Hello. I read the article entitled "Misunderstanding Brokeback Mountain" posted on the forum, and the reactions to it, and many other reactions to the movie and reviews and comments about the movie. I've seen it multiple times and have PBS and have found myself weeping at times like a cracked basement and don't want to let go of all the things about the movie that grip me.
That said, it totally bums me out how quick people are to resolve what is a beautiful and very present work of art in one direction or another....why, so you can rest easier, be right, feel vindicated, whatever? The movie remains an open sore for me.
Here is a link to a review by Mark Simpson, the very queer British cultural critic who did in fact come up with the concept of metrosexual (which meant to his way of thinking the modern man more in love with his image and sensual self than with another person), a being that transcends the gay/straight split.
A few facts on Simpson for the uninitiated:
1. He's written brilliantly on changes in masculinity, the incredible increased exposure of male flesh, and what he sees as the too-neat claims of gay culture.
2. He out-Foucaults Foucault in his claim that sexuality and desire constitute the prison to end all prisons.
3. He is totally pro-sex, no doubt out there scoring right now.
4. He sees the movie as a very mixed bag--hates the lack of what he regards as real homo sex and expressed love, and sees it as a mostly boring metrosexual critique on retrosexuality and repressed male emotionality.
Simpson's queer credentials are unassailable, so far as I can see. I have all his books save one, and his Male Impersonators, written in the 90's, is a brilliant record of changing views of men---and provides a very big and knowing perspective from which to talk about what it means to be a sexual man of any stripe. Read and absorb what he says about Marky Mark and Tom Cruise, and you get a much more fluid view of how men (at least in the Anglo-American world) make their identities, and the private visions and fears behind them, than anything else I've seen about male sexuality.
Mind you, I love the frickin movie, screenplay, story, and--though I think Heath's mostly just a lucky guy with very good acting instincts and a pliable body--cannot but cannot get Ledger's performance, his body language, the rising tide of his lostness and empty pain, cannot get all that out of my neighborhood. Brings back my father, his fear, his longing (for what?? for a body undamaged by WWII, for war buddies, for anyone but my mother?) come powerfully alive for me, like I experienced them when I was maybe 2 or 3 or 4 years old....He's been dead for nearly 30 years. I remember how I felt inside about how HE carried his body and pain. I am so grateful for the chance--painful and unsettling as it continues to be--to revisit all this, and let the karmic confusion and pain wash over me....My body moves just a bit more easily as I do.
Longwinded post, I know. The movie--and I disagree with a lot of what Simpson says--does, as the critic points out, deal to a great extent with homoerotics and male sensuality....and these are far bigger and (pardon me for saying it) deeper and longer lasting than sex of any kind can express...Although sex is of course a wonderful prison as prisons go.
The link:
http://www.marksimpson.com/pages/journalism/metro-cowboys.htmlThanks.
