Maybe You Had to Be There
27/12/05 22:42![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madrobinsAmong other things I've done this vacation was see Brokeback Mountain. I liked it. I would not say that, because the lovers are gay, it is somehow more effective, meaningful, politically insightful than a tragic heterosexual love story, but I thought it was effective, meaningful and insightful. Part of this is because I am always fascinated by stories of people whose lives aren't easily contained by their time and place. It's part of what I'm playing with in the Sarah Tolerance books--I never want her not to believe in the values with which she was raised; I want her in conflict with them, because that's what interests me, and I want her to feel that conflict (and the reader, too, if I do it right).
My godparents were a gay couple. No, they weren't godparents in the religious sense; on the other hand, one introduced himself to several people at my wedding as my "fairy godfather." I would not have had the nerve to say such a thing. He was the more colorful of the two; his partner, a tall, soft-spoken Billy-Graham-lookalike with a Texas drawl, worked for a company that made material for girdles and things like that. Watching Brokeback I thought of him (he would have been well into middle-age in 1963 when Brokeback begins, and had already left a marriage and a child in Texas and been living in the East for years) and wondered what it had been like for him, leaving his home and his community and all the expectations with which he had been raised--his own and those of the people around him--because his very nature was at war with those expectations.
Someone--could it have been![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
alg?--asked why Ennis and Jack, the lovers in Brokeback, couldn't just pick up and leave. Even when I was a kid the degree of mobility we have now was fairly unusual; even now relocating is no picnic. Hell, we moved three thousand miles three years ago--with a job at this end and all sorts of support from the Spouse's new company--and it was scary. Imagine being from a time and place where your expectations are not high to begin with. If you're a naturally conservative sort of person, even a pessimistic sort of person, it would likely seem impossible. Watching the film, I also remembered reading about a lab test where rats, conditioned to running a maze, would ignore an escape route when one was opened for them--they simply couldn't believe there was a way out.
When it comes down to it, Brokeback is the story of a pessimist and an optimist. The pessimist has good reasons of his own for believing that expressing his love in his time and face could be devastating, even deadly. The optimist has...optimism. Looking at it, you know there's no way it could end well.
A few years ago there was a much ballyhooed film called Far from Heaven, set in the late 50s or early 60s, with Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid and Dennis Haysbert. Quaid is closeted and married to Moore, and as their marriage dissolves, she begins to be close to Haysbert. All the way through the film (which is built to resemble one of those Jane Wyman-Rock Hudson weepies like All that Heaven Allows) it appears that somehow, in spite of what one knows about the era, Haysbert and Moore will have a happy ending. In the end they don't--the filmmaker decided to go with social reality, but because they kept hinting at something else, it never felt satisfying to me. Brokeback, because there's never any hint that--from the perspective of Ennis, the pessimist--this relationship can end well, plays fair. As I said, I liked it.
Your mileage, of course, may vary.
My godparents were a gay couple. No, they weren't godparents in the religious sense; on the other hand, one introduced himself to several people at my wedding as my "fairy godfather." I would not have had the nerve to say such a thing. He was the more colorful of the two; his partner, a tall, soft-spoken Billy-Graham-lookalike with a Texas drawl, worked for a company that made material for girdles and things like that. Watching Brokeback I thought of him (he would have been well into middle-age in 1963 when Brokeback begins, and had already left a marriage and a child in Texas and been living in the East for years) and wondered what it had been like for him, leaving his home and his community and all the expectations with which he had been raised--his own and those of the people around him--because his very nature was at war with those expectations.
Someone--could it have been
alg?--asked why Ennis and Jack, the lovers in Brokeback, couldn't just pick up and leave. Even when I was a kid the degree of mobility we have now was fairly unusual; even now relocating is no picnic. Hell, we moved three thousand miles three years ago--with a job at this end and all sorts of support from the Spouse's new company--and it was scary. Imagine being from a time and place where your expectations are not high to begin with. If you're a naturally conservative sort of person, even a pessimistic sort of person, it would likely seem impossible. Watching the film, I also remembered reading about a lab test where rats, conditioned to running a maze, would ignore an escape route when one was opened for them--they simply couldn't believe there was a way out.When it comes down to it, Brokeback is the story of a pessimist and an optimist. The pessimist has good reasons of his own for believing that expressing his love in his time and face could be devastating, even deadly. The optimist has...optimism. Looking at it, you know there's no way it could end well.
A few years ago there was a much ballyhooed film called Far from Heaven, set in the late 50s or early 60s, with Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid and Dennis Haysbert. Quaid is closeted and married to Moore, and as their marriage dissolves, she begins to be close to Haysbert. All the way through the film (which is built to resemble one of those Jane Wyman-Rock Hudson weepies like All that Heaven Allows) it appears that somehow, in spite of what one knows about the era, Haysbert and Moore will have a happy ending. In the end they don't--the filmmaker decided to go with social reality, but because they kept hinting at something else, it never felt satisfying to me. Brokeback, because there's never any hint that--from the perspective of Ennis, the pessimist--this relationship can end well, plays fair. As I said, I liked it.
Your mileage, of course, may vary.