The Big Message

***[Attn: This post is about Brokeback Mountain. I don't think there are any plot spoilers in it. Really, I don't. But I'm just saying.]***

Mr. Shakes and I saw Brokeback Mountain last night, and so I was finally able to go back and read Tart’s beautiful post on the film, which I skipped over before, because I avoid any press or discussion about films to which I’m really looking forward. I hadn’t managed to miss that it was a “gay cowboy love story with a Big Message,” but, knowing Ang Lee’s and Annie Proulx’s work, and knowing the inherent flaws in most Big Message hype, I prepared myself for nothing more than moving and captivating story, and that’s exactly what it was, as Tart so eloquently noted.

There is a Big Message, but it isn’t in the film. The Big Message is that the story was written, that the film was made, that it was widely released, that it received stellar reviews, that there are people who have never seen two men kiss in real life who are seeing this film and enjoying it, that—at a time when people want to change the Constitution to prevent gay marriage—the most beloved film of the year reminds us that neither hatred nor law can stop the love upon which lifetime commitment depends.

That the film itself lacks an overt political message is, in reality, what is revolutionary. This is a love story like any other love story. In its candor, Brokeback Mountain challenges the viewer not to relate—have you never longed, have you never felt the pain of loss, have you never feared judgment, have you never kept a secret from your child? Have you never loved this deeply? It doesn’t require our sympathy, but speaks to our empathy, which is what all great films do, relying on the commonality of so much of human experience. Not “Walk a mile in this guy’s shoes,” but “We’ve all tread this familiar path.” Normalizing, by virtue of universality, a gay relationship after so many people have come of age with the notion that, to paraphrase Oddjob, the way they love is unspeakably loathsome and perverse, is no small thing.

It’s easy to imagine the difference between a world in which a gay teenager has never seen an openly gay character on television or in film, and a world in which a gay teenager can watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, but that misses a subtle point, which can be found somewhere between Philadelphia and Brokeback Mountain. Philadelphia set out to take its viewers on a journey of compassion and acceptance. Brokeback Mountain presupposes that a tragic love story with two male leads is as viable an option as any other—and if you don’t agree, it doesn’t try to endear its characters to you by making them saintly eunuchs. (If you don’t agree, it’s your problem.)

We look back on Philadelphia now and we sniff at its timidity—a one-dimensional cardboard cutout of a gay man, too likable to be human, stricken with a sexually transmitted disease, which seems preposterously impossible considering he never seems to touch anyone, including his partner—but at the time, it was important. One day, with any luck, we’ll look back at Brokeback Mountain in a not totally dissimilar way—why is the tragedy because they’re gay? Sniff.—because we’ll have moved on yet again. I’m reminded of the many times I’ve read that Will Smith, or Denzel Washington, or Queen Latifah, or some other black actor has gotten a role “even though it was written for a white person.” (Ooh, ahh.) It’s silly; unless key plot points are race-specific, parts are written for people, but that’s the struggle of broadening—or finally crushing all notion of—The Norm. One day, I might be reading that Ian McKellan and Rupert Everett have signed on to a May-December romantic comedy that Richard Gere and the latest busty ingénue have passed on. And no one will bat an eye, even when the gossip rags breathlessly report “even though the parts were written for straight people.”