Review of the Day: Daniel Medelsohn on Brokeback Mountain February 14, 2006
Brokeback Mountain has earned more accolades than any movie in recent history, and deserves most of them. Reviewers praise Ang Lee’s touching movie by calling it a universal love story; some of them maintain that this story about gay cowboys is only accidentally about being gay.In his “An Affair to Remember”, Daniel Mendelsohn eloquently disagrees, noting that one of the major themes of the story is about a very specific psychological reality in gay love-the closet. He questions the “universal” rhetoric, and reminds us that there are different ways to be universal, almost all of them specific.
Mendolsohn quotes several reviews to illustrate the “lengths to which reviewers from all over the country, representing publications of various ideological shadings, have gone in order to diminish the specifically gay element”. Why, in the rush to classify the film as a romantic epic with universal appeal, would the Los Angeles Times say that it is “a deeply felt, emotional love story that deals with the uncharted, mysterious ways of the human heart just as so many mainstream films have before it? The two lovers just happen to be men.”
Now this is about like saying that Huckleberry Finn just happened to be the adventures of a young boy and a slave on the Mississippi River, and could have equally well been about Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy driving down Route 66. Of course Brokeback Mountain is a love story, and a love story that can move straight people who don’t know anything about the social position of American homosexual cowboys, circa 1963-1980. But Mendolsohn maintains, even against the statement of director Ang Lee (who said “This is a universal story. I just wanted to make a love story.”) that Larry McMurtry, Diana Ossana, Ang Lee, and Heath Ledger “seem, despite the official rhetoric, to have been aware that they were making a movie specifically about the closet.”
The closet is not a universal experience, and not even a universal experience of gay love. It is very specific, and involves a kind of self-loathing and unfulfilled existence that star crossed heterosexual lovers never have to endure. Mendelsohn believes that the power of Brokeback Mountain is “not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they are not really homosexual-that they’re more like the heart of America than like “gay people”-you’re pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed.”
This review illustrates the possibilities of the critical genre. It discusses this great film in the broader context of its critical reception, and while Mendolsohn obviously admires the film as a work of art, he expresses that admiration with something other than an emotional gush. He instead chooses to analyze the film in terms of what others have said, and to undermine the clichés with which it has been praised and defended. As a rhetorical strategy, this choice is perspicacious, and the result is a brilliant critique that accomplishes the first task of criticism, which is to liberate the work of art from the trite thought with which we almost automatically surround and confine it, often with the best intentions in the world. He raises an important question about the collective response to this film: Why do we need this defensive rhetoric of the universal? Have we not come as far as we think we have?
If you have not seen this film, Mendelsohn’s review will help you see it clearly. If you have, it will help you see the film anew, to understand the nearly inexhaustible layers of meaning it contains. And after you have read the review, you will be wary the next time a whole gaggle of critics start using the same or similar phrases. Mendelson gives us something to see, and something of lasting value to think about as we see. That is what great critics do , and it is what we should demand of them.
Read the various reviews on the Brokeback Mountain site.
