I want to read the reading I've been reading as reflections on our cultural assumption about modern romantic love, the tragedy of courtly love.
In courtly love, the object we say we desire is unobtainable because we we make it unobtainable. This is not the simplistic Freudian claim that the object is more desirable because it can't be had. Rather, the object of our desire is so horrifying that we put obstacles in the way so we can't have it.
In courtly love, we distract ourselves both with the limit, the lack, the "No" and with an idealized beauty narcissistically projected on to the Other. The beauty is in the relationship between the two men, but it is also in the beauty of the geography and landscape -- the wide open spaces that people repeatedly focus on. From what's been described Lee's camera loves and idealizes Nature.
This film appeals to its audience (and disturbs Yoshie, Brian, and others) because it falls smack in that tradition of US individualism, where freedom resides elsewhere, inaccessible, unobtainable. It's not possible here. We are distracted by the glorious beauty of nature, the wide openness of the geography, a beauty that hides the terror that freedom evokes.
SUBLIMATION OF THE SUBLIME: LOVE AS EASY-GLIDE ASSFUCKING.
To narcissistically project onto nature, there must be a silent, subaltern surface that is already there. That surface is the silvering behind the pane of glass that makes narcissistic (heterosexual) reflexivity possible at all.
The relationship between two queer men becomes the lady in courtly love. Their love is idealized as perfect, boundless love that must be endlessly put off, endlessly displaced via ritualistically enacted ordeals.
"What the paradox of the Lady in courtly love ultimately amounts to is thus the paradox of detour: our 'official' desire is that we want to sleep with the Lady; whereas in truth, there is nothing we fear more than a Lady who might generously yield to this wish of ours -- what we truly expect and want from the Lady is simply yet another new ordeal, yet one more postponement."
The easy-glide assfucking is emblematic of a perfect, uncomplicated, idealized love. It is a love that is out of the ordinary and must be approached only through ritual acts of seduction that must never be consummated -- for that would make it merely mundane and of this world. It would no longer be sacred and unobtainable.
But, courtly love -- where the Straight eye eyeballs the Queer guys with its idealization of queer love -- is ultimately a masochistic fantasy.
In the masochistic theater of courtly love, Zizek reminds us, the Lady is the Master who subjects the masochist to punishing, capricious ordeals. Whereas we commonly believe that the Lady is put on a pedastal (or pedderstool if you're a Frey fan writing an angry letter to Dolan), placed above as if in some spiritual otherworld where perfection resides.
However, the idealization, this claim about the ethereal perfection of the Lady (ass fucking), is a secondary development. It is a narcissistic projection.
The function of that projection is not simply to keep the Lady (and the ass fucking) off limits. Rather, it is to occlude the trauma evoked by the Other -- the Lady (and the assfucking).
"In this precise and limited sense, Lacan concedes that 'the element of idealizing exaltation that is expressly sought out in the ideology of courtly love...is fundamentally narcissistic in character. Depreived of every real substance, the Lady (and the assfucking - my addition) functions as a mirror on to which the subject projects his narcissistic ideal. In other words...the Lady (and the ass fucking) appears 'not as she is, but as she fills his dream.'
"Let's go off to a ranch of our own, let's run away from this world to a life of our own making."
"No."
Jack had to die, not because he was gay, but because had the movie ended with them running off together, that would have been the end of courtly love, the end of the straight eye for the queer guys.
It is not simply that the Lady isn't real, that she doesn't really represent what women really are. And, thus, it is not simply that the assfucking isn't real, that it doesn't really represent assfucking -- an easy glide assfucking that could only be enacted by the whore of Babylon or someone who'd been fisted by a bear for hours prior to the assfucking.
Thus, we must ask, not about that which doesn't really represent the reality we believe exists. Rather, we must ask how the truth of a universal love that is neither queer nor straight is produced in the first place.
In Brokeback the truth of love, whether queer or straight, is constructed for us as something that must be seen but not heard. We must know it exists, but it must not be on public display:
"(I)if these two men had been born twenty years later it is doubtful if they would have been riding on a float in a Gay Pride parade. What they had was rare, not for public display." (David McReynolds)
Zizek points to Lacan's "Courtly Love as Anamorphosis" where an idealized Other, the Object, must not be shown. It must be seen only through a glass darkly. Ideally, we must never see it. It must be private. To remain an idealized Object, love as easy-glide assfucking must be seen in some "partial, distorted form, as its own shadow." We can think of it, says Zizek, as a "temporal anamorphosis: the Object is attainable only by way of an incessant postponement, as its absent point of reference."
But, by this he does not mean that we see distorted, imperfect representations. Rather, the straight eye for the queer guys creates is a universalized, essentialized love itself --a love that is neither straight nor queer. Love is elevated, idealized, eroticized, spiritualized, and sacralized. It is sacralized by ritual postponements and displacements:
"It is here that 'sublimation' sets in (and) sublimation occurs when an object, part of everyday reality, finds itself at the place of the impossible Thing. Herein resides the function of those artificial obstacles that suddenly hinder our access to some ordinary object: they elevate the object into a stand-in for the Thing. This is how the impossible changes into the prohibited: by way of the short circuit between the Thing and some positive object rendered inaccessible through artificial obstacles."
Brokeback, on my reading of these readings, then, is a film that elevates the object -- queer love -- into a stand-in for the Thing, some Love that exists out there.
And this is why it can be read as an offensive film that subsumes and silences queer love by insisting that there is a universal love, out there, but which must not and cannot be seen. It must be silenced and not for public display -- in the name of the thing that is rare, Love.
WELL DONE. THAT'S RARE
But, of course, as leftists we must ask, shouldn't we, about the way in which we make love something rare to begin with. Here is this thing we claim is unending, endless, without bounds, no limits, everlasting. And yet, it is rare, it is limited, and only a few can have it -- like status and wealth it must be rare, only for the privileged few. And if they have it, they must keep it behind closed doors to preserve its value in our contemporary economy of love.
[1] For, after all, what had the filmed ended by other means. One option would have been happiness -- but that would have actually been a depressing ending - and few in Hollywood want you to leave a film unhappy and depressed. Crying cathartically, yes. Depressed, no. Another ending could have been just panning out from the scenes of domesticity that have been described here as less than satisfying. Hardly a Hollywood ending.
At 03:48 PM 2/3/2006, Doug Henwood wrote: [Thanks to Michael Pug for passing this along.]
Brokeback Mountain: A Review by David McReynolds