Among the first images of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain are a series of shots of men in cowboy hats with heads downturned, their faces wholly obscured by the wide brims. In these opening shots, the cowboy hat, that icon of American manhood, serves as a kind of mask. In a sense, the film suggests, the wearers are hiding behind those hats even when their heads are raised. Nor are they the only ones.
I agree completely with Greydanus' point about art v. propaganda when he writes:
one-sidedness is increasingly the single thing that I find most quickly sabotages a film’s persuasiveness; nothing else so glaringly announces that the filmmaker himself hasn’t really put his own point of view to the test, and doesn’t trust the audience to see things his way unless he stacks the deck in his own favor.
What I often find most compelling is a filmmaker bold enough to stack the deck against himself — to insist on hearing the case for the opposite point of view, on seeing those on the other side as human beings rather than comfortable stereotypes. Tim Robbins did this in Dead Man Walking when he allowed the grieving relatives of Poncelet’s victims to be sympathetic, suffering souls rather than vengeful ogres.
Still, that it's a good film doesn't mean it's not ultimately a pernicious one. Greydanus concludes:
In the end, in its easygoing, nonpolemical way, Brokeback Mountain is nothing less than a critique not just of heterosexism but of masculinity itself, and thereby of human nature as male and female. It’s a jaundiced portrait of maleness in crisis — a crisis extending not only to the sexual identities of the two central characters, but also to the validity of manhood as exemplified by every other male character in the film. It may be the most profoundly anti-western western ever made, not only post-modern and post-heroic, but post-Christian and post-human.
See more of Greydanus' work at Decent Films.
