Intertexts

Something lives on in the Highline tliat cannot examine itself. Outsiders recognize its presence but fail to describe it, hurrying instead over the prairie highways at eiglity miles an hour to reach the more conventionally spectacular scenery of the mountains. Judging from the closed and sullen faces in the old photographs in the museum, the hysterical invective arising from the pages of the earliest newspapers, it has existed there since the first white exploration and settlement of the Highline. Perhaps it is the quality that perpetrated genocide, or perhaps it is the inevitable outcome of genocide, akind of mark of Cain. —Mary Clearman Blew, Bone Deep in Landscape: Writing, Reading, and Place, 19 I’m tired of this dirty old city. Entirely too much work and never enough play. And I’m tired of these dirty old sidewalks. Think I’ll walk off my steady job today. Turn me loose, set me free, somewhere in the middle of Montana. And gimme all Igot cornin’ to me. And keep your retirement and your so called social security. Big City turn me loose and set me free. —Merle Haggard, “Big City” I n t r o d u c t i o n Laura J. Beard and David H. J. Larmour T E X A S T E C H U N I V E R S I T Y The lyrics to Merle Haggard’s “Big City” make an appealing opening to introduction of this special issue on Brokeback Mountain.As Brittany Powell and Todd Kennedy note in their article in this collection, tided “The Day the Gay Cowboy Broke Up with McCabe &Mrs. Miller. Brokeback Moun¬ tain's Love Affair with Consumerist Conformity,” the classic Western film stereotypically involves romanticizing abygone past in which the wide open landscapes of the frontier provide aspace for fi'eedom and individual¬ ism in the face of crushing modernity and economic ‘progress.’” The firstperson narrator/singer of the Haggard song, like die characters Jack and Ennis in Brokeback Mountain, rejects the constraints of the big city, the eco¬ nomic promises of steady work and so-called social security to seek freedom somewhere in the middle of Montana. Mary Clearman Blew makes Mon¬ tana the setting of her personal exploration of the interrelationship of landIntertexts , Vol. 10, No. 22006 ©Texas Tech University Press o u r < 4 1 I N T E R T E X T S I 1 0 6 scape and writing, thereby giving the combining of page and place an arche- j typal aura, one that is also apparent in E. Annie Proulx’s choice of the title “Brokeback Mountain” for her celebrated short story. The film of the same name has been similarly celebrated. Brokeback Mountain^impactonthefilmindustryisobviousinalistingoftheawards^ and nominations it garnered. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice | International Film Festival, and was honored with Best Picture and Best Director accolades from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, Golden Globe Awards, Critics Choice Awards, and Independent Spirit Awards. Brokeback Mountain had the highest number of nominations (eight) for the 78thAcademyAwards, winning in the categories of Best Director, BestAdapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score. While many thought it would win theAcademyAward for Best Picture, it failed to take home that particular trophy. In deciding to edit this special issue of Intertexts on Brokeback Moun¬ tain-mAits cultural reverberations, we were seeking essays situating the film and its reception in contemporary cultural settings. Of particular interest the landscapes of desire envisioned or created by Brokeback Mountain, thewaysinwhichthespatialandthesexualconstituteeachother,andhowa iscussion of this film might contribute to our understanding of the perormanceofsexualidentitiesandthewaysinwhichtheyareinscribedonthe oyand the landscape. InAlice Doesn^t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, eresadeI^uretissuggeststhat“theprojectofsemioticsshouldbeprecisely *R physical properties of bodies are assumed as signs, as vehiclesforsocialmeaning,andhowthesesignsareculturallygeneratedby codesandsubjecttohistoricalmodesofsignproduction”(25).Wewere interested,then,inexploringhowwemightmapBrokebackMountahi,how thephysicalbodiesinthefilmareassumedassigns,asvehiclesforsocial meaning,andhowthosebodiesareculturallygeneratedbycodes—codes fromfilmstudies,thegenreoftheWestern,thevariouscodesofpopularculture competing in the societies in which the film has been shown, eLauretisassertsthatcinemashouldbeunderstood“asasignifying\ practice,aworkofsemiosis:aworkthatproduceseffectsofmeaningandper¬ ception, self-images and subject positions for all those involved, makers and i viewers; and thus asemiotic process in which the subject is continually engaged, represented, and inscribed in ideology” (37). This leads us to inquirehovvthefilmproduceseffectsofmeaningandperceptionregarding sexualidentitiesandhowallthoseinvolvedinthemakingandviewingofthe filmareengagedandinscribedinideology.Formanyviewersandreviewers, the meaning produced has been “gay cowboy movie”—a one-dimensional term well suited to Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” monologue, good for getting laughs but not so useful for critical evaluations—and some of our contribu¬ tors actively interrogate this label that critics have so readily attached to the film. They also question its status as “groundbreaking enter into cogent discussions of whether, how, and when it conforms to, or I w e r e I o r “ a l a n d m a r k ” a n d 1 0 7 BEARD AND LARMOUR: Introduction breaks with, conventions of the Western genre. What can critical attention to the discursive operations of the film reveal about the ideology at work? In her own theorization of film, de Lauretis notes that dominant cinema performs “a political function in the service of cultural domination includ¬ ing, but not limited to, the sexual exploitation of women and the repression or containment of female sexuality” (26). Aconsideration of Brokeback Mountain might look at how or to what extent the film serves cultural dom¬ ination, including the sexual exploitation of women and the sexual repres¬ sion of what the dominant culture might consider deviant sexualities. In what ways is desire aproperty of men (property as both “something men own, possess, and something that inheres in men, like aquality” [de Lauretis 20]), and which desires are considered acceptable for men—and for which men? Are there ways in which Brokeback Mountain seeks to problematize the suggestion that desire is aproperty of (only) men? Writing ourselves from auniversity located in Lubbock, Texas, aconser¬ vative, predominantly Christian town in West Texas, only 139 miles from Jack’s hometown of Childress, we are particularly interested in exploring which are the communities imagined by the film. Indeed, the strikingly accurate interiors and dialogue in the scenes of Jack’s married life in Texas are one of director Ang Lee’s most significant achievements in the realm of “authenticity” in the movie. Childress, Texas, was established in 1876, and named for an attorney, George C. Childress, who authored the Texas Decla¬ ration of Independence. The U.S. Bureau of the Census estimate for the 2005 population is 7,676, with more than 83% of the population white and all the businesses in Childress white-owned (http://quickfacts.census.gov/ qfd/states/48/48075.html). Both Childress and Lubbock are communities that grew up around cotton farming, with agricultural income now earned primarily from cotton, wheat, hay, grain sorghums, peanuts, and cattle. The largest employer in Childress is the state penitentiary (420 employees); sec¬ ond largest is Super Wal-Mart (235). The economic development site of Childress, Texas, boldly proclaims: ●When you watch the news on television or read the newspaper, are you concerned about our American way of life; ultimately, the future of your business? Environmental stress on your employees from street crime, drug availability, labor strife, overburdened urban infrastruc¬ ture and high taxes is costing your company in productivity. ●Employees whose major concern is for their families and personal welfare cannot be as productive as those free from the worry. ●Relocation or expansion into an area virtually free of the environmen¬ tal stress offers you alow cost means of boosting productivity and ultimately your bottom line. ●Childress, Texas could be your answer! (http://www.childresstexas.com/child-ed.htm) I N T E R T E X T S ( | 1 0 8 The “American way of life” is thus linked to independent businesses, which are themselves linked to secure families raised in an environment free from ij street crime, drug use, or other “undesirable” elements. Within the main- ij stream belief^systems of Lubbock and Childress, Texas, the sexual desires and sexual activities of Jack and Ennis are all too readily seen as athreat to | families, business, and said American way of life. j . The economic element in Brokeback Mountain is uncovered in the arti¬ cle by Powell and Kennedy as an important contributory factor to the fatal course of the lives of Ennis and Jack. It is at least partly their lack of eco¬ nomic opportunities that keeps them locked in astate where they cannot freelyexpresstheirsexualityandtheirloveforeachother.Conversely,the filrnBrokebackMountainisitselfengagedinthecommodificationofgay desire: capitalism goes after markets and the term “pink dollar” has been coinedtorefertothespendingpowerofgayandlesbianindividualsand couples, who, at least according to these economic suppositions, have more j “disposable”incomebecausetheyare“unburdened”bymanyoftheeco¬ nomic constraints that come with, for example, rearing children. It is inter¬ esting in this regard that in Childress, at least, the urge to prevent the film from being shown in the town overrode the desire to make money from it. And yet, this was afilm which attracted sizeable audiences even in the unexpected places. Andrew Sullivan, writing in the Sunday Times of j .ndon(February26,2006),musesonthecommercialsuccessofthefilm of aprediction by “cable television’s chief windbag Bill O’Reilly” that“They’renotgoingtogotoseethegaycowboysinMontana.I’m sorry.They’re not going to do it” (December 20, 2005): m o s t ●●●it’s done remarkably well in the middle of the red states. O’Reilly’s Montana?Inthe85-yearoldcinemainMissoula,Montana,theownertold themedia:“It’sbeensupereverynightsincewestartedshowingit.”The movie did even better in Billings, amore conservative city in the state. According to Variety magazine, some of the strongest audiences have been inTulsa,Oklahoma,ElPaso,Texas,DesMoines,Iowa,andLubbock, Texas.LubbockistheplaceGeorgeW.Bushcallshisspiritualhomeand maywellbethesiteforhispresidentiallibrary.GreenwichVillageitain’t. Butwhilethefilmmayhavebeensurprisingly(orperhapsnotsosurprising¬ ly)successfulinmanyconservativecommunities,itsfocusonthesexualrela¬ tionship between Jack and Ennis made “Brokeback Mountai phrase playing out in pop culture with derogatory intent. On February 6, 2006, basketball fans at aGonzaga University game chanted “Brokeback Mountain” during their game against St. Mary’s, intending to imply that one (or more) of the opposing players was gay.i While this particular inci¬ dent garnered some unwelcome national attention, students at the private Catholic university remarked that it was not the first time homophobic remarks were made at the games. Even before the film won anyAcademy i n t o a c o d e BEARD AND LARMOUR: Introduction 1 0 9 Awards, it had become “the punch line of jokes, the subject of Internet par¬ odies. ...‘Have you seen BrokebackV has become adinner-party Rorschach test of gay tolerance” as noted in aUSA Today article by Scott Bowles.^ In April 2006, when hundreds of gay and lesbian parents planned to line up for tickets for the White House Easter Egg Roll (a tradition dating to 1878), some referred to their planned participation as “Brokeback Bunny.” Brokeback Mountain has been taken up within the Texas Tech University community in avariety of positive ways as well. In addition to this special issue of Intertexts, we might note the May 3, 2006, Junior trombone recital at the Hemmle Recital Hall, for which the two student performers created posters titled “Brokeback Hemmle,” picturing themselves in cowboy hats, imitating the pose in the promotional poster for the movie (which, it has been noted, was itself an imitation of publicity materials for the blockbuster romance film Titanic). In the spring of 2007, the film is planned to be shown as part of the university’s GLBT Awareness Week activities. For many viewers in Lubbock and throughout the United States, the film inevitably brought back memories of the savage beating of Matthew Shepherd. Indeed, Brokeback Mountain can be seen as one important com¬ ponent of the artistic and cultural response to this horrifying—and horrify¬ ingly revelatory—event as it percolated through the national consciousness. In October 1998, the twenty-one-year-old University of Wyoming student was brutally beaten, then tied to afence post and left to die. The murder— whose archetypal significance was certainly not lost on observers both inside and outside the United States—led to discussion of legislation that would make crimes committed on the basis of sexual orientation punishable as hate crimes, even as anti-gay Christian churches also protested at the funeral of Shepherd and the trials of his assailants. Tracing the public response to and incorporation of Shepherd’s story is beyond the scope of this brief introduc¬ tion, but many of the same tensions are at play there as are played out in the reception to Brokeback Mountain. The irony inherent in the fact that the film’s two main settings—^Texas and Wyoming—are the “home” states of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, whose adminis¬ tration has been pushing for aconstitutional amendment to outlaw “gay was not lost on at least some audiences. m a r r i a g e . Although much has been said and written about the reception and the cultural impact of Brokeback Mountain in today’s politically overheated landscape of the United States, where debates about homosexual rights and the expression of gay sexuality rumble on amid those on the current war (in which the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, saw fit to inform the Chicago Tribune that “homosexual acts between individuals are immoral”), it is important to remember that there is awhole world of viewers out there.^ Looking at the reception of the film in other countries and cultures helps us at least to see more clearly how historical factors such as social discourses, genre codification, audience expectations, and fantasy influence viewers’ reactions to this film. To cite but one example, Rebecca 1 ■s 1 1 0 I N T E R T E X T S Copeland, an associateprofessorofJapaneselanguageandliteratureat| Washington University, has suggested that Brokeback Mountain might be | the “ultimate chick flick” in Japan, where “stories about male-male homo¬ sexuality have been extremely popular with Japanese women for decades.” , SheseesJapan’sfascinationwithmalehomoeroticthemesaspartofalarger| societal struggle over the role of women in ahighly repressive, male-domi- | nated culture.“There’satheorythatsuggestsJapanese women are attracted [ to stories of male homosexuality because it’s the only place in their society ) wheretheycanseeimagesofmeninaloving,caringrelationshipwherebothj' partners are considered to be equals,” Copeland asserts in an interview. “It’s ! thekindofrelationshipthatJapanesewomencraveforthemselvesbutrarely find within the confines of traditional Japanese society.How might her comments about the role of films like Brokeback Mountain in Japanese socie¬ tyhelpusconsidercriticallythewaysinwhich—andthereasonswhy—the filmwasmarketedtofemaleaudiencesintheUnitedStatesasalovestory? Itseemsaptthatsomanyofthearticlesselectedforinclusioninthisspe-j cial issue oi Intertexts m\ed “Landscapes of Desire: Conversations on Broke- [ back Mountain” are themselves conversations, essays in which two or more [ scholars enter into their own dialogic exchanges about the film. Powell and| ^nnedy put Brokeback Mountain into conversation with Robert Altman’s ; McCabe&Mrs.Miller(1971).TheiranalysisrevealshowAltman’sfilm workstodefythegenreoftheWestern,whileBrokebackMountainshowcasconventional views about gender and its performance; film and politics; and capitalism and movie marketing.”Addressing issues of gender and genre, capitalism and conformity, Powell and Kennedy demonstrate “pre¬ cisely how the use of genre to remain marketable insures that Brokeback remains an ideologically conservative film since it partakes in the Western’s questionable assumptions about sexuality, gender, and ultimately film.” In their article “‘You Know IAin’t Queer’: Brokeback Mountain as the Not-Gay Cowboy Movie,” Kathleen Chamberlain and Victoria Somogyi criticallyquestion“thegaycowboymovie”asthe“culturaltag”appended toAng Lee’s film. They argue that in fact nobody in the film is “gay in the more general sense of the term to designate aconstructed identity that is not limited to 1 ! e s and that the marketing merely accentuates elements in thefilmwhichinviteviewerstoaccepttheerasureofhomosexuality.Scruti¬ ny of numerous reviews and other reactions reveals that Brokeback Moun¬ tain’s success in conflating sexual behavior with sexual identity is amajor reason for its commercial success. Chamberlain and Somogyi invite us to transpose terms relating to homosexuality with those relating to race and then ask: would afilm be hailed as progressive if it argued for no more than African Americans’ right to exist and to live without fear of lynching? This issue is also discussed by Kylo-Patrick RHart in “Retrograde Sto¬ rytelling or Queer Cinematic Triumph? The (Not So) Groundbreaking Qualities of the Film Brokeback Mountain” which poses the question “just how ‘groundbreaking’ is it really?” Formulating his response in relation to s e x a c t s BEARD AND LARMOUR: Introduction 1 1 1 two small, but telling, differences between Proulx’s short story and the film—the addition of Ennis’s “conversion fear” and the playing-up of “gay¬ bashing” in Jack’s death scene—Hart argues that the film “implicitly perpet¬ uates heterosexism and homophobia, while appearing on its surface to be attempting to challenge and oppose such deleterious cultural forces.” Nonetheless, as Hart demonstrates by citing previous cinematic forays into the same territory, such as Red River with Montgomery Clift and John Wayne, the film’s “manifest content” and the emotional viewing experiences it has provided do, in one sense at least, represent a“queer cinematic tri¬ umph.” “Conversing Brokeback Mountain''s Varied Spaces and Contested Desires” is aconversation between four scholars, Scott Baugh, Donovan Gwinner, Sara Spurgeon, and Alan Weltzien, and this time, quite literally a conversation. Eschewing the format of the traditional academic essay, their contribution is organized around aseries of questions or prompts. Each con¬ tributor provides one prompt and responds to those of his/her colleagues. Their conversation focuses on the ways in which Brokeback Mountain con¬ forms to or challenges conventions of the Western genre; how Ennis and Jack are characterized as Western heroes (or antiheroes); how the film might validate or endorse open spaces or middle terrains that provide freedom for the protagonists; and whether, indeed, there are any “in-between spaces” or sites beyond the reductive polarities of homosexuality/heterosexuality, marriage /not-marriage, female/male. They provide close readings of particular scenes, and Baugh’s expertise in film studies allows him to offer insightful readings of the techniques employed in the film. N o t e s 1. See article at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/ 02/1 l/sports/sl81217S63.DTL. 2. See article at http://www.usatoday.eom/life/movies/news/2006-02-21-brokeback_x .htm. 3. Chicago Tribune, Monday, 12 March 2007. 4. See article at http://news-info.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/6664.html. W o r k s C i t e d Blew, Mary Clearman. Bom Deep in Landscape: Writing, Reading, and Place. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1999. de Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. ...