Brokeback Mountain and the geography of desire.

Journal of Men's Studies, The, March, 2006 by Tuss, Alex J.

Annie Proulx (2005), commenting on Brokeback Mountain (1997), published in The New Yorker of October 13, 1997, reveals that the story "was constructed on the small but tight idea of a couple of home-grown country kids, opinions and self-knowledge shaped by the world around them, finding themselves in emotional waters of increasing depth" (p. 130). The increasing depth of these emotions results because "the two characters had to have grown up on isolated hardscrabble ranches and were clearly homophobic themselves, especially the Ennis character" (p. 130). Thus, there is a disconnect between their upbringing and the upsurge of emotions they encounter on Brokeback Mountain. Proulx grounds this disconnect in the "two-faced landscape" (p. 137) of her narrative. The "destructive rural homophobia" (p. 130) in which Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar mature locates itself in the small towns and impoverished ranches on the Wyoming plains, in what Larry McMurtry (2005), coauthor of the screenplay of Proulx's story, calls the "grit of the towns" (p. 141) and "the struggling, bruised speech still to be heard today across the north plains" (p. 140).

Those towns and that speech delineate the conventional, heterosexual environment that dictates Jack and Ennis's behavior, their denial, and their marriages, making "the story of the long-frustrated love" a part of "the strong, long American tradition of doomed young men" (p. 140). McMurtry notes that "it is to the mountains that the two lovers go for their brief reunions" (p. 141), finding in remote Wyoming a respite from constricting, conventional small-town life. Brokeback Mountain chronicles Jack and Ennis's tragedy in terms of the externally acceptable marital life of the north plains and an anguished internal love for another man that finds expression only on idyllic Brokeback Mountain. This bifurcated geography provides the foundation for the bisexual tensions in the narrative that Diana Ossana, McMurtry's collaborator, describes as "this spare narrative about a doomed love between two unremarkable men" (p. 144). Ossana expands on the divided narrative when she reads

... about the tragedy of Ennis del Mar, clenched and terrified,

incapable of imagining a life different than the one he had chosen

.... Jack's wretched, unrequited love; Alma's fragmented hopes

and quiet despair; Lureen's cumulative bitterness. I felt broken in

two. (p. 144)

Being broken in two captures the essence of Proulx's haunting story, what McMurtry identifies as "a tragedy of emotional deprivation, as not a few western stories are" (p. 142).

The tragedy begins when Jack and Ennis, a "pair of deuces going nowhere" (p. 7), "both high school dropout country boys with no prospects, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life" (p. 4), first meet. Jack, "infatuated with the rodeo life," only "a minor bull riding buckle" (p. 7) to show for his efforts, is "crazy to be somewhere, anywhere else" than his parents' impoverished ranch. Jack's dreams of escape come to brief realization on Brokeback Mountain. That realization comes in a "dozy embrace" (p. 44) between Jack and Ennis that solidifies

in his memory as the single moment of artless,

charmed happiness in their separate and difficult

lives. Nothing marred it, even the knowledge that

Ennis would not then embrace him face to face because

he did not want to see nor feel that it was Jack he held.

And maybe, he thought, they'd never got much farther than

that. Let be, let be. (p. 44)

This moment starkly contrasts with the reality of the plains and Jack's frustration in Childress, Texas and his marriage to Eureen. Jack exclaims to Ennis that "you got no fuckin idea how bad it gets. I'm not you. I can't make it on a couple of high-altitude fucks once or twice a year. You're too much for me, Ennis, you whoreson son of a bitch. I wish 1 knew how to quit you" (p. 42).

Ennis manifests a similarly conflicted emotional landscape. Ennis possesses "a muscular and supple body made for the horse and for fighting. His reflexes were uncommonly quick and he was farsighted enough to dislike reading anything except Hamley's saddle catalog" (p. 8). Ennis lives as a clenched fist, even with Jack. When Jack complains to Ennis that their relationship "is a goddam bitch of a unsatisfactory situation" and that arranging time with Ennis is "like seein' the pope" (p. 40). Ennis angrily responds that Jack forgets "how it is bein' broke all the time. You ever hear a child support? I been payin' out for years and got more to go. Let me tell you, I can't quit this one. And I can't get the time off' (pp. 40-41). Beset by Alma and his daughters, Ennis can never overcome his limiting, conventional choices. He cries out to Jack, "I goddamn hate it that you're a goin' a drive away in the morning and I'm goin' back to work. But if you can't fix it you got a stand it" (p. 30). For Ennis, part of standing involves worrying about what others may see or think. "I been lookin' at people on the street. This happens a other people? What the hell do they do?" Ennis wonders (p. 30). The story hints early on at this yawning disparity between Ennis and Jack's enervating conformity and the animation of their infrequent reunions: "during the day Ennis looked across a great gulf and sometimes saw Jack, a small dot moving across a high meadow as an insect moves across a tablecloth; Jack, in his dark camp, saw Ennis as night fire, a red spark on the huge black mass of mountain (p. 9). The "great gulf" severs Jack from Ennis. A tire iron and the narrow homophobia of small-town life destroy Jack and leave Ennis as bereft as after their parting following their summer on Brokeback, when Ennis "felt like someone was pulling his guts out hand over hand a yard at a time. He felt about as bad as he ever had and it took a long time for the feeling to wear off' (p. 18).