Here's a link to a really wonderfully written article about BBM that appeared in the NY Review of Books over the weekend. Writer Daniel Mendelsohn takes issue, as I have, with the argument by critics about how "universal" the story it tells is. It's rather infuriating, actually, that many liberal-minded critics have been so insistent that this is the story of two sexless souls falling in love.
Let's just be clear: Brokeback Mountain is a story about the way the closet ruins the lives of gay men and their families. I'm happy that the film's been so embraced by all, but the knots people have tied themselves in to to insist how "universal" the story is is pretty insulting, as if to call the film "gay" is somehow a horrible thing that would keep people from relating to it.
Choice quote: "The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really homosexual—that they're more like the heart of America than like "gay people"—you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed."
Let's just be clear: Brokeback Mountain is a story about the way the closet ruins the lives of gay men and their families. I'm happy that the film's been so embraced by all, but the knots people have tied themselves in to to insist how "universal" the story is is pretty insulting, as if to call the film "gay" is somehow a horrible thing that would keep people from relating to it.
Choice quote: "The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really homosexual—that they're more like the heart of America than like "gay people"—you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed."
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment