Bareback Mountain

So, if you haven't heard, there's this movie about gay cowboys, and according to the New Yorker's Ken Tucker:

You either buy into this tale of men in love or you join the ranks of those who've been snickering during the movie's prerelease trailers, and who can be divided into the insecure, the idiots, or the insecure idiots.

Well, here's the thing: Offhand, I can think of two theatrical releases in the last two years that I unreservedly enjoyed: Kinsey and The Aristocrats.

[UPDATE 1/4/06: Add Match Point to the list of movies I have zero reservations about. (I don't mean to imply there is absolutely nothing about these movies that could be improved, but that they are (so I say) essentially as good as any film can be.) One caveat: I'm a huge fan of Woody Allen, and reading Dostoevsky was a life changing-experience for me, so any film that is the product of Allen's full exercise of his talent and that rings insightful and ironic changes on the basic plot of Crime and Punishment is going to be up my alley. That is idiosyncratic, albeit very good, taste. N.B.: One prominent reviewer whose name I can't recall, else I'd provide a link, wrote something to the effect that "you'll never see the plot twist coming." That's fatuous. The first two thirds of the movie resound with Hannah and Her Sisters, and the last third with Crimes and Misdemeanors, which is (duh) an adaptation of C&P. If you're familiar with the source material, in other words, you should be able to pinpoint the moment at which the "twist" part of the plot is set into motion, and more or less exactly how it will play out. Of course, grasping the bare essentials of the plot isn't the purpose of the exercise. Which points towards a potential constituent of greatness in art: an experience that becomes richer and deeper on the second, third, nth viewing/listening/etc. My four word review of Match Point (undercutting the old boss by one word): Tolstoyan take on C&P [if Bush gets to bend the rules of FISA, we at FW get to bend the rules of counting--ed.]. With that said, I'm hoping to see a reaction to the film and the foregoing from the actual Tom...Schmidt.]

Robert Farley thought of a few good reasons why Brokeback Mountain might not be worth the ten bucks oh five for a ticket:

because Ang Lee is a hit or miss director...because films on such topics often take on an Afterschool Special quality...because [one] doesn't care for cowboy romance films....

Add to that that I don't care for romance films in general and that if I'm not super motivated I'm not going to do the grunt work involved in catching a limited release flick. (I still have to see Jesus Is Magic.)

However, some people don't want to see it because they think mansex is gross. Or something. Mickey Kaus, for example, apparently won't see a movie unless there's a female lead he can fantasize about. Well, that's what he says, anyway. I'm gonna have to go ahead and call shenanigans on that. Did Kaus see The Godfather? The Terminator? etc etc ad nauseam ad infinitum?

It's a fairly well documented fact that most homophobes' homophobia is a coping method for their own repressed homosexuality and bisexuality. Since overt gay-bashing is generally seen as vulgar and impolite these days, homophobia itself has increasingly become sublimated under various forms of cover; for pundits, this meta-homophobia tends to get expressed as the preferences of "middle America," since those preferences are just empirical facts, as opposed to, say, the normatively assessable judgement of pundits who hide their own disdain for gayness behind whatever "middle America" is supposed to be. One of the more egregious specimens of this type of bigotry that's relevant to Brokeback Mountain comes from (where else?) NRO, in the person of Kulturwissenschafter Rod Dreher:

[I]t does seem pretty inarguable that the mainstream American film audience doesn't have much enthusiasm for a film that depicts male-on-male eroticism. What's interesting to me is that there really is an appetite, however limited, for non-erotic male homosexuality (e.g., Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, The Birdcage), and there is an appetite for lesbian eroticism in mainstream film. But not frank male-on-male eroticism. I can't begin to explain the discrepancy--I mean, why so many people find male-on-male eroticism distasteful, when they tolerate the same from female-to-female--but it's real.

Yeah, that is a head scratcher, isn't it? The mystery of why the "mainstream American film audience" likes its fags nice and flamingly harmless but digs hot chicks making out---the "mainstream" appetite for lesbian action between stereotypical lesbians is what exactly?---is just one of those eternal puzzles, a bit like the problem of change.

P.S. James Wolcott points out of James Lileks that "[he] should have learned at this point the difference between 'disinterest' and being uninterested." But Wolcott lets him off too easy. Lileks' ignorance of the distinction would be mildly embarrassing were he merely a "semiprofessional writer," as Wolcott has it, but as a fully professional anti-egghead poseur, Lileks would have to do something like lie on his back and give himself a rimjob to embarrass himself any more.

The post Wolcott nods at is classic Lileks: his rhetorical blade flashing from its scabbard, our Man in Minnesota incises and excises and slash boom pow hack the illusions of liberal p.c.dom are in tatters. Thus, Lileks bleats wimpily about Entertainment Weekly putting Brokeback Mountain on its cover instead of The Passion of the Aslan, only to deride as pernicious liberal fluff the notion that "the two movies are somehow in a meta-competition for the Soul of America." Time for another round of spot the contradiction.

P.P.S. Wolcott surely doesn't think that the success of Brokeback Mountain (BM?) in a tiny release in three theaters in NYC, one in LA, and one in SF, is an indication of future box office success, does he?