While visiting my family in Maryland last weekend I saw the film Brokeback Mountain. We had to drive into Baltimore to see it because the good people of Harford County wouldn't allow the "gay cowboy movie" to play locally. I'd become quite familiar with the towns slightly southern homosexual anxiety after having lived there for nearly two years when I was in my late teens. I remember driving around the small town in my old Honda with the mellifluous tones of Eve Libertine shaking the windows. Screaming the words until I was sure I'd done permanent injury to my throat I'd slow my car down to absorb the sweet gaping expressions of the people on the sidewalk. Each strangely resembling the blow up doll on the album cover. The pleasure was at times was so intense that I would need to pull my car over, throw my head back, and light a cigarette.
The film, while exceptional, was not about gay cowboys. I also can't see how it was about "Love as a force of Nature," as the tag line suggests. In my opinion it was a film about starvation. I'm amazed at how deftly it depicts the way that deprivation will, after so many years, either kill you or force you to turn your teeth inward. If you've never experienced this you might very well walk out of the theatre thinking, "Jeepers, that sure was a swell gay cowboy flick. I guess love really is a force of nature!" No. Love is something that leaves you desperately alone in a cramped, dirty trailer cluching your dead lover's shirt because that is the only thing that's left of him.
One of the most powerful scenes, I thought, was when Jack and Enis part ways for the first time. They end up beating the shit out each other. It may sound crazy, but Enis punching Jack in the face seemed like such a logical response to me. Isn't that exactly what you want to do to someone who has that much power over you, someone who has taken you from a relatively safe, if passionless existence, and thrown your life into utter chaos? I felt so horrible for both men. They were raised to be silent and that's exactly the way they left each other.
Driving home from Baltimore I thought about the people who fought to keep this film out of their town, and how they deal with their own starvation. I wished that I was driving alone and that I had Eve with me to scream along with. "The public are shocked by the state of society, /Don't give me your morals, / They're filth in my eyes. /You can pack them away with the rest of your lies/Your painted mask of ugly perfection,/The ring on your finger,/ the sign of protection,/Is the rape on page 3, /it's the soldiers obsession,/How well you've been caught to support your oppression. /One god. One church. One husband. One wife."