Why hate "Brokeback"? Because it's "Titanic"

The last time Loose Canon wrote about it, "Brokeback Mountain" was winning the Beliefnet poll. But, thank God, it was losing--big-time--in her beloved Red States:

There is good news on the Brokeback front: The movie is not playing in the heartland, according to blogger Mickey Kaus, who has kept an eye on the movie. In posts on "the Brokeback heartland meme," Kaus not only shows that the movie's popularity in red states is a myth--he shows why it is being propagated and who it actually hurts (that's the good news).

Alas, LC is hard of reading. That's not what Kaus said. The movie that "underperformed" in the Midwest was "Fahrenheit 9/11." Kaus then wrote:

Some enterprising reporter should get hold of similar data for Brokeback, once its run is over. Do you want to bet they show the same insular, blue-state dominance? The only difference would be that Fahrenheit 9/11 was much more popular than Brokeback, measured in box office.

In fact, not so. "Brokeback" is doing brisk business across the country. Yes, it opened in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, in just five theaters--but there it earned "the highest per-showing average for any drama in film history." It did well in suburban theaters. Early in January, it was in 483 theaters. In mid-January: 1,194 theaters. It's now in about 2,000 theaters.

With eight Academy Award nominations--Best Picture, Best Director, Best Lead Actor (Heath Ledger), Best Supporting Actor (Jake Gyllenhaal), Best Supporting Actress (Michelle Williams), Best Cinematography, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score--it's cruising toward a domestic gross of $80-100 million. If it wins a few, it could earn much more and become one of the best investments in film history; the budget was just $14 million.

Conservatives of the rabid stripe not wish this weren't so. They insist it's not. On his program, Bill O'Reilly said on December 20, 2005:

"But I don't care about the movie. I'm going to make the prediction. The movie will get a lot of Academy Awards, because again Hollywood is very sympathetic to the gay movement ... But I will submit to you this movie does not do big box office outside the big cities. It won't. They're not going to go see the gay cowboys in Montana. I'm sorry. They're not going to do it."

Wrong again. The Missoulian continues:

Here in Missoula, the film has been a smash hit since it opened at the 1,100-seat Wilma Theatre on Jan. 6. “It's been super every night since we started showing it,” said Bill Emerson, who manages the 85-year-old theater.

Elsewhere in Montana, here's the Helena Independent Record:

“Those numbers are amazing to me,” said Ryan Pliner, distribution coordinator for Focus Features. “Anybody who’s questioning how this movie is playing (outside of big coastal cities) should look at something like this.”The last time this town demonstrated such abundant enthusiasm for a film was when “March of the Penguins” opened at the Wilma. That film ended up screening at the theater for more than six months.

But “Brokeback” isn’t just doing well in this, traditionally the most liberal part of the state. In Kalispell, the film drew 576 willing ticket-buyers over its first weekend. It was the No. 1 draw during opening weekends in Helena and Whitefish, beating out “Big Momma’s House 2,” “Nanny McPhee” and “Underworld” the three top box-office draws nationwide. And guess where the film enjoyed its best opening weekend in Montana? Hint: It wasn’t liberal Missoula. Try Billings.

Okay, to the big question: Why is this film doing so well all across America? Because it's grabbing the "Titanic" audience: women who crave a great love story. And this is a great one indeed--it's a story of forbidden love. Think "Romeo and Juliet." Think "Endless Love."

LC doesn't see the "spiritual" side of the movie because she watched it with her eyes closed. She saw "sex between two guys who rarely make emotional contact with each other." I would have said it's just the other way around: "emotion between two guys who rarely make sexual contact with each other."

And that's the movie's big revelation: Gays bleed too. It's not just anonymous sex in dark clubs. Or the Village People. Or Truman Capote, lisping. It's real guys with real feelings--feelings that bruised just like yours.

There's a brilliant piece about "Brokeback" in The New York Review of Books.

Both narratively and visually, Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy about the specifically gay phenomenon of the "closet"—about the disastrous emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression and of the social intolerance that first causes and then exacerbates it. What love story there is occurs early on in the film, and briefly: a summer's idyll herding sheep on a Wyoming mountain, during which two lonely youths, taciturn Ennis and high-spirited Jack, fall into bed, and then in love, with each other.

The sole visual representation of their happiness in love is a single brief shot of the two shirtless youths horsing around in the grass. That shot is eerily—and significantly—silent, voiceless: it turns out that what we are seeing is what the boys' boss is seeing through his binoculars as he spies on them.

After that—because their love for each other can't be fitted into the lives they think they must lead—misery pursues and finally destroys the two men and everyone with whom they come in contact with the relentless thoroughness you associate with Greek tragedy. By the end of the drama, indeed, whole families have been laid waste. Ennis's marriage to a conventional, sweet-natured girl disintegrates, savaging her simple illusions and spoiling the home life of his two daughters; Jack's nervy young wife, Lureen, devolves into a brittle shrew, her increasingly elaborate and artificial hairstyles serving as a visual marker of the ever-growing mendacity that underlies the couple's relationship. Even an appealing young waitress, with whom Ennis after his divorce has a flirtation (an episode much amplified from a bare mention in the original story), is made miserable by her brief contact with a man who is as enigmatic to himself as he is to her. If Jack and Ennis are tainted, it's not because they're gay, but because they pretend not to be; it's the lie that poisons everyone they touch.

The conclusion nails it for me:

The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it.

But, hey, there's no reason to read a book about a film. Have you seen the movie? If not, go--trust me, those Oscar nominations weren't because a few softheads got control of the Academy. It's a sorrowful experience, start to finish--these are sad, sad men, whose lives are wasted for no fault of their own. Just look at the TV commercial for the film: the shot where Heath finds two shirts on one hanger in his lover's bedroom. He holds to his face. He inhales his past. And weeps.

Hell, I weep when I see that commercial. Anyone who's seen the film would feel a pang. Except for someone who sees it and immediately thinks: "This is an ad for gay marriage."

It's not, of course. It's a love story. A narrow character piece. Not a political tract. But that's what makes it so threatening for the LCs of our country --it's not porn, it's a love story that, for the grace of God, could be ours. And that's disgraceful to the LC. There oughta be a law!

And, if the LCs have their way, there will be. A Federal Marriage Act. Coming your way soon, if the Republicans have anything to do with it.

Talk about ugly! Talk about twisted! But then we no longer expect sanity about sex from people who see every gay person as a billboard--and as a sinner.