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.
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