Entertainment

Film shoots down idealized world of classic Westerns

06:18 PM CST on Monday, December 12, 2005

By CHRIS VOGNAR / The Dallas Morning News

Brokeback Mountain is set in the American West – of the late 20th century. It's about a pair of rugged ranch hands – who fall in love with each other.

In short, it's the ultimate revisionist Western.

Frontier myths are among the most cherished in America. They conjure images of ruggedly macho frontiersmen forging a new civilization, and noble cowboys hunting down savage Indians.

These simplistic, black-and-white dynamics give us a sense of comfort and order in a modern age marked by uncertainty. And they're not confined to film: Buffalo Bill Cody's 19th-century Wild West Shows, which predated the movies, spun theatrical yarn upon yarn. And TV shows such as Gunsmoke and Rawhide, which came well after the dawn of cinema, kept the myths alive.

But none of them left much room for gay cowboys.

Revisionist Westerns got big in the Vietnam era, as filmmakers drew parallels between the war and the systematic massacre of American Indians. But the idea of the revisionist Western is actually a bit redundant, because the Western has always been a revisionist genre.

Western entertainment was designed to foster pride in and reinvent a treacherous, often chaotic time and place in American history.

"The Western is an invented genre," says Ang Lee, who directed Brokeback Mountain. "Moviemakers invented Westerns. They're not just stories of real people in the West. It's the movies, though it's a genre I admire greatly."

But if the classical Western revises the realities of the West, then the revisionist Western revises the myths of the classical Western. "The classical Western is a foundational genre, offering a conservative and very utopian view of American civilization," says Christopher Sharrett, a professor of film and communications at Seton Hall University.

And there's nothing very conservative or utopian about Brokeback Mountain.

Opening Friday in Dallas, Brokeback begins in the early 1960s with Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) signing up to guard a flock of sheep during the summer on an idyllic Wyoming mountain (OK, so there is something utopian about it). They slowly get to know each other and find themselves giving in to what Oscar Wilde called "the love that dare not speak its name."

That culturally imposed silence is especially heavy in rural America years before any organized gay rights movement. Ennis and Jack part ways when their summer is done, marry pretty women (Ennis in Wyoming, Jack in Texas), but never get over each other.

Ennis, a strong, silent type who would actually be at home in more traditional Westerns, can barely even acknowledge his feelings to himself, let alone anyone else.

"There's a lack of understanding on the part of the characters about how they feel for each other," says Mr. Lee. "The affection becomes very private, so the film is both grand and intimate at the same time."

Ennis and Jack see each other over the years, but the chasm that stays between them is vast, the emotional heart of a devastating love story.

John Clum, chairman of Duke University's Theater Studies Department, points out that intense male bonding has always been a key component of the Western.

"First it was the cowboy hero and a comic sidekick: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and Gabby Hayes, for instance. Then it was an older loner cowboy, usually John Wayne, and a younger, more civilized man locked in a quasi-Oedipal struggle: Montgomery Clift in Red River, and Jeffrey Hunter in The Searchers."

Of course, there was never any overtly gay content in these Westerns, even though, as Mr. Clum observes, "there is some literature on the erotic lives of cowboys, and supposedly homosexuality was not totally alien to life 'where the buffalo roam.' "

Such relationships wouldn't fit the confines of the classical Western, with its cowboys-and-Indians boundaries between right and wrong, savages and civilization.

Perhaps the most crucial point of Western revision concerns the plight of the American Indian. Richard Slotkin's exhaustive and engaging book Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America addresses this subject (and almost everything else about how the West has been mythologized and remythologized).

As Mr. Slotkin points out, the environmental and American Indian rights movements of the '60s and '70s brought a reconsideration of the frontier Indian massacres.

Some films of the period, including Arthur Penn's Little Big Man (1970) and Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), addressed the cowboys-and-Indians revision head-on. But some of the more compelling Westerns of the period worked on a more allegorical level that tied together the frontier and the Vietnam War.

Take Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969). The Bunch, led by William Holden's Pike Bishop, do mercenary business on a dying frontier; they end up in Mexico, where they meet a graphically bloody end influenced, like Bonnie and Clyde, by TV footage of the war. The film suggests that Vietnam was a far-away frontier that couldn't, and perhaps shouldn't, be tamed.

Now Brokeback Mountain gives us a different kind of frontier to be conquered, one of tolerance and acceptance. But the film also hints at a different kind of sadness keyed to modernity's effects on the West.

You can sense it in Jack's wife, Lureen (Anne Hathaway), who starts as a spunky rodeo cowgirl but ends up a slave to a calculator as she toils for her father's farm equipment company.

Brokeback screenwriter Larry McMurtry, who adapted E. Annie Proulx's short story with Diana Ossana, told Mr. Lee that Lureen is a common type of the modern West, raised on big dreams and rugged excitement but later reined in by a life of bureaucratic drudgery.

Not everyone will accept Brokeback Mountain's vision of the West. Macho myths die hard, especially in a time when heterosexuality is widely upheld as a sacred value and political symbol.

But the process of revision remains fascinating. Long after the closing of the frontier, the West is still a powerful symbol ripe for reshaping and overturning.

E-mail cvognar@dallasnews.com

Brokeback Mountain is hardly the first movie to look at the American West in a new light. Here are some of the best-known revisionist Westerns, listed in chronological order:

The Searchers (1956) – John Ford's movie about Indian captivity and rescue has many classical qualities, but the obsessive revenge that drives Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) hints at the pathological racism that would come to the fore in later revisionist Westerns.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) – Another Ford/Wayne classic. This is the one that cleverly argued that the legend is more compelling than the truth.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) – You could actually go with any of the Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns, but this is the most popular. Wandering anti-heroes, all pretty bad, populate a desolate frontier.

The Wild Bunch (1969) – Speaking of bad men, Sam Peckinpah led his mercenaries all the way down to Mexico for a gruesome finale to a nihilistic tale.

Little Big Man (1970) – Arthur Penn made this caustic forerunner to Dances With Wolves, about a white man (Dustin Hoffman) who enters captivity and learns to like it.

Blazing Saddles (1974) – What in the wide, wide world of sports is going on here? Just Mel Brooks manically tweaking the wide, wild West.

Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976) – Robert Altman pulls back the curtain on Buffalo Bill's huckster Wild West shows.

Dances With Wolves (1990) – Kevin Costner goes native in an epic tale of how the Indians were wronged. It seemed a lot better then than it does now.

Posse (1993) – Yes, there were black people in the West. And here's a bad movie about them.

Dead Man (1995) – Jim Jarmusch directs Johnny Depp as a wandering mystic named William Blake. The film actually beat Brokeback to the gay cowboy punch, though only in a brief vignette.

Chris Vognar