Posted on 12/09/2005 10:14:01 AM PST by Uncledave
This moving and majestic film would be a landmark if only because it is the first Hollywood movie to unmask the homoerotic strain in American culture that Leslie Fiedler discerned in his notorious 1948 Partisan Review essay, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey." Fiedler characterized the bond between Huckleberry Finn and Jim, a runaway slave, as an unconscious romantic attachment shared by two males of different races as they flee the more constraining and civilizing domain of women. He went on to identify that bond as a recurrent theme in American literature.
In popular culture, Fiedler's Freudianism certainly could be applied to the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Minus the ethnic division, it might also be widened to include a long line of westerns and buddy movies, from "Red River" to "Midnight Cowboy" to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid": the pure male bonding that dare not explore its shadow side.
In large segments of American society, especially in sports and the military, those doors remain sealed. The murder of Matthew Shepard, after all, took place in "Brokeback" territory. Another recent film, "Jarhead" (in which Mr. Gyllenhaal plays a marine), suggests how any kind of male behavior perceived as soft and feminine within certain closed male environments triggers abuse and violence and how that repression of sexual energy is directly channeled into warfare.
Yet "Brokeback Mountain" is ultimately not about sex (there is very little of it in the film) but about love: love stumbled into, love thwarted, love held sorrowfully in the heart.
(Excerpt) Read more at movies2.nytimes.com ...
Oops - my excerpt didn't denote where text jumps in the full article.
Jake and Owen can kiss their careers goodbye. Although, I doubt anyone will go to see this, so they may squeek through - I don't hear them doing to many PR events for it...
Must be a gay reviewer.
The whole idea still makes me nauseated.
My crap-detector just overloaded.
Remember, all instances of male friendship in American Literature is simply "homoeroticism".
The Queer Mafia busy congratulating itself.
Push The Agenda... always, always push The Agenda.
Yeah, and Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in "On the Road to Morocco".
Jackie Gleason and Art Carney in "The Honeymooners".
Etc., Etc.
The movie industry's answer to slumping box office receipts?
How about a gay cowboy movie...and it's not a comedy!!
Idiots.
Artsy film reviewers feel the need to write like this, but for the rest of us, we simply can't get past the gross parts.
Glad I don't have to go see it.
Are you saying its Broke Bank Mountain?
LOL! They do live in a different Universe.
Time for a crack back on the Devientcy.
Hollywood has so many gays who feel the need to express themselves. The problem is that our kids are growing up with movies like this and thinking that being gay is just another choice in life.
LOL, 3% of the population is said to be gay and half of them probably don't like westerns. Not much of an audience from my point of view.
I miss John Wayne.
What about Santa and Rudolph?
"Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey."
But being gay has NOTHING to do with pedophelia, does it?
And another movie makes my 'mustn't see' list.
Samuel Clemens is spinning in his grave.
Ah, go bugger Frank Rich, ya poof.
Very funny!
Gay cowboys. No wonder movie profits are in the crapper this year. The folks running the film business are so out of touch it is amazing. It is their business if they choose to make a movie like this. But to expect that anyone but the super kook fringe would spend 12 bucks and a weekend night out to go see this kind of stuff is ludicrous. No wonder the movie business is losing it's a$$.
In Fiedler's day it was possible to imagine that two adults of the same sex could be very close, and even love one another, without expressing those feelings physically.
so a male cannot have a male friend without being gay? just because this guy can't be friends without thinking of sex doesnt' mean that everybody is that way.
Hmmm.....
I disagree - this is all too believable from the legacy media. They are parroting the typical BS from the Gaystapo - refuse to recognize the difference between brotherly love and erotic love and then claim all men are secretly gay.
How blind I've been - I didn't realize that whenever two men bond as friends, they are obviously homosexual. Why, that means that the 10% that the pro-homos have been touting is a tad low, the real rate of homos must be 95% at the least. I guess that makes me a minority . . .
Yeah, I remember hearing about Leslie Fiedler's reading of Huck Finn from one of my professors when I was at Harvard back in the 1950s.
Fiedler was ahead of his time.
As for the New York Times, it is the premiere gay newspaper of the country. It has The NY Blade beat six ways from Sunday. You don't need to ask if any particular reporter is gay, you need to ask if he is one of their token non-gays.
You have got to be kidding me!!! On what planet in what other universe does anybody expect me to see this film??????
I am so tired of liberals/hollywood thinking they need to drag our heroes through the mud and denigrate the history of our great country by tearing down our idols. Lincoln wasn’t gay and neither were cowboys, the great American icon. It’s like they are trying to extinguish patriotism by making a young generation think there is nothing to be proud of in our past.
Owen?
Who the Heck is that!?
"John Wayne was a Fag!"
Isn't Stephen saying Tonto is white?
They may not have meant it to be a comedy
Good God, they're still going on and on about THAT? Without resurrecting the details, the guy was murdered, and his killers punished. Since then, how many gays have been killed while cruising? If there's been one, we'd be hearing about THAT instead of this ONE incident as "proof" of widespread killing of gays. For Pete's sake, give it a rest.
C.S. Lewis had a funny riff on this one, in The Four Loves:
It has actually become necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual.The highlighted passage cracks me up every time I read it. Lord Nelson, of course, was downright flagrantly heterosexual, but when he was dying in the cockpit of the Victory, he asked Captain Hardy to kiss him. Quite reasonable, and rather touching, but in the minds of the loony "gay" activists, proof positive of homosexuality.The dangerous world 'really' is here important. To say that every Friendship is consciously and explicitly homosexual would be too obviously false; the wiseacres take refuge in the less palpable charge that it is really - unconsciously, cryptically, in some Pickwickian sense - homosexual. And this, though it can never be proved, can never of course be refuted. The fact that no positive evidence of homosexuality can be discovered in the behavior of two Friends does not disconcert the wiseacres at all: "That," they say gravely, "is just what we should expect." The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden. Yes - if it exists at all. But we must first prove its existence. Otherwise we are arguing like a man who should say "If there were an invisible cat in that chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does look empty; therefore there is an invisible cat in it."
A belief in invisible cats cannot perhaps be logically disproved, but it tells us a good deal about those who hold it. Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantial love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. ... Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best. And the reason for this is important.
Lamb say somewhere that if, of three friends (A, B, and C), A should die, then B loses not only A but "A's part in C," while C loses not only A but "A's part in B." In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facts. ... Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. ... In this, Friendship exhibits a glorious "nearness by resemblance" to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah's vision are crying "Holy, Holy, Holy" to one another (Isaiah VI, 3). The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall all have. . . .
The homosexual theory therefore seems to me not even plausible. This is not to say that Friendship and abormal Eros have never been combined. ... In deciding, if we think we need or can decide, where it crept in and where it did not, we must surely be guided by the evidence (where there is any) and not by any a priori theory. Kisses, tears and embraces are not in themselves evidence of homosexuality. The implications would be, if nothing else, too comic. Hrothgar embracing Beowulf, Johnson embracing Boswell (a pretty flagrantly heterosexual couple) and all those hairy old toughs of centurions in Tacitus, clinging to one another and begging for last kisses when the legion was broken up ... all pansies? If you can believe that you can believe anything. On a broad historical view it is, of course, not the demonstrative gestures of Friendship among our ancestors but the absence of such gestures in our own society that calls for some special explanation. We, not they, are out of step.
Should be "Double Back Mountain" or "The Rump Wranglers"or "Hop-a-long Ass and Me".
I can't believe that.
Yup. It's been going on for awhile. See post 42.
I also talked to a guy from there that said that the best rider was only making about a million a year. It was 03. I wonder how the riders are doing now.
LOL, they don't call them the NYT Bathhouse Boys for nothing!
Always pushing some kind of perversion.
This will be seen as evidence of these actors "stretching". They are both vocally anti-Iraq War, too, so in gay-dominated Hollywood, they probably just got a boost in their asking prices.
My biggest disappointment in this is that the screenplay was written by Larry "Lonesome Dove" McMurtry.
Does anybody have any barbwire?
Yeah, just like Tom Hanks and Hillary Swank.
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