How "Brokeback Mountain" helped me find myself

Among the many landmarks that will be celebrated in the new year, one happens to be the tenth anniversary of the release of Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee’s film about two ranching cowboys who develop what seems on the surface, an unlikely relationship.

The movie, which took home multiple Oscars, was in turn adapted from a short story by writer Annie Proulx. Brokeback Mountain is one of those stories that are so organically good and so well-written and so politically relevant that they end up speaking to an age. The movie released in the midst of the burgeoning political debate over gay marriage in the US. Its stark representation of two men’s love makes for a strong case for killing bigotry.

To gay men, however, the movie was many things rolled into one. It was a delicate evocation of a perfect love realised in the lap of the exquisite Wyoming mountains. It was the bravura exploration of a romance that had no apparent reason to develop – how often do ranchmen, in the popular imagination, turn out to be gay? And yet it was an accomplished showcase for a love that grows with such blazing intensity that it mirrors the best passions on celluloid. The movie, in fact, was such a visual and emotional delight that Proulx, in a 2009 Paris Review interview, chose to distance herself from it:

"So many people have completely misunderstood the story. I think it’s important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience, but unfortunately the audience that Brokeback reached most strongly have powerful fantasy lives. And one of the reasons we keep the gates locked here is that a lot of men have decided that the story should have had a happy ending. They can’t bear the way it ends — they just can’t stand it. So they rewrite the story, including all kinds of boyfriends and new lovers and so forth after Jack is killed. And it just drives me wild."

I can understand Proulx’s frustration. Lee’s film was such a “force of nature”, to borrow from the film’s tagline, that gay men ended up with vastly personal narratives about the film. My own relationship to the film has been anything but straightforward. I first saw the movie in Delhi in February 2006, a month before Lee won an Oscar for Best Director. My identity as a gay man had until then been shaped by Queer As Folk, a US TV series with unabashedly proud characters.

Brokeback was an altogether different experience. The experience of watching the movie itself was gravid. February in Delhi is chilly, and I watched the film with my sister in the soft glow of my room late into the night. My sister and I saw many movies like that, in the light of the lamp that covered the room in a tantalising near darkness. That accentuated the movie experience, for it brought the characters on-screen in close intimacy with us, my sister and me, lovers of films who had sneaked into these strange, distant lives in the dead of the night.

There were several strands to my initial discomfort with Brokeback. The first was the love. The sheer serendipity of Ennis and Jack's meeting on a snow-capped mountain was strewn with meaning. A bit too much to bear for someone like me, still negotiating what it meant to be gay. Ennis and Jack were given a chance, the space to have their love, the solitude to nurture it. Despite their not trying, not thinking about it, things of the deepest import came to them out of the blue. These two rustic ranch heads, who had never held expectations from anything, found love unexpectedly too. And what fierce, envy-inducing love!

I was gobsmacked. These rough unlettered cowboys shared a love that my language crazy self could only hope to achieve. I took this negation extremely seriously. To me, it was as if I had been told surreptitiously, insidiously that the edifice on which I had studiously built my life - an edifice drenched in seriousness and privacy - was so weak that the loneliness it spawned laughed at me.

And then, it wasn't just the love. There was the sex, the hot, rich, rough, sudden, fierce sex. It was the hottest sex scene I had seen. And then later, the most tender. When Ennis pulls down his jeans and takes saliva in his hand to help himself enter Jack, I was glued to the screen. It wasn't just the heat of the moment. It was the intense psychology simmering underneath. How did Ennis Del Mar, the uber male idol, know what to do with Jack Twist? Up until that point, the story gave no indication of Ennis' interest in Jack. (The opposite, Jack eyeing Ennis, was rampant.) The power of the story derived from Ennis' absolute aplomb at knowing how to answer the sexual call of this person of the same sex burning with desire. It showed gayness getting discovered all of a sudden in a spirit of sexual fury. It was endorsement of the hottest kind.

But most of all, more than the love and the sex and the drama, it was the final scene. Here’s what happens. Ennis, separated from his wife and grieving over Jack’s death, has chosen to lead a life of solitude. In this scene, his daughter visits him briefly in his trailer and then leaves. She leaves behind a cardigan and when Ennis spots it, he looks outside the trailer door to see if she’s still around. But she isn’t there. He goes back inside and folds the cardigan against his jaw. He does with such heartbreaking tenderness you almost keel over. Then he opens his wardrobe to put the cardigan there, where stuck up on the inside is a picture of Brokeback Mountain (and the shirts). "Jack I swear," he says, and his eyes glisten with a solitary tear. 

Ennis Del Mar, alpha male. Shaper of Jack's destiny. A hermit lost for love. Crying. It was too much. Did I say their serendipitous meeting was unbearable? No, this was unbearable. This was fucking killing. I was drenched, head to toe, in his grief.

I remember living in a blur for days after watching the movie. I did not know what to do. It was as if the movie had gotten inside me, its characters had slipped into my soul and I was now carrying the collective burden of their traumas. I dreamed about Heath Ledger, who played Ennis del Mar, and I woke with my heart in my mouth from those intense, sad dreams. Heath’s performance had spoken to me at a deeply personal level. In its silence, it had been magnanimous; in its luxuriance, breathtaking.

Brokeback got me closer to the sort of person I wanted to be. It lunged me further on the emotional scale. Deep inside, I discovered a peaceful quietude, even as nothing much altered on the surface. It was as if I had lived Ennis and Jack’s life vicariously through their performances and was now certain that I would take on anyone who would not respect their memory. I had always known I was gay but after Brokeback, that was no longer enough. I wanted the world to know it too.