NY Review of Books: Daniel Mendelsohn on BROKEBACK

[PalJoey]

Posted: 2/6/06 at 1:08pm

Well, I guess this mean that Namo is not Daniel Mendelsohn after all. It was a good guess, though.

snippet:
-----

For to see Brokeback Mountain as a love story, or even as a film about universal human emotions, is to misconstrue it very seriously—and in so doing inevitably to diminish its real achievement.

Both narratively and visually, Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy about the specifically gay phenomenon of the "closet"—about the disastrous emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression and of the social intolerance that first causes and then exacerbates it. What love story there is occurs early on in the film, and briefly: a summer's idyll herding sheep on a Wyoming mountain, during which two lonely youths, taciturn Ennis and high-spirited Jack, fall into bed, and then in love, with each other. The sole visual representation of their happiness in love is a single brief shot of the two shirtless youths horsing around in the grass. That shot is eerily—and significantly—silent, voiceless: it turns out that what we are seeing is what the boys' boss is seeing through his binoculars as he spies on them.

After that—because their love for each other can't be fitted into the lives they think they must lead—misery pursues and finally destroys the two men and everyone with whom they come in contact with the relentless thoroughness you associate with Greek tragedy. By the end of the drama, indeed, whole families have been laid waste. Ennis's marriage to a conventional, sweet-natured girl disintegrates, savaging her simple illusions and spoiling the home life of his two daughters; Jack's nervy young wife, Lureen, devolves into a brittle shrew, her increasingly elaborate and artificial hairstyles serving as a visual marker of the ever-growing mendacity that underlies the couple's relationship. Even an appealing young waitress, with whom Ennis after his divorce has a flirtation (an episode much amplified from a bare mention in the original story), is made miserable by her brief contact with a man who is as enigmatic to himself as he is to her. If Jack and Ennis are tainted, it's not because they're gay, but because they pretend not to be; it's the lie that poisons everyone they touch.
An Affair to Remember

[jrb_actor]

Posted: 2/6/06 at 1:13pm

This is the 31st thread with Brokeback in the subject line. That does not include the threads that were deleted and the threads that

1. had heath or jake in the title
2. threads that were threadjacked with debates about Brokeback

This is about to rival Wicked, and has certainly taken over Bush as the one thing BWW has debated about the most.

SCHMEH!

Brokeback is starting to induce headaches.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 2/6/06 at 1:25pm

Yes, but it's the first thread to feature the writing of Daniel Mendelsohn, author of "The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity" and "Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays," and he is pretty brilliant.

I thought for a while he might be Namo.

Updated On: 2/6/06 at 01:25 PM

[jrb_actor]

Posted: 2/6/06 at 1:31pm

In other news, Brokeback almost hit $60 million this week.

[SonofMammaMiaSam]

Posted: 2/6/06 at 1:42pm

I'm not quite sure how he implanted himself into Ms. Proulx' brain to find that particular premise, but okay.

[MasterLcZ]

Posted: 2/6/06 at 2:19pm

Mendelsohn is an excellent writer - Thanks for the link, PJ - it's a good piece.

As is this one by Larry Gross.

Excerpt:

"The praise these straight actors have garnered for their awesome achievements in portraying gay folks somehow obscures the reality that every day on Hollywood’s large and small screens legions of lesbian and gay actors are convincingly portraying heterosexual characters. Somehow, though, these achievements go without notice or recognition. And herein lies an important part of the story: Hollywood’s devotion to the public heterosexuality of its stars.

Despite all the cultural changes of the past few decades—applauded by liberals and mourned by conservatives—the entertainment industries remain obsessed with a concern for the supposed prejudices of the mass audiences they seek to attract. Sometimes these audience biases are real, but much of the time industry decision makers are caught up in a self-fulfilling illusion in which they attribute to the masses attitudes that they themselves claim not to share."


The Year of the Queer

[PalJoey]

Posted: 2/6/06 at 2:28pm

Well, THAT was certainly comprehensive!

[MasterLcZ]

Posted: 2/6/06 at 2:32pm

Ha! I know! He DID needed a weensy bit of editing!

(the readers comments that follow are especially interesting)

Updated On: 2/6/06 at 02:32 PM

[Luscious]

Posted: 2/6/06 at 7:07pm

Excellent article PJ. Thanks for posting the link.

Really like what he's saying here...

"But the fact that this film's main characters look like cowboys doesn't make them, or their story, any less gay. Criticisms like LaSalle's, and those of the many other critics trying to persuade you that Brokeback isn't "really" gay, that Jack and Ennis's love "makes no sense" because they're Wyoming ranch hands who are likely to vote Republican, only work if you believe that being gay means having a certain look, or lifestyle (urban, say), or politics; that it's anything other than the bare fact of being erotically attached primarily to members of your own sex."

"Indeed, the point that gay people have been trying to make for years—a point that Brokeback could be making now, if so many of its vocal admirers would listen to what it's saying—is that there's no such thing as a typi-cal gay person, a strangely different-seeming person with whom Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar have nothing in common—thankfully, you can't help feeling, in the eyes of many commentators."

[zzannahk]

Posted: 2/6/06 at 11:03pm

have i misunderstood? i thought it was a short story, not a book.

[SonofMammaMiaSam]

Posted: 2/7/06 at 6:21am

It was a short story originally published in Vogue magazine zz. Both of those reviews/evaluations are longer than the actual story was.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 2/7/06 at 8:10am

It was The New Yorker not Vogue. Not quite Vogue's style.

[DG]

Posted: 2/7/06 at 8:14am

PJ - I wouldn't be surprised if some of their ads right now were inspired by it, though

[SonofMammaMiaSam]

Posted: 2/7/06 at 8:16am

My bad. Brain fart. Thanks PJ. Cowboy duds are all over the runway in Europe.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 2/7/06 at 8:22am

You mean like this new line by Valentino?

Updated On: 2/7/06 at 08:22 AM