Witness, won’t you, the confluent forces, the twin streams of conflicting culture represented by the amazing “Brokeback Mountain” movie phenomenon, a spare and sad and highly controversial little indie-style flick that is shaking up the homophobic community and raking in the Golden Globes and which now seems a shoe-in to win an Oscar or four, as compared and contrasted with, say, the humorless, depressing, dry-as-death Samuel Alito Supreme Court nomination. Oh yes, we have a match. Do you see it?
Look closer. On the one hand, here is the astounding reach and power of this rare and striking little film, an emotional tinderbox of a movie that, in the wrong hands or with the wrong marketing or if it had been off pitch by just this much, could have very easily been trashed and quickly dismissed, would have hobbled the careers of two up-and-coming hunk actors, been mocked across the board and demonized by the religious right as revolting gay propaganda, the source of all ills, proof of the existence of the devil himself.
Of course, the latter is still happening (isn’t it always?), but the amazing thing is, no one seems to care. The screech of the right’s homophobes is being easily drowned out by the fact that this astonishing, pitch-perfect film is now considered a movie that, quite literally, changes minds. Shifts perceptions. That moves the human experiment forward and makes people truly think about sex and gender and love and not in the way that, say, “Pride & Prejudice” makes you think because that kind of thinking is merely sweet and harmless, whereas “Brokeback” slaps bigotry and intolerance upside its knobby little head and induces heated discussions of the film’s dynamics and politics and ideas of love over a bottle of wine and some deep curious sighing.
That’s one side. On the other hand, here we have this relentless neocon spiritual death wish, as evidenced by the imminent appointment of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, yet another dour white male judge who, by all evidence, will do everything in his power to keep America’s spiritual, humanitarian and sexual progress — you know, the exact kind of universal awareness illuminated by intensely intimate movies like “Brokeback” — locked in the ironclad box of anti-women, anti-gay, power-über-alles conservative thinking for the next three decades or more.
Of course you may say: Oh please, this is just silly, no way is there a direct connection between Alito and “Brokeback.” I mean come on, one’s just a heartbreaking gay love story and one’s a massive disheartening political maneuver and they simply have no direct correlation in this world as we know it and to draw a correlation is to, well, make stuff up.
To which I say: You are right, but only a little. Of course Alito is not about to be appointed to deflect “Brokeback”‘s message per se, but rather, he is being installed in general reaction to, in attack on, in preparation for what “Brokeback” and its ilk represent. Which is, of course, the aforementioned awakening, the shift, the movement toward something new and different and open. Do you see?
This is the ever-present push-pull of the culture. This is how we stumble toward the light, gasping and bleeding and with painful rope burns on our wrists. After all, there is no progress forward — intellectual, spiritual, sexual or otherwise — without a concomitant blood-curdling scream from the power brokers and the religiously terrified to hold it all back. Change brings fear. Sexuality brings confusion. For every person who has his rigid homophobic ideology shattered by “Brokeback”‘s emotional hammer, there is a confused neocon who redoubles his efforts to replant it.
