The University of Notre Dame was privileged to have Alexander Doty, a leading scholar of Queer theory, on hand for its “Gay & Lesbian Film: Filmmakers, Narratives, Spectatorships” forum this past February. Doty shared a presentation entitled “Gay & Lesbian Film, Queer Theory & the Academy” and, in relation to this topic, offered some thoughts on the controversial pop-culture phenomenon of the moment, Ang Lee’s film Brokeback Mountain. One particular thing stood out to Doty where Brokeback was concerned, an observation that my own survey of critical work affirms: criticism of the film has been overwhelmingly complacent toward its alternativeness. Even the USCCB’s Office of Film and Broadcasting (which represents the Roman Catholic Bishops in America) was temperate in its review, stating that the film is “a serious contemplation on loneliness and connection,” if “objectively immoral” (USCCB). This complicated response has been echoed by the gay and lesbian community to a length as well: at The Advocate, for example, the conquests and “conspiratorial” defeats of Brokeback have been thoroughly and proudly detailed, while one review declared that the film is “not gay” (Kim).

But why the fuss over “gay cowboys” in the first place? They are, after all, hardly non-constituents in the cinema. For instance, the veneer of heterosexuality easily slips off the shoulders in the “cruising” scene in My Darling Clementine and to accommodate the androgyny and role-reversal of Johnny Guitar (as illustrated by revisionist readings of those films). Then again, the critics are partially correct: Brokeback Mountain is not a “gay” film in any generic sense. Rather, the film works in the fissures of mainstream cinema genre, where “gay” and “straight” overlap. I would therefore like to examine how Brokeback Mountain problematizes and appropriates certain tendencies of the Melodrama and Western to create a queer alternative space. By incorporating Doty’s thoughts from his presentation and a survey of media criticism regarding the film, I hope to contend that the narrative pleasure of Brokeback Mountain takes root in the interstices of generic cinema, where the dominant heterocentric ideology and its counter-ideologies imbricate.

Our first task is to outline Doty’s terms as they bear on gay and lesbian theory and cinema. Queer is not a “hip synonym,” as Doty puts it, for “gay” or “lesbian,” a blank-set to be filled in among certain circles and on certain whims (Doty, 2006). Rather, the winning power of Doty’s “queer theory” is to suggest that queer is analogous to straight, an alternative space abreast the dominant culture that various non-, anti-, or contra-straight people occupy; but that straight-identifying people may, in certain circumstances, occupy as well (the converse is likewise true). In such a sense, “queerness,” regardless of gender, class, or race, is a viable alternative where strict definitions of homoeroticism and/or straightness do not satisfy critical inquiry—in instances where there is significant overlap. But, since queerness is perennial, parceled vis-à-vis heterosexuality, it cannot be defined by schizophrenia or apostasy, but rather as an alternative sphere interposed with, rather than counterposed to straight-identifying culture. One of Doty’s examples of queer theory in practice is Katherine Hepburn’s cross-dressing antics in Sylvia Scarlett. If I, as a straight-identifying male and otherwise devotee of Hepburn, gaze upon her figure in drag with some amount of sexual pleasure, I am having a “queer moment,” a phenomenon that cannot systematically be categorized as “gay” or “straight.” Regarding cinema overall, Doty’s theory is important to understand that our viewing practices are compound, hardly reducible to black and white, and that both straight and gay audiences are permitted equally “queer” pleasures in that viewing (Doty, 1993).

With Doty in mind, it seems appropriate, if not to pinpoint Brokeback Mountain’s more obvious divergences from straight culture, to differentiate “gay” elements of the film from “queer” elements, and to suggest which is prevalent. For Doty, Jack’s trajectory is one of the few purely “gay” components (Doty, 2006). Age and temperament, compacted by Ennis’s acute and recursive disowning, find Jack relatively liberated, more free to explore his homosexuality in non-Brokeback related contexts. I would also add as a “gay” element the anecdote of Earl and Rich, the two ranchers and “tough old birds” bold enough to co-habitate, without Ennis and Jack’s tenuous pretenses, despite an inhospitable social environment. In fact, their brutal fate both presages the inferred demise of Jack and sets a “queer precedent” for the characters of the film. Rather than allow themselves a monogamous life together, the impossibility of which is illustrated by Earl and Rich, Ennis and Jack must suffer through paralleled flimsy relationships due to highly impeding social constraints: they must be queer (neither all straight, nor all gay) to survive.

Queer, therefore, is a kind of yoke for Ennis and Jack, as much as for their alienated spouses, Alma and Lureen. But that a traditional, if incomplete, male-female attraction is evident, suggests that Ennis and Jack’s homoerotic relationship is not so straightforward. “Bisexual” is also inappropriate here: the internalization of Ennis’s gay impulses is combined with a strongly cultivated sense of “normalcy” that is not reducible to hetero-, bi-, or homosexual terms. A “gay lifestyle” is a figment to Ennis, as opposed to Jack; its materialization subsists as an alternative space within a deep-seated traditional upbringing. “Queer” too, then, is Ennis’s defending of the nuclear family against a family-eroding counterculture (the bikers at the picnic), though he himself is an active participant, albeit a pathologically closeted one, in a similar erosion. I think it is therefore appropriate to view the film as “queer” more so than “gay.” But “queer” for the characters of Brokeback Mountain is almost defeatist, the “got-to-stand-it” reality of the idyllic “gay,” which is to say, corrupt with displeasure. Doty, however, legates “queer moments” with pleasure, especially in terms of reception; and indeed, following this, the true queer moment is had by the audience.

The above, all narrative-internal considerations, do not provide adequate coverage of Brokeback’s “queerness,” especially where concerns audience reception. Participatory in the character identification mechanism, the audience is asked, quite explicitly, to abandon the tenets of straight-identifying culture, to “walk several hundred miles in [Brokeback’s] characters’ shoes,” as Jan Stuart of Newsday put it. Consider character identification with Alma as an example of audience “queering:” though her character is symptomatic of traditional-values America, Alma’s seething indictment of Ennis’s homoerotic transgressions—a perspective from the straight, even anti-gay, orthodoxy no less—is accompanied by audience upheaval. Alma is, to the audience, suddenly less underappreciated than prejudiced: she is ignorant of this “love that will never grow old” (as Emmylou Harris’s song goes), jealous, and impotent where Ennis’s heart is concerned. Certainly this is a “queer moment” in Doty’s terms, an alternative space where alignment with same-sex relationships is not irremissible (especially in our gay marriage-banning contemporary situation). This, if not dependent on an audience magically becoming queer, is thanks to an appropriation of the Melodrama and Western. Precisely how Brokeback Mountain manages the feat, therefore, entails a bit of genre study.

The homoerotic tension created by the pup tent scene (the film’s only explicit portrayal of male-male anal sex) was alleviated in several ways by leading critics. Some were not impressed by its “tameness;” others, in starts of cleverness, but also with hints of insecurity, translated the scene by way of Western-made clichés, likening the act to wrangling; many, however, latched to melodrama and would not budge at any sign of unconventionality. It is no wonder that Brokeback seemed “gay” to no one: genre, rather than gender, was being confused. This is not to blame critics though; the ambivalence of their response is endemic of how Brokeback Mountain destabilizes generic conventions.

Rick Altman’s contributions to genre study offer some assistance here. Altman is cognizant of the monolithic proportions of genre, where “semantic signals” and “syntactic expectations” complicate attempts at unbiased, that is, sans genre, readings. Semantic elements include those that can be readily plucked from the mise-en-scene—cowboy hats and pup tents, for example. Syntactic elements are more complex: they are the “explanatory power” of genre, the relationships that arise between characters and a given setting (Altman 684-5). For instance, a narrative with the semantics of a Western and two male protagonists confers the syntactic expectation of a duel according to Altman (Altman 690). We can therefore appreciate the difficulties inherent in the critics’ response considering the outcome of the male protagonist relationship in Brokeback Mountain.

Critics’ reaction to the melodramatic required an amount of syntactic interpretation on their part, an understanding of what “falling in love” entails in Hollywood cinema. The narrative of Brokeback hails from a corpus that, among other things, infers “a paradise waiting to be lost” (Lane). This aligns the film with the syntax of a melodrama in the vein of an “old-fashioned romantic weepie” (Taylor). But if we label melodramatic films “weepies,” it is because a process of self-identification with plot and protagonist triggers an emotional response—in the case of the melodrama, empathy (the physical consequence of which may be “weeping”). What critics have suggested is that melodrama’s syntactic expectation is so indelible that it constitutes an erasure of gendered bodies (“the two lovers here just happen to be men” says Kenneth Turan of the LA Times). “Gay love” is negligible under the aegis of “cinematic love,” with its binding generic retinue. As progressive as this seems, it remains that Brokeback tweaks the traditional melodrama, i.e., a heterosexual romance, to structure the identification process around homoeroticism and queer protagonists. In effect, it appropriates melodrama’s empathetic dimensions to “queer” the audience, offering identification with alternative characters.

The Western genre is also called to task. Brokeback certainly lends narrative attention to that part of Americana “where men go to hide” (Williams). Here we see the collapsing exterior West—from panoramic Brokeback itself to downtrodden trailers—juxtaposed with the growing interior West—what all of those men of the range could have been thinking—a demythologization of big looks, Monument Valley Westerns in favor of the revisionist Western, where the once suggestive is avowed outright. Brokeback’s revisionist pedigree opens the West to queerness, destabilizing the West’s masculine figure.

The West has long been terra firma for the man’s man, figures like John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Clint Eastwood who thrive on phallocentrism. Ennis and Jack are not so different from them: they are square-jawed, tough, and live according to the Western code. Therefore, Brokeback does not emasculate men, but suggests that masculinity itself is highly complex; it does so by utilizing a genre known for its dominant masculine features. In that sense, Brokeback Mountain toils harder for its adopted medium than for Annie Proulx’s short story, since the aura of the Western—its iconography, ideology, and biggest stars—owes more to film than to other traditions. Brokeback searches out these alternative spaces in the Western—subtexts aroused, in many ways, by the genre itself. Again we might note that it is not the gender of the film that is at issue, but the genre, the innovative ties to conventional Hollywood cinema that make Brokeback Mountain an instance of “Queer Cinema.”

Doty’s principal suspicions toward Brokeback Mountain regard the melodramatic tendency of escapism (to have a good cry and go home)—the danger is not with its queer credentials as much as its terminate experience. It is a peril with which cinema is ultimately fraught. What this paper has argued, therefore, is not that that fear is unfounded, but counterbalanced by the film’s work in manufacturing an alternative space, affording straight and non-straight audiences alike pleasurable “queer moments.” If we read the film as playing with generic conventions of Hollywood cinema instead of as implicitly “gay,” the audience would be engaging with a text that differentiates itself from the status quo while overlapping with it—a “queer” film, not radicalizing genre and convention, but mixing the pleasures of “normal” genres with the pleasures of alternative ones. Brokeback Mountain may be, after all, a tear-jerker—a cathartic purge in the waters of sentimentalist melodrama. But if it is so baptized, it is a queer pleasure that presides.

Works Cited

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Doty, Alexander. “There’s Something Queer Here.” Making Things Perfectly Queer:

Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 1-16.

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