I want to start this by saying that, at the time it came out, I LOVED Brokeback Mountain.
It was early 2006, I was sixteen, and tentatively starting to venture out of the closet. Brokeback Mountain’s massive success felt like an encouraging gesture from the outside world, that people like me could be seen on screen and portrayed sympathetically.
But that didn’t change how disturbed I was by the film’s ending, and how depressed it left me feeling. Now, I find myself resenting the place Brokeback Mountain holds in the LGBT film canon, because I don't feel that it's anywhere near as significant a piece of cinema for the LGBT community as some would have us believe.
For a start, the film's premise simply isn't all that original. Even a very brief acquaintance with LGBT cinema will show that tragedies absolutely dominate the canon. The Children’s Hour, for instance, was made in 1961 – adapted from a play written in the 1930s – and features Shirley MacLain as a young, lesbian school teacher, and Audrey Hepburn as her ambiguously orientated best friend and love interest. The film is an intense, emotional drama with an inevitably tragic end – MacLain’s character commits suicide. But, as in Brokeback, MacLain’s character is portrayed sympathetically and both women are shown to be innocent victims of the cruelty of others, rather than perverts.
If Brokeback Mountain was such a cultural milestone, why did its creators not manage to use something other than exactly the same narrative template that was being used in 1961? ‘Queer meets queer, queers’ lives spiral downwards, queer dies, credits roll’ would be boringly cliché if it weren’t so alarmingly common in LGBT film. If nothing else, we can accuse Brokeback’s creators of a serious lack of original thought.
And whilst tragedies are an important dramatic genre, and it’s not like I object to my access, as a queer person, to this long standing narrative tradition, what I object to is having such limited access to almost any other genre. I fear the negative psychological consequences for the most vulnerable members of our communities, seeing so many of our stories end in death and disaster. I fear the wider societal impact that these stories have on how real LGBT people are received culturally.Being allowed to star only in certain types of story - never being allowed to take the lead in narratives that don't revolve around our sexuality (and some assumed inherant tragedy therein), is inherantly 'other'-ing, and Brokeback Mountan's popularity is a symptom of this issue.
For a start, the film's premise simply isn't all that original. Even a very brief acquaintance with LGBT cinema will show that tragedies absolutely dominate the canon. The Children’s Hour, for instance, was made in 1961 – adapted from a play written in the 1930s – and features Shirley MacLain as a young, lesbian school teacher, and Audrey Hepburn as her ambiguously orientated best friend and love interest. The film is an intense, emotional drama with an inevitably tragic end – MacLain’s character commits suicide. But, as in Brokeback, MacLain’s character is portrayed sympathetically and both women are shown to be innocent victims of the cruelty of others, rather than perverts.
Admittedly, the pathos of Children feels more authentic than Brokeback’s to me, because it’s a product of its era. It was 1961, the source material was written in the 1930s, and writers and filmmakers were working under heavy censorship laws, amongst the many other cultural issues that limited the depiction of LGBT people, so that we were only ever tragic figures or deviants (or both).
In the late 1990s and 2005 the people behind Brokeback – both the short story it’s adapted from and the film itself – had no such excuse.If Brokeback Mountain was such a cultural milestone, why did its creators not manage to use something other than exactly the same narrative template that was being used in 1961? ‘Queer meets queer, queers’ lives spiral downwards, queer dies, credits roll’ would be boringly cliché if it weren’t so alarmingly common in LGBT film. If nothing else, we can accuse Brokeback’s creators of a serious lack of original thought.
And whilst tragedies are an important dramatic genre, and it’s not like I object to my access, as a queer person, to this long standing narrative tradition, what I object to is having such limited access to almost any other genre. I fear the negative psychological consequences for the most vulnerable members of our communities, seeing so many of our stories end in death and disaster. I fear the wider societal impact that these stories have on how real LGBT people are received culturally.Being allowed to star only in certain types of story - never being allowed to take the lead in narratives that don't revolve around our sexuality (and some assumed inherant tragedy therein), is inherantly 'other'-ing, and Brokeback Mountan's popularity is a symptom of this issue.
Much like the faux-activism of Macklemore’s ‘Same Love’, Brokeback’s tragedy!porn suggests more to me about a heterosexist society than about actual LGBT people today. Queer tragedy these days functions to relieve straight guilt – because who doesn’t feel bad for the poor guys in that film? It reassures its heterosexual audience that they're good people because they feel for the queer characters, and then lets them off the hook, never having to consider how it feels for a queer kid, like I was, to see so much violent death dished out to my on-screen reflections. It’s unhelpful, it’s depressing and at its worst, these sorts of depictions of us as helpless and/or dead are deeply regressive.
In a world where straight celebrities are rushing to assure LGBT kids that It Gets Better, I have to wonder how much more good they'd do if they spent that time pushing for wider, clearer and more positive representation of queer people on screen. It's a little hard for a teenager to imagine a world where they aren't victimised constantly when that victimisation remains so central to 90% of our cinematic narrative, know what I mean?
