Philip Cunliffe
posted 18 January 2006

Having heard much of the hype, my expectations of an inevitable anti-climax with Brokeback Mountain were roundly shattered. Ang Lee's film is an exceptional accomplishment, and it richly deserves the accolades it has received. Not only are the characters superbly acted - particularly Heath Ledger's taciturn and fiery ranch hand Ennis Del Mar - but the whole movie is of a piece, with the characters and the evocation of time and place all coming together in a harmonious whole.

Given the theme of the movie - a serious treatment of same-sex love between cowboys - it is perhaps surprising how muted the political reaction to the film has been. Before the movie's release, the commentariat was bracing itself for the opening of yet another front in America's 'culture wars' between red state and blue. This bold challenge to the icons of American mythology could not possibly be ignored, or so it was believed.

As it turned out, the reaction has been relatively low-key, though an article in Salon suggested that the conservarati who normally chase after 'Hollywood liberals' made a conscious decision this time not to picket screenings, in order not to give Brokeback any more publicity than it already had (Scott Lamb, All quiet on the gay western front, Salon). Instead, the conservative reaction, such as it was, had to be actively solicited by Salon. Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute of 'Concerned Women of America', probably put the conservarati case best, when he told Salon that 'Part of the enduring appeal of westerns is the display of brotherhood, unhindered by sexualisation. You often hear the phrase "to be a straight-shooter'" That means to speak plain truths and walk easily amid the natural bonds of affection, without the distraction of misplaced sexual urges. In other words, the audience can relax. Their hero is not going to get weird on them.'

There is indeed something cheap and misanthropic in the ironic, sub-Freudian impulse to claim that the only authentic bond between men is one based on repressed sexual desire - and the whole Western genre is an easy target on this score for Culture Warriors. 'I would be a millionaire if I had 50p for every time someone mentioned Montgomery Clift and John Ireland admiring each other's pistols in Howard Hawks's 1948 western Red River', the Guardian's film critic Peter Bradshaw wrote. The success of Lee's film, however, is that it manages to deal so effectively and tenderly with the dynamics of this peculiarly American genre - the portrayal of intimate relationships forged amongst men.

Indeed, America's peculiar attitude towards same-sex love has a longer history than the noxious campaigns of the Christian Right. As far back as 1949, the Trinidadian Marxist CLR James noted the characteristic vitriol of the American response to homosexuality in his book American Civilization, a rejoinder to Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America: 'It is not that more Americans are homosexual than people of other nations,' James wrote. 'It is … that Americans have a unique attitude to [homosexuality]. They hate it, they denounce it, they are on guard against it … men are beaten, pushed away, exposed on charges of homosexuality … where the average European would express his distaste by shrugging his shoulders and turning aside.'

Yet James did not see this hostility as an atavistic expression of American backwardness. James noted instead how this hostility co-existed alongside an equally distinctive American understanding and portrayal of intimacy and fraternity between men, that stretches well beyond the vaunted 'latent homoeroticism' of the Western, back in to the nineteenth century writings of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Writing in the aftermath of two world wars that became renowned for the fraternal bonds formed amongst ordinary soldiers, and reflecting on the inequality of the sexes in America, James goes on to describe how 'the American male has had a passion for human relationships, social and personal, general and intimate, and it is this which above all constitutes the high civilization of the United States. He has not been able to create or establish this relationship with women … Under these developing social circumstances [of modern American society] there has been a powerful impulse to intimate friendships with men but hedged around by a safeguard of stern prohibition against this intimacy becoming perversion' (CLR James, American Civilization, [1993], pp.223-224).

For James, the distinctively excessive American repression of same-sex desire among men reflected not the backwardness of American society, but rather the uniquely intense social contradictions as the most advanced society in the world. That is, both the unprecedented opportunities that America offered for the development of human personality and relations (as partially captured in the mythology of the rugged individualism of the West); and the frustration and mangling of these bonds in the alienation of modern society. It was this, according to James, that accounted for that peculiarly American ambivalence towards close, intimate relations among men - their frank portrayal and celebration on the one hand; and the inevitable counter-stroke of sexual repression on the other.

It is this contradiction that Ang Lee's film explores so well. Lee has taken advantage of a more liberal sexual climate not so much to 'expose the subtext' of the Western, but to enrich this unique American genre as a whole. For Brokeback is not just a story of sexual bigotry frustrating love and desire, but of socially-imposed limits grinding down two individuals, who are forced to struggle as much against uniformity and meaninglessness as against sexual prejudice.