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Popular Culture Review
“But if you can’t fix it you got a stand it. Shit. I been lookin at people on the
street. This happen a other people? What the hell do they do?” (30). Jack, too,
recognizes the intensity of their draw to one another: “This ain’t no little thing
that’s happenin here” (30), he says. And later in the story, Proulx writes, “Jack
said he was doing all right but he missed Ennis bad enough sometimes to make
him whip babies” (38). The two know that their time together is special and
finite: “One thing never changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent
couplings was darkened by the sense of time flying, never enough time, never
enough” (39).
Of course, what Brokeback Mountain shares with other Western films
includes cowboys as central characters, a portrayal of masculinity, a setting in a
particular geographic region, etc. However, more importantly, it shares with
Midnight Cowboy, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Unforgiven, and other
Westerns that rely upon bildungsroman an understanding of how fated we are,
how limited by the places and people we know, how devastated by our own fear.
Even so, I would argue that Brokeback Mountain may have more in common
with The Great Gatsby than it does with other film classics of the American
West. Like The Great Gatsby, Brokeback Mountain is about an impossible—or
at least unactualized—dream. Richard Corliss calls the film “slow and studied”:
“The movie is heartbreaking because it shows the hearts of two strong men—
and their women—in the long process of breaking” (62).
The lost and abandoned dream drives the plot, a plot that depends upon
internal action and barely uttered emotion. And it is the lost and abandoned
dream that places Brokeback Mountain in the company of American films about
thwarted hopes, whether those films are set in the American West or not. As F.
Scott Fitzgerald writes about Gatsby, “His dream must have seemed so close
that he could hardly fail to grasp it.” But the dream eluded Gatsby, and
Fitzgerald ends his novel with the now famous line: “So we beat on, boats
against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (182). For Ennis in the
final scene of Brokeback Mountain, the future is a window looking out onto an
empty field. A treasured postcard of the past that is taped to the inside of his
closet door reminds