I can’t imagine there’s a student who hasn’t heard about the “gay cowboy love story” starring teen heartthrobs Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. Before anyone rushes to correct me, I understand that the movie is more than just a “gay cowboy love story.”
It is, many argue, a love story, period. The fact that the two lovers are Ennis and Jack, instead of Ennis and Jacqueline, is incidental – or should be.
To many, such a story is long overdue. To others, the critical recognition that the film has received is much ado about nothing.
Understandably, the film is not without its detractors, artistic and religious. Veteran film critic Gene Shalet, whose son is gay, panned it. Instead of feeling sympathy for Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, he saw him as a “sexual predator.” Decide for yourself.
Ennis Del Mar, played by Heath Ledger, and Jack Twist, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, meet in Wyoming in 1963 after signing up to herd sheep on Brokeback Mountain. Ennis is the quintessential Marlboro man. His neck is red. He barely speaks – and when he does, it’s with a clinched jaw. His is a world of Copenhagen, beer joints and ranchin’.
Jack, a two-bit rodeo cowboy who drives a beat up pickup, checks Ennis out in his rearview window the first time they meet. It doesn’t take a gay man to figure out right away that Jack Twist has a bit of swish in his Wranglers.
One night, after downing a bottle of whiskey, they end up in the tent together, and Jack makes his move on Ennis (perhaps that’s what Shalet meant by predator).
What ensues is rough, raw and graphic. The next morning, like fraternity brothers and best friends, they assure each other that what happened “was a one-time deal.” Uh-huh. Right. Sure.
Fast forward – both men get married. Ennis leads a dreary, unhappy life. Jack hits pay dirt and marries a barrel racer whose daddy is rich. A few years pass. Jack sends Ennis a postcard saying he’ll be passing through and asks if he wants to get together.
Ennis is excited, to say the least. They meet up and all but rip each other’s clothes off, but not without Ennis’ wife seeing, a subplot that is essential to the story’s development. Ennis introduces Jack to his wife as a “fishing buddy,” and for the next 15 or so years, they meet two or three times a year on Brokeback Mountain to do a little “fishin’.”
Long story short — they fall in love. But, there’s no room for gay romance in their world, where the word “gay” isn’t even part of their vocabulary. “Men like that,” – fairies, queers – live in big cities and hang out at the YMCA or in bowling alley bathrooms. Or, as Ennis warns Jack, if they get caught, they get a rope tied to their genitals and get dragged behind a truck.
Ennis, always taciturn, sums their relationship up like this: “If you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it.” But, Jack can’t stand it. So, he looks for love in other places, more of that predator accusation, I suppose.
Still, he loves Ennis and wants them to get a ranch together and live an idyllic life on the Wyoming frontier. Ennis, however, is anything but idyllic. He realizes that it could never happen. His reluctance to buy into Jack’s fairytale ending leads Jack to say what has become the most quoted line of the movie: “I wish I knew how to quit you!”
Corny? Yes, but no less poignant. If you’re a “straight” boy, or the girlfriend of a straight boy, imagine how hard it would be for you to drop everything in your life and turn your back on every commitment you’ve made. Imagine telling your friends and family that the boy they thought was straight is really gay, and that he’s in love with another man.
And, if you’re having a hard time imagining it in 2006 in Dallas, Texas, where every gym has more gay men than StairMasters, imagine coming to terms with leaving your wife and moving in with a man in Wyoming in the 1960s, or 70s, or 80s, for that matter.
I won’t give away the ending. Suffice it to say that if you’re able to set aside whatever biases you have about homosexuality, and if you’re able to view Ledger and Gyllenhaal as two people who meet and fall in love, you’ll be moved by the story.
Sure, it might be a little uneasy seeing two men kiss, but the story isn’t told in the time they spend together, but rather in the time they are forced to spend apart.
George Henson is a lecturer of Spanish. He may be contacted at [email protected].
