The movie Brokeback
Mountain moved slowly through film festivals, winning
raves, then on to limited release, and now it’s up for a pile of
Oscars and is making wannabe Westerners think twice about wearing
that Stetson.
In Salt Lake City, theater-owner Larry
Miller ramped up the rhetoric by canceling a showing at one of his
venues. Miller owns large chunks of the Salt Lake City economy,
including the Utah Jazz basketball team, a community college
campus, a throng of Honda and Toyota dealerships and assorted
entertainment spots from theaters to automobile racetracks.
It’s no secret he made up his mind about the movie early on.
For historical reference, Miller is the same tons-of-fun
guy who once came boiling out of the stands to fight a basketball
player he disapproved of. He also signed alleged Jazz basketball
center Craig Ostertag twice. So, you can see that prudence is not a
big part of his skill set.
While I enjoyed both the 1997
versions of the Jazz and Honda Accord, I can’t cut Miller much
slack here. He cancelled Brokeback Mountain
while the movie was showing in the outer provinces of Logan, Utah,
where I live. Salt Lake City is a mere $110 cab ride from Park City
and the always-edgy Sundance Film Festival. One would think “who
cares?” But the really crazy part is he canceled the movie without
even seeing it.
Like Miller, most people don’t really see
the West before they make up their minds. They cancel out the
reality and insert what they think it should be.
People still think the West is idyllic and immune from statistics
and the laws of probability. That’s really the only thing that
makes the movie shocking. The movie wouldn’t make news, and
Brokeback Mountain wouldn’t be up for a rusty
pick-up truckload of awards, if it were not set in the cowboy West
of a few decades ago. The truth is: Gays, lesbians, Democrats,
Republicans, poverty, drug use, divorce, fundamentalists, homicidal
teenagers and tree-huggers all coexist in the West, and always
have. The cowboy West really only existed in Marlboro County ads
and tourist posters.
The marketing teams forgot to
mention that just off-camera, there were lots of regular people
living their gay, straight or in-between lives.
The movie
is based on a story by Annie Proulx that was originally published
in the New Yorker magazine before being brought
to the screen by a Taiwanese director. So maybe it just took
Easterners and a far Easterner to bring Proulx’s heartfelt,
place-based tale of forbidden and dangerous love to the public. You
do have to wonder why they chose the West as the setting. One
answer is that a gay couple living in Manhattan or San Francisco is
nothing new and fairly safe. You’re not safe in a culture
that makes 100 percent macho men the only men allowed — even
in the liberal 1960s, where the movie romance begins.
But
that dang press keeps getting it wrong. They keep calling it a “gay
cowboy movie” when anyone with a Western eye for detail can quickly
point out that it is more a gay sheepherder movie. This is a pretty
big error in continuity, since in the real history of the West,
sheep and cattle mixed about as freely as Yankees and Confederates.
As a side note, some of the only special effects in this
languorous tale involve fake sheep. Getting two Hollywood
leading-man hunks to act out a love story was nothing compared to
trying to get a thousand sheep to walk along the edge of a cliff in
just the right light. Director Ang Lee obviously didn’t do much
research on Suffolk sheep, so he had to digitally add a few hundred
to the flock.
Another maddening twist is that the
spectacular scenery in the movie wasn’t made in Wyoming; most
of the movie was shot in Alberta, Canada. So, all in all, Western
purists can sleep comfortably, knowing that this movie was only a
Taiwanese misinterpretation set against a liberal Canadian
backdrop.
Apparently, this hasn’t stopped an influx of
calls to the Wyoming office of tourism. Even when people are told
that the movie’s backdrop is the Canadian Rockies, they don’t seem
to care. They still like the idea of Wyoming better than the real
place.
Dennis Hinkamp is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia,
Colorado (hcn.org). He lives in Logan, Utah, where he works in
extension communications for Utah State
University.
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