Popular Culture Review Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 2008 | Page 32

28 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