> Also, in my article I point out a key moment -- the transition from
> the two shepherds having sex to the sheep killed by a coyote -- a
> consequence where queer sex leads to gory death -- as if nature
> itself were in revulsion of what had happened in that tent.
Precisely. But it's even worse in The Ice Storm: you enjoy a little swapping, and YOUR CHILD gets ELECTROCUTED and DIES!!!
Bitch | Lab says:
<snip>
> heh. I've been pestering Brian for his review. When his review of
> Manderlay came out, I told him that I'd concluded that Brokeback
> was really just a 'chick flick'.
I was prepared to like Brokeback Mountain at this level at least, because its trailer showed Jake Gyllenhaal in a flattering light (and I love his sister). In the film, Gyllenhaal does recall Montgomery Clift -- the original gay cowboy (The Red River, 1948) -- to the viewer's mind, but only to Gyllenhaal's disadvantage. :-|
The main value of Brokeback Mountain is an iconographic value. Now, even those who couldn't see any gay subtext in The Red River and the like cannot but imagine GAY every time they look at cowboy images. :->
Joanna wrote:
> Absolutely not. What the film argues is that being unable to live
> one's passions is unnatural.
It seems to me that it's perfectly good and natural in Ang Lee's universe not to live one's sexual passions -- take The Wedding Banquet: a straight girl Wei-Wei marries a rich gay boy Wai-Tung upon the advice (!) of Wai-Tung's lover Steve, to get a Green Card for herself and help conceal Wai-Tung's relation with Steve from Wai- Tung's parents; Wei-Wei seduces Wai-Tung when he is drunk, gets pregnant, thinks about abortion, but decides not to have one (!); Steve, an ACT-UP activist, is an unnaturally self-sacrificing boy, so he overcomes his jealousy and accepts (!) an odd triangle relationship; Mr. Gao, Wai-Tung's father, thanks Wei-Wei for giving him an heir and gives money to Steve as a token of acknowledgment of his relation to Wai-Tung which Mr. Gao knew (!) about all along but hid it (!!) because he wanted to have an heir (!!!). Each turn of the plot screams a PLOT DEVICE louder than the John Williams score in Star Wars films. The characters in the Wedding Banquet make the choices they do, only because there would be no film if they made other choices. And it's no wonder, as Bitch | Lab reports that the film's precedent was The Bridges of Madison County (yuck). . . .
Brian notes that "Ennis is only cut off because Ang Lee wants him to be. He never explains why he is cut off." Quite so. I'd only add that almost all his other characters -- gay or straight -- in all his films make unnatural choices just because the plots require them to. Now, if Ang Lee were an experimental artist fighting narrative cinema -- like Brecht, Vertov, Buñuel, Godard, etc. or even like Hal Hartley -- questions such as whether characters' choices make sense in light of what's shown in the film and what we know of history do not arise. But Ang Lee is essentially a conventional realist film maker -- no bold visual, aural, or narrative experiment in his cinema -- so one can only wonder why he always creates plots that make characters sacrifice themselves and/or get them punished. In Lee's cinematic universe, people were happier when their lives were constrained by strict social customs, made choices based on economic prudence first and foremost, and could not dream of gay sex, swapping parties, etc. (Jane Austen's world) -- freedom and free sex only brought sadness (at best) and death (at worst).
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>