THE TALKIES: If It's Not Brokeback, Fix It
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES JAMES B O W M A N IfItg Not Brokeback, Fix It S MALLER FILMS SWEEP OSCAR NOMINATIONS" headlined the Wall Street Journal. "Small films with potent themes..." agreed the New York...
...Ang Lee, the 68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 2006 JAMES BOWMAN director, has said, "This is a universal story...
...That's why Brokeback Mountain is-like other gay-themed pictures such as Angels in America by Academy Award Best Screenwriter nominee (for Munich) Tony Kushner--a Bad Dad movie...
...Both Jack's old man, when we finally meet him in the person of Peter McRobbie, and his almost equally unattractive father-in-law (Graham Beckel) are presented to us as domestic tyrants, dominating and manipulating wives and children by means of intimidation...
...That Western Union sent its last telegram only a few days before the nominations were announced may have been what prompted the Academy to celebrate in such ostentatious fashion the final overthrow of Sam Goldwyn's famous dictum, "Pictures are for entertainment...
...It's a point of view, of course, though hardly an unfamiliar one in the movies of the last--oh, I don't know, 30 years...
...Most of us, especially those of us raised by more or less stern papas to "take it like a man," will approve the sentiment...
...Not far behind it are GoodNight and GoodLuck taking yet another well-deserved whack at "McCarthyism"--doesn't Hollywood ever get tired of knocking down its favorite hate figure after George W. Bush?--the why-can't-we-all-just-get-along racial soap ~' opera, Crash, and Munich, Steven Spielberg's paean to the fine moral properties of Jewish guilt...
...Ledger's character, Ennis Del Mar, says to his gay lover Jack, played by Academy Award Best Supporting Actor nominee Jake Gyllenhaal, "If you can't fix it, Jack, you got to stand it...
...And the greatest of these causes in Hollywood-greater even than self-righteous moralizing about that now familiar "cycle of violence"--is the one that has most to do with buttering Hollywood's bread, namely the unwavering assault on the culture of "repression" and (as Hollywood supposes) its "patriarchal" roots...
...To them, as to the minds behindBrokebackMountain, not having what you want is tantamount to a death sentence...
...The picture with the most nominations, Brokeback Mountain, celebrates both gay love and, with it, the "gay" political agenda...
...Henderson Presents, celebrates the breakdown of British sexual prudery during the dark days of the Second World War.A History of Violence and Crash join Munich in warning us against the dangers of engaging in "violence'-even self-defensive violence--unless, of course, you are a fanatical Islamicist suicide bomber, in which case violence is understandable and excusable and you can expect to be treated quite sympathetically...
...This typically lumbering attempt at wit disguises the extent to which the Oscars have in fact become Hollywood's method of congratulating itself for political rectitude on behalf of liberal and left-wing causes...
...Ennis himself is a prettybad dad to two daughters, but that's only because all his models, and pretty much all society's too in the era (1960s and 1970s) of the film's setting, were even worse...
...Three ~'~ of the five nominees for best actor portrayed, or impersonated, an alreadywell-known celebrity...
...Other movies to receive multiple nominations include one, Syriana, attacking big oil companies--with a charge at the CIA and the American foreign policy establishment thrown in as makeweight--and another, The Constant Gardener, attacking big drug companies...
...He "never taught me anything, never once came to see me ride...
...Small films, maybe, but big names...
...He can barely walk or open his mouth to speak, so stiffis he...
...Or look at them in another way...
...The best picture nominees include mostly independent films with low budgets and serious subjects...
...At one point Mr...
...To him, it is a very specifically "gay tragedy...
...Is it about homosexual love or is it just about love...
...Love there is, of course, and more of lust, but of more interest than either to Mr...
...Its hero, played by Academy Award Best Actor nominee Heath Ledger, is literally rigid with repression...
...Most people don't, of course, though most of those learn to rub along with what they've got...
...T HUS THE MAIN PURPOSE of the juxtaposition of gay love and that wild, masculine outdoor life of ridin' and herdin' and fishin" and shootin' is not just to excite gays with images of butch cowboy love or even to make the case for an emotional continuum--and therefore the exciting possibility of a seamless transition--between male friendship and homosexuality, though it does make that case too...
...The Academy could have made a much more daring choice by picking as a Best Picture nominee Cinderella Man, which only received nominations for editing and make-up--and a make-up to Paul Giamatti, overlooked in last year's Sideways, with the chance of a Best Supporting Actor nod...
...That, if the New York Times wants to know, is the message Hollywood was sending with its Oscar nominations...
...It could be the academy's response to the grievous condition our world is in...
...In Hollywood's dream world there's never anything, at least anything sexual, that can't be fixed...
...One of the nominees for best foreign film takes as its heroes two Palestinian suicide bombers...
...The film is neither about gay love nor about love tout courtbut yet another of Hollywood's seemingly endless stream of exercises in xaflgar Freudianism and romanticizations of the inhibition-less and unrepressed life...
...agreed the New York Times...
...Now, a movie like that would be simply unimaginable...
...The argument of BrokebackMountain's critics and apologists is roughly between two contending views of it...
...MARCH 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 69...
...messages should be delivered by Western Union" But that doesn't mean that all these message-movies have since learned to become entertaining-or, which comes to the same thing, enjoyable to those who don't share their strongly held political opinions...
...Guessing what sort of political agenda will, I imagine, not be difficult...
...Jack, who goes in for bull riding at the rodeo, has a dad who was also a rider but who is impossible to please, according to Jack...
...James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and The American Spectator~ movie critic...
...A much more insightful review in the New York _Review of Books by Daniel Mendelsohn, who loved the film, makes a strong case that that's just where it should be classified...
...But Cinderella Man had no Bad Dad to offer...
...His own dad died when he was a child, but not before showing him as a terrible warning another sort of broke back: the shattered body of a homosexual rancher murdered and mutilated by gay bashers...
...The message is clear enough for Western Union: traditional standards of masculinity produce only spirit-killing "repression" and the deep unhappiness that repression inevitablyproduces...
...Lee, to his brace of screenwriters, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, and to Annie Proulx, on whose story the film is based, is the loving but terrified depiction of that most potent of contemporary bogeymen, the dreadflfl specter of not being able to live a life of complete sexual fulfillment...
...But in my opinion, both of these views are mistaken...
...The New York Times published a cutesy little editorial pretending to wonder what meaning the Academy should be regarded as attempting to convey by its choices: The task of deciphering this year's nominations is a little easier than in past years...
...And the way you fix it is by doing what feels good...
...I just wanted to make a love story'--and that disingenuous selfcharacterization has been echoed in review after review by those who are grateful for an excuse not to classify it among downbeat gay problem dramas...
...This pattern could be merely the hangover from the "Lord of the Rings" years...
...Now we live in a world--at least a world of popular entertainment and the media--where goodness can only mean doing what you want...
...Three of the five nominees for best picture are about famous people or events...
...Jack leaves home when still young to make his own way in the world...
...Rather, it is to show us unforgettable images of toxic masculinity...
...Four of the five best picture nominees have a more or less explicit political agenda...
...Once upon a time--back, say, in the days of Brief Encounter (1945)--the movies were not averse to tales of heroic repression...
...Hollywood does not...
...Or, it could simply be that these mostly very good films are really the best movies released in 2005...
...one, Transamerica, has a hero--or heroine--who is a transsexual and another, Hustle &Flow, a hero who is a pimp trying to make it as a rapper...
...Only a good dad, and one, moreover, who knew something-and taught something--about being a man and learning to stand what you couldn't fix...
...one, North Country is about alady miner who breaks an all-male monopoly of mining jobs--how inspirational is that?--and another, Mrs...
...But making do in the face of life's little disappointments is not something at all approved ofbythe enemies of repression...
...Could there be any connection here between these politically themed movies and the decline in box office receipts during 2005...
...The movie's makers and sponsors in their press campaign understandably but with an unconvincing positiveness make the case for mere love...
Vol. 39 • March 2006 • No. 2
