "Brokeback Mountain" will remain a metaphor, rather than a tool of learning, for the church.

—Dave Greiser, Souderton, Pennsylvania, serves as teaching pastor at Souderton Mennonite Church and adjunct professor of preaching at Palmer Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.