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Popular Culture Review
powerful scene in the film, Jack and Ennis leave stultifying domesticity behind
and leap from a ledge into icy waters, shouting, intimately connected, and fully
alive.
Jack fantasizes about a “sweet life” and tells Ennis, “You know, it could be
like this—just like this—always.” In this simple statement, the audience is asked
to engage universal themes of need and longing and desire. When Ennis
responds by saying that there is “no way” two men can live together and then
utters the now famous line—“If you can’t fix it, Jack, you’ve got to stand it”—
readers and viewers must contend with whether the situation cannot be “fixed”
or whether Ennis lacks the will or the template to “fix” it (and whether we lack
that will or template, too). That Ennis’s life experience has not prepared him for
the possibility of loving a man—that the cultural discourse has not given him
language for his desire—makes choosing Jack as his life partner impossible for
him to imagine. But the choice is not impossible, joy is not forbidden, and life
does not have to end in a trailer on the edge of the dream.
The open, verdant Western landscape of B r ok e b a c k M ountain stands in
stark contrast to the apartments and strip malls and bars of the town in which
Ennis and Alma (Michelle Williams) make their life together. Brokeback
Mountain looms, mythic, majestic and impenetrable, a 14-hour drive and a
universe away from rodeos and a Texas ranch where Jack and Lureen (Anne
Hathaway) are raising their son.
The film disturbs and unsettles us, not simply because it suggests that love
between two men is as rich and as viable as love between a woman and a man
but because it demands that we confront the lives we could have lived if we had
crossed the invisible divides that separate us from ecstasy and the fulfillment of
our deepest desires. B r ok e b a c k M ountain demands that we consider the societal
paradigms that help us to define ourselves at the same time that they limit,
constrain, and immobilize us.
The tragedy of the tale is not that Jack is dead—killed as he changed a tire
or murdered by those who despised him for being gay. The tragedy o f
B r ok e b a c k M oun ta in is not death but a long life lived cautiously and guardedly.
The tragedy is not having lost one’s life but having wasted it. In fact, although
set across the continent from the Long Island Sound, B r ok e b a c k M oun ta in
evokes thoughts of the “last and greatest of all human dreams” and “the
transitory enchanted moment” (182) of The G r e a t G a tsb y. By doing so,
B r ok e b a c k M oun ta in becomes reminiscent of classic American narratives about
profound and enduring loss.
Inevitably, the film has been analyzed for its portrayal of love and sexual
expression between two men; lauded for its cinematic accomplishments;
celebrated for the universal themes that it addresses; and analyzed for its vision
and revision of the mythology of the West. In fact, all of these critical
approaches enrich a study of the lost American dream in B r ok e b a c k M ountain
by reminding us that love and passion are not restricted to heterosexual couples;
that a film about two men in love can be compelling and artful; that a text fails