The last frontier

Not just a film about two gay cowboys, Brokeback Mountain looks at the gaping divide between nature and culture; the freedom of the wild and the restrictions of the civilised world. By Manohla Dargis

The movie Brokeback Mountain has earned plaudits from critics' groups along with predictable sneers, and has provoked argument over its gay bona fides.

It is that rare American film that seamlessly breaches the divide between the political and the personal, the past and the present. Here, against the backdrop of the great American West, that mythic territory of rugged individualism, is a quietly devastating look at masculinity and its discontents.

Jack and Ennis, the lovers played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, marry unhappily, but their wives pose far less of a real threat to their happiness and physical well-being than do other men -- those overbearing fathers, bullying bosses, leery strangers and thugs who shadow their affair from start to heartbreaking end. On Brokeback Mountain, Jack and Ennis are free to follow their own paths. The mountain becomes their lost paradise, a realm of absolute freedom separate from the law, society and, most radically, the yoke of identity. On Brokeback, the two men are neither straight nor gay, much less queer; they are lovers, which probably accounts for the category confusion that has greeted the film.

That Brokeback Mountain quickly and jokingly became known as "the gay cowboy movie" speaks to the unease surrounding the film's subject, but it also reflects an unfamiliarity with both the West and the western. The image of the cowboy looms large in American popular imagination, even if the history of the actual cowboy was relatively short, having begun during the great cattle drives after the Civil War and ended as cattle were increasingly moved by rail. By the time the movies were invented, the era of the cowboy and the freedom he symbolises was long over, but Hollywood, and later television and advertising, kept him alive in the collective consciousness.

In an interview in a Wyoming newspaper, Annie Proulx, who wrote the original story on which the Ang Lee film is based, corrected the common misconception about her two characters. "Excuse me," said Proulx, "but it is not a story about 'two cowboys'. It is a story about two inarticulate, confused Wyoming ranch kids in 1963 who have left home and who find themselves in a personal sexual situation they did not expect, understand nor can manage." Jack and Ennis are not cowboys (if anything, the two are shepherds), but they are, in Proulx's resonant words, "beguiled by the cowboy myth". It is a myth shaped as much by Hollywood as history.

In Brokeback Mountain, Jack and Ennis embody the classic western divide between nature and culture, their lives split between the freedom of the wilderness and the restrictions of the putatively civilised world they call home. Proulx's story opens long after the symbolic closing of the American frontier and delineates a new frontier that will soon change the country's social and political topography: gay rights. As Proulx has reminded interviewers, Matthew Shepard, a gay man in Colorado, was murdered the year after her story was published. In the pop-culture fantasy of assimilation, gay men and lesbians are little more than fabulous accessories for straights, but Shepard's death and the debate over same-sex marriage are reminders that this frontier remains open.

Much like the West and the democratic ideal of the cowboy, which helped create the myth of the American frontier and the freedoms it was meant to represent, the movies create fantasies of liberation that don't always correspond to the world off-screen. In Brokeback Mountain, Jack and Ennis cling to the myth of the cowboy because it offers a freedom that only really exists when they cling to each other, a freedom that remains contingent even now.

MANOHLA DARGIS

© 2005 New York Times News Service

Pictured top: Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, and below: Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams in Brokeback Mountain, in cinemas from 6 January