Gay America
The Hidden Columnists--Frank Rich Edition (18 Dec)

WHAT if they held a culture war and no one fired a shot?

So begins Frank Rich's Sunday column Two Gay Cowboys Hit a Homerun (full access to column available to Times Select subscribers), which is focused on the new movie Brokeback Mountain (details from IMDB; trailer at Apple) and its weirdly non-confrontational opening--it even had the highest per-theater average ever for a live action movie opening last weekend:

Those screens were in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco - hardly national bellwethers. But I'll rashly predict that the big Hollywood question posed on the front page of The Los Angeles Times after those stunning weekend grosses - "Can 'Brokeback Mountain' Move the Heartland?" - will be answered with a resounding yes. All the signs of a runaway phenomenon are present, from an instant parody on "Saturday Night Live" to the report that a multiplex in Plano, Tex., sold more advance tickets for the so-called "gay cowboy picture" than for "King Kong." "The culture is finding us," James Schamus, the "Brokeback Mountain" producer, told USA Today. "Grown-up movies have never had that kind of per-screen average. You only get those numbers when you're vacuuming up enormous interest from all walks of life."

In the packed theater where I caught "Brokeback Mountain," the trailers included a National Guard recruitment spiel, and the audience was demographically all over the map. The culture is seeking out this movie not just because it is a powerful, four-hankie account of a doomed love affair and is beautifully acted by everyone, starting with the riveting Heath Ledger. The X factor is that the film delivers a story previously untold by A-list Hollywood. It's a story America may be more than ready to hear a year after its president cynically flogged a legally superfluous (and unpassable) constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage for the sole purpose of whipping up the basest hostilities of his electoral base.

By coincidence, "Brokeback Mountain," a movie that is all the more subversive for having no overt politics, is a rebuke and antidote to that sordid episode. Whether it proves a movie for the ages or as transient as "Love Story," it is a landmark in the troubled history of America's relationship to homosexuality. It brings something different to the pop culture marketplace at just the pivotal moment to catch a wave.

[...]

Though "Brokeback Mountain" is not a western, it's been directed by Ang Lee with the austerity and languorous gait of a John Ford epic. These aesthetics couldn't be more country miles removed from "The Birdcage" or "Will & Grace." The audience is forced to recognize that gay people were fixtures in the red state of Wyoming (and every other corner of the country, too) long before Matthew Shepard and Mary Cheney were born. Without a single polemical speech, this laconic film dramatizes homosexuality as an inherent and immutable identity, rather than some aberrant and elective "agenda" concocted by conspiratorial "elites" in Chelsea, the Castro and South Beach, as anti-gay proselytizers would have it. Ennis and Jack long for a life together, not for what gay baiters pejoratively label a "lifestyle."

But in truth the audience doesn't have to be coerced to get it. This is where the country has been steadily moving of late. "Brokeback Mountain," a Hollywood product after all, is not leading a revolution but ratifying one, fleshing out - quite literally - what most Americans now believe. It's not for nothing that the proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage vanished as soon as the election was over. Polls show that a large American majority support equal rights for gay couples as long as the unions aren't labeled "marriage" - and given the current swift pace of change, that reservation, too, will probably fade in the next 5 to 10 years.

The history of "Brokeback Mountain" as a film project in itself crystallizes how fast the climate has shifted. Mr. McMurtry and Ms. Ossana bought the screen rights to the Proulx story after it was published in The New Yorker in 1997. That was the same year the religious right declared a fatwa on Disney because Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet in her ABC prime-time sitcom. In the eight years it took "Brokeback Mountain" to overcome Hollywood's shilly-shallying and at last be made, the Disney boycott collapsed and Ms. DeGeneres's star rose. She's now a mainstream daytime talk-show host competing with Oprah. No one has forgotten she's a lesbian. No one cares.

ANOTHER startling snapshot of this progress can be found in a culture-war skirmish that unfolded just as "Brokeback Mountain" was arriving at the multiplex. The American Family Association of Tupelo, Miss., a leader in the 1997 anti-"Ellen" crusade, claimed this month that its threat of a boycott had led Ford to stop advertising its Jaguar and Land Rover lines in glossy gay magazines. Last week Ford, under fire from gay civil-rights organizations and no doubt many other mainstream customers, essentially told the would-be boycotters to get lost by publicly announcing that it would not only resume its Jaguar and Land Rover ads in gay publications, but advertise other brands in them as well.

As far as I can tell, the only blowhard in the country to turn up on television to declare culture war on "Brokeback Mountain" also has an affiliation with the American Family Association. By contrast, as Salon reported last week, other family-values ayatollahs have made a conscious decision to ignore the movie, lest they drum up ticket sales by turning it into a SpongeBob SquarePants cause célèbre. Robert Knight of Concerned Women for America imagined that the film might just go away if he and his peers stayed mum. Audiences "don't want to see two guys going at it," he told Salon. "It's that simple."

So he might wish. The truth is that the millions of moviegoers soon to swoon over the star-crossed gay cowboys of "Brokeback Mountain" can probably put up with the sight of "two guys going at it." It's the all too American tragedy of what happens to these men afterward that neither our hearts nor consciences can so easily shake.

I can't wait to see this movie. It just opened here in Seattle this weekend, but Mrs. F and I have had too much on our plates before we head to North Carolina on Monday to even contemplate seeing it. It's definitely high on the list of potential films to see over the holiday next weekend, but I'm also quite curious about Munich and Syriana (no Cheaper by the Dozen Part 2 for me--I think this and his upcoming Pink Panther movie might kill Steve Martin for me completely).