Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain Or “This Ain't No

ANNIE PROULX’S BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN OR “THIS AIN’T NO LITTLE THING”...

CRISTINA CHEVEREªAN University of Timiºoara

Shortly after Brokeback Mountain’s controversial 2006 Oscar race, this paper will take a look at the brilliantly-written, thought-provoking short story behind the movie. Annie Proulx challenges her readers’ expectations with a stereotype-crushing epic of few words, in which a ‘love that dares not speak its name’ gets the final say. In a 21st century dominated by the all-too-fascinating power of moving pictures and special effects, the average entertainment consumer most often tends to forget the true magic of story-telling. The controversial Brokeback Mountain, icon-movie which undoubtedly stole the discussion panel and the limelight at the 2006 edition of the Academy Awards, is a cin- ematic performance which goes beyond mere glamor and technical artifice into the lost world of common living gone astray. The film fully benefits from its acknowledged excellent directing by Ang Lee, flawless acting by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, and breathtaking scenery. The acclaimed screeplay to match was fashioned by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, very few people remembering, however, the true inspiration for their efforts: it is literally the somewhat neglected story behind the story that shall make the focus of our discussion in this paper. Surprinsingly enough, Brokeback Mountain is not just another case of attention grabber carefully constructed by the Hollywood industry to court the politically correct. The source that it quite faithfully translated onto the big screen happens to be an exquisite literary achievement by one of the most successful American writers of the last decades: Annie Proulx. In the contemporary vortex of images which overrule the more limited appeal of the written word, many of the movie-goers might need reminding of Proulx’s remarkable career: her debut novel, Postcards was given the P.E.N.- Faulkner Award for fiction in 1993, being closely followed by The Shipping B.A.S. vol. XIII, 2007 42

News, which won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, The National Book Award for Fiction and no less than the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1994. Against this resonant background, Brokeback Mountain struck like lightning: “Annie Proulx figured no magazine would touch her short story, the tale of two Wyoming cowboys whose romance is so intense, it sometimes leaves them black and blue. But The New Yorker published it in 1997, and it went on to win an O. Henry prize and a National Magazine Award” (Cohen 2005: 1). Later on included in Close Range. Wyoming Stories, the piece contributed to the volume’s recognition by The New Yorker Book Award for Best Fiction 1999, the English-Speaking Union’s Ambassador Book Award (2000) and the Borders Original Voices Award in Fiction (2000). Unfortunately, enthralled by the 2005 movie-version of the story, many reviewers and even more viewers fail to pay tribute to the writing that set everything in motion. Peter Bradshaw’s review for The Guardian sets the record straight in a succinct presentation: “Brokeback Mountain is an adaptation of a piece of writing from 1997 by Annie Proulx that already bears the reputation of being the best short story ever to be published in The New Yorker magazine” (Bradshaw 2006: 1). What is it, then, that has made this short story not only a groundbreaking literary achievement, but also the inspiration for a thought-provoking movie? The first thing that comes to mind is its daring topic: an FAQ posted by the writer on her website starts by calling the story “an examination of country homophobia in the land of the Great Pure Noble Cowboy” (Proulx 2005b: 1). Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist are barely 19 when they meet on a summer-herding job on Brokeback Mountain, which turns out to mark the beginning of a tragic, timeless and wordless emotional involvement between the two men or, as Anthony Lane assesses it, “a love story that starts in 1963 and never ends” (2005: 1). The plot is uncomplicated and clear-cut, easy to summarize but not at all facile in terms of symbolism and implications:

There’s nothing romantic about herding huge numbers of four-legged beasts left to range far and wide, and cowboys pretty much have cornered whatever romance there is in rugged outdoor animal husbandry. Riding herd on sheep guaranteed a horseman a hard time in old Westerns, but Ennis and Jack make the most of it, even if their diet is mostly beans. They don’t talk much, but Ennis speaks of being raised by his brother and sister after their parents died in a car crash, and of a woman named Alma he plans to marry. Jack tells of his parents and working the Texas rodeo cir- 43 LITERARY ENCOUNTERS

cuit. One night, Ennis decides to sleep by the fire rather than head off to his lonely post, but in the small wee hours, with the fire dead, he’s freez- ing. Jack yells at him to join him in his tent. A simple human gesture in sleep prompts a frantic coupling that in the cold light of morning each man is quick to dismiss. The summer ends, and as time goes by Ennis marries Alma and Jack weds Lureen, and they each have kids. The men’s shared passion keeps its fire, and their affection and need for each other grows. Over the years, they contrive to spend time together back on Brokeback Mountain. Always there is the threat of exposure and the fear it breeds (Bennett 2005: 1).

Eventually, Ennis belatedly finds out about his lifelong companion’s accidental death, much too late for any essential decisions to be made. After years of denial and repression, he stands both rebuked and painfully illuminated, in a final attempt to take upon himself the responsibility of the never-assumed promise: “Jack, I swear –” he said, though Jack had never asked him to swear anything and was himself not the swearing kind” (Proulx 2005a: 54). The inner struggle of two characters placed in adverse circumstances and surrounded by standardized prejudice stands at the highly sentimental core of the story. As Gail Caldwell of the Boston Sunday Globe puts it, “Brokeback Mountain does some of the best things a story can do. It abolishes the old West clichés, excavates and honors a certain kind of elusive life, then nearly levels you with the emotional weight at its center” (2005: 1). How does Annie Proulx fight cliché? First and foremost, by means of distributing two male characters in an enduring love-story built according to the sinuous yet quite easily recognizable patterns of human relationships in general. It has been the “gay-story” label that has done the story and, sub- sequently, movie the most considerable share of injustice. Proulx’s aim is much wider, as Roger Ebert accurately points out in a review to the film-version: “Ennis and Jack love each other and can find no way to deal with that. Brokeback Mountain has been described as ‘a gay cowboy movie’, which is a cruel simplification. It is the story of a time and place where two men are forced to deny the only great passion either one will ever feel. Their tragedy is universal. It could be about two women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic groups—any ‘forbidden’ love” (2005: 2). It is interesting to note how the all-encompassing dimension of the two men’s minute drama has managed to pervade most interpretations, regardless of their orientation or main focus. Thus, Paul Clinton follows the same B.A.S. vol. XIII, 2007 44 line in his CNN report, stating that “to label Brokeback Mountain as ‘the gay cowboy movie’ does a great disservice to its haunting love-story, stretching over decades, which survived in a time and place in which the two men’s feelings for each other were utterly taboo” (2005: 2). Romanian analysts of the phenomenon also emphasize the simple and touching story about the time that passes while feelings remain unchanged. Deconstructing stereo- typical reception, Alex Leo ªerban talks about two ‘cowgays’ who are, in fact, rather bisexual, get married and have children: apart from this ‘biolog- ical incident’, the topic itself is the love that knows no boundaries in time, space or gender (cf. 2006: 1). Iulia Blaga goes even as far as offering a definitely non-queer perspec- tive upon the narrated issues: he maintains that the focus lies neither with the gay couple, nor with the romance developing within it, but rather with Love itself (cf. 2006: 1). Projected upon the background of options such as marital compromise or divorce, it is this larger than life feeling that stays the absolute constant coordinate around which the action revolves. This is, indeed, the insight that Proulx herself offers into her work, while making her intentions clear to her audience:

“I hope that it is going to start conversations and discussions, that it’s going to awaken in people an empathy for diversity, for each other and the larger world. I’m really hoping that the idea of tolerance will come through […] It is a love story. It has been called both universal and specific, and I think that’s true. It’s an old, old story. We’ve heard this story a million times; we just haven’t heard it with this cast […] I think this country is hun- gry for this story, because it’s a love story and there’s hardly much love around these days. I think people are sick of divisiveness, hate-mongering, disasters, war, loss; and need and want a reminder that sometimes love comes along that is strong and permanent, and that it can happen to anyone” (qtd. in Cohen 2005: 2).

The major challenge of the story is that, in fact, it does not happen to just anyone: the ‘heroes’ of this romance of the American West go against the grain of all traditional representation. Not only do they transgress the common heterosexual standard, they do so while simultaneously embody- ing the male United States effigy: the free, untamed, ultimate image of masculinity—the cowboy: “Proulx didn’t think her story would ever be published because the material was too risky: it involved a love story between two men that made very explicit the physical attraction between them. And they were not just any men, they came from the wide expansive west that 45 LITERARY ENCOUNTERS gave us John Wayne and the Marlboro Man—and this world was described as chilly and oppressive against this novel kind of love” (Proulx 2005 c: 1). Indeed, the choice of characters appears to act as subversive to the Hollywood brand-image of American identity as strong, fearless and incor- ruptible, just as the setting can be and has more than once been considered an effective tool of political criticism. The action takes place in the rural America of the 1960s, moving back and forth in between Wyoming and Texas, two of the most conservatively intolerant states. There is little won- der, consequently, as to the fear that projects itself bitterly onto the two protagonists’ common fate. Moreover, the American reader can relate to actual facts in recent history that have to do with a merciless vocation for cruel- ty rather than open-mindedness, as does Roger Ebert when talking about Ennis’s obsession with actual lynching:

When he was taught by his father to hate homosexuals, Ennis was taught to hate his own feelings […] Jack is able to accept a little more willingly that he is inescapably gay. In frustration and need, he goes to Mexico one night and finds a male prostitute. Prostitution is a calling with many haz- ards, sadness and tragedy, but it accepts human nature. It knows what some people need, and perhaps that is why every society has found a way to accommodate it. Jack thinks he and Ennis might someday buy themselves a ranch and settle down. Ennis who remembers what he saw as a boy; ‘This thing gets hold of us at the wrong time and wrong place and we’re dead’. Well, wasn’t Matthew Shepard murdered in Wyoming in 1998? And Teena Brandon in Nebraska in 1993? Haven’t brothers killed their sisters in the Muslim world to defend ‘family honor’? (2005: 2/3).

While the movie seems aimed in retrospect at a notorious American case, the short story proves to be quite visionary: written in 1995 and eventually published in 1997, it seems to have foreseen the murder of gay col- lege student Matthew Shepherd in Laramie, Wyoming in 1998. In this respect, Proulx’s work proves to have indeed stemmed out of close obser- vation of the studied areas as a deeply-enrooted writing skill: “I long ago fell into the habit of seeing the world in terms of shifting circumstances overlaid upon natural surroundings. I try to define periods when regional society and culture, rooted in location and natural resources, start to experience the erosion of traditional ways, and attempt to master contemporary, large- world values. The characters in my novels pick their way through the chaos of change. The present is always pasted on layers of the past”. (Proulx 1999: 6) B.A.S. vol. XIII, 2007 46

Brokeback Mountain does witness an explicit blow at traditional, patri- archal, standardized views, exposing the shallowness, hypocrisy and inflex- ibility of stereotypes in their violent confrontation with real life. While the writer acknowledges in various interviews that Wyoming, the “Equality State”, can hardly be seriously regarded as such, she chooses to depict it as complex rather than ruthlessly put it down. Ennis and Jack are victimized by the same society that has shaped them: the two cowboys (merely shep- herds or herders, in fact), are themselves inclined towards a conservative mentality due to the immediate data of their rudimentary education (cf. Sturza 2006: 2). This is what ultimately triggers their tragedy: apart from social prejudice and convention, the ultimate barrier they can never break is that of their own mental boundaries. Denial begins on the first morning after, as Ennis says, “I’m not no queer” and Jack replies “Me neither. A one- shot thing. Nobody’s business but ours” (Proulx 2005a: 15). The scene that haunts the memory of the more reluctant protagonist is the scene that explains the heartbreaking choice the two are never able to make, at least not simultaneously. To Jack’s dreams of shared future and sweet secluded life together, Ennis replies:

It ain’t goin a be that way. We can’t. I’m stuck with what I got, caught in my own loop. Can’t get out of it. Jack, I don’t want a be like them guys you see around sometimes. And I don’t want a be dead. There was these two old guys ranched together down home, Earl and Rich—Dad would pass a remark when he seen them. They was a joke even though they was pretty tough old birds. I was what, nine years old and they found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They’d took a tire iron into him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp. What the tire iron done looked like pieces a burned tomatoes all over him, nose tore down from skiddin on gravel […] Two guys livin together? No. All I can see is we get together once in a while way the hell out in the back a nowhere—” (Proulx 2005a: 29/30).

This passage holds the key to the immense burden the two characters are meant to carry around and has given rise to various reactions and interpretations. In the context of ideological criticism, one can find articles such as Rick Moody’s film review for The Guardian. He considers that “it is hard, therefore, not to think of Brokeback Mountain as an incredibly salient political statement for troubled times. I’m sure that there are many public rela- tions professionals right now trying to pretend that this is not the case, that [this film] is not an affront to certain senators from Wyoming and Texas and 47 LITERARY ENCOUNTERS

Utah and Colorado and Montana and Idaho, and perhaps an affront to the president of the United States himself” (2005: 2). On the other hand, the reputed Stanley Kaufmann of The New Republic emphasizes a feature that is characteristic of Proulx’s prose: “Brokeback Mountain does not contain the slightest suggestion that its pur- pose is to chronicle a case or a social problem” (2006: 20). Indeed, what makes the short story so utterly convincing and its message so powerful is precisely the appeal to the commonality of things and feelings, to the sim- plicity that paradoxically distinguishes and halos them: “It simply treasures two human beings who, unlikely as we may have thought it for these men, find themselves fixed in a discomfiting yet thorough passion. They inhabit a world that vaunts macho masculinity; nonetheless they seem secretly forti- fied by their fate” (Kaufmann 2006: 20). Despite some inevitable outbursts, this secrecy which needs to be kept around the central affair is brilliantly paralleled by a scarcity of both dia- logue and stylistic ornamentation. Proulx’s writing is an almost laconic third-person rendition of events as seen through Ennis’s problematic lens. As it usually happens in Oriental writings, there is very little actual talk, each line weighing a ton of emotion and cutting like a scalpel into the bleeding human heart. Meaning is rather constructed in the fashion of absurdist the- ater-plays, by means of a never-ending interplay between pause and silence. Implication and suggestion function perfectly, together with signifi- cant details, oblique looks and unuttered sentences. The half-said and the half-done meet in a perpetual and tormenting half-life, as illustrated by the open confrontation of the two and their realization of immutable fate. When Jack, after twenty years of relationship, tempestuously owns up to his frustration and bitterness, reproachful of Ennis’s public reticence, shouting, “I wish I knew how to quit you”, the latter almost falls into a frantic aggrieved trance.

Little vast clouds of steam from thermal springs in winter the years of things unsaid and now unsayable—admissions, declarations, shames, guilts, fears—rose around them. Ennis stood as if heartshot, face grey and deep-lined, grimacing, eyes screwed shut, fists clenched, legs caving, hit the ground on his knees. “Jesus,” said Jack. “Ennis?” But before he was out of the truck, trying to guess if it was heart attack or the overflow of an incendiary rage, Ennis was back on his feet and somehow, as a coathang- er is straightened to open a locked car and then bent again to its original shape, they torqued things almost to where they had been, for what they’d B.A.S. vol. XIII, 2007 48

said was no news. Nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved (Proulx 2005a: 43).

One can easily notice the visual quality of Annie Proulx’s prose, which exposes people and situations as they are, in deep connection to the envi- ronment and background that shapes and breaks them altogether: “Nonjudgmental and sympathetic, Proulx’s story, romantic but never descending into the sentimental, showed the sad impact of irrational homophobia on the lives of two men who happen to be gay. That, as cowboys, they are iconic of all that is masculine America adds a decidedly deliberate level of irony” (Lazere 2005: 1). Moreover, refusing a manifest political dimension, the story creates the impression of a haiku fable, a quick-spirit- ed elegy to slow-mindedness and its devastating effects upon the human soul. Between love and death, Ennis and Jack can find no middle ground but the wild majestic Brokeback Mountain. Delicate, insightful, subtle, the story ranges high in the typical frame of Proulx’s stories, true to a non-com- plimentary contemporary life:

“America is a violent, gun-handling country. Americans feed on a steady diet of bloody movies, television programs, murder mysteries. Road range, highway killings, beatings and murder of those who are different abound; school shootings—almost all of them in rural areas—make headline news over and over. Most of the ends suffered by characters in my books are drawn from true accounts of public record: newspapers, accident reports, local histories, labor statistics for the period and place under examination. The point of writing in layers of bitter deaths and misadventures that befall characters is to illustrate American violence, which is real, deep and vast” (Proulx 1999: 6)

Under such circumstances, there could hardly be any proper ending to an essentially ‘im-proper’ love that literally does not dare speak its name. “Not once do our heroes mention the word love, nor does any shame or harshness attach to their desire. Indeed, what will vex some is not the act of sodomy but the suggestion that Ennis and Jack are possessed of an inno- cence, a virginity of spirit, that the rest of society (which literally exists on a lower plane, below the mountain) will strive to violate and subdue. If the lovers hug their secret to themselves, that is because they fear for its sur- vival” (Lane 2005: 2). Eventually, it is Jack Twist who pays the price, it is human life that bends against insurmountable laws; the secret and the love that had made its object remain untouched, untamed, unspoken, captured 49 LITERARY ENCOUNTERS in the miracle of evanescent memories which Proulx handles so unforget- tably:

The shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack’s sleeves. It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he’d thought, long ago in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack’s own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one. He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands (Proulx 2005a: 52).

A story of love under siege, as labeled by The New Yorker, Brokeback Mountain reads like poetry and feels like real life. It stands to show that wearing hearts on the sleeve—regardless of the protagonists’ gender—can still make powerful literature nowadays. To quote impulsive Jack, “Old Brokeback got us good and it sure ain’t over” (Proulx 2005a: 26).

References

Bennett, R. 2005. “Brokeback Mountain”. The Hollywood Reporter (6.09). http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/reviews/review_display.jsp?vnu_con- tent_id=1001054462 Blaga, Iulia. 2006. “‘Brokeback Mountain’. Te þine coloana sau faci ‘Crash’?”. Suplimentul de culturã (March). 2 pp. http://agenda.liternet.ro/articol.php Bradshaw, P. 2006. “Brokeback Mountain”. The Guardian (6.01). 4 pp. Guardian Unlimited Home Page, http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_review Caldwell, Gail. 2005. “Brokeback Mountain”. The Boston Sunday Globe. Book jacket presentation. http://www.amazon.com/Brokeback-Mountain-Major-Motion- Picture Clinton, P. 2005. “Brilliant ‘Brokeback’. Groundbreaking film one of best of the year”. CNN.International.com (9.12). 3 pp. Cohen, S. 2005. “Proulx Discusses Origins of ‘Brokeback’”. The Advocate News Magazine. (17.12–19.12). 3 pp. http://www.advocate.com/ Ebert, R. 2005. “Brokeback Mountain”. Chicago Sun Times (16.12). 4pp. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article. Kaufmann, S. 2006. “Out West”. The New Republic (16.01), pp.20–21. B.A.S. vol. XIII, 2007 50

Lane, A. 2005. “New Frontiers. ‘Brokeback Mountain’ and ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’”. The New Yorker (12. 12). 6 pp. http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cin- ema/articles/ Lazere, A. 2005. “Brokeback Mountain” (8.12), culturevulture.net. 2 pp. http://www.culturevulture.net/movies/Brokeback.htm Moody, R. 2005. “Across the Great Divide”. The Guardian (17.12). 6 pp. http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages Proulx, Annie. 1999. Interview with Annie Proulx in The Missouri Review, volume XXII, nr.2. http://www.missourireview.com/ Proulx, Annie. 2005 a. Brokeback Mountain, Scribner: New York. Proulx, Annie. 2005 b. “About ‘Brokeback Mountain’. FAQs” (9.12). 2 pp. http://www.annieproulx.com/brokebackfaq.html Proulx, Annie. 2005 c. „Annie Proulx tells the Story of ‚Brokeback Mountain’. Softpedia (30.12). 3 pp. http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-author-of-the- story-Brokeback-Mountain-talks-about-the-film-15748.shtml ªerban, A. L. 2006. „Cowgays. Brokeback Mountain”. Libertatea (March). 2 pp. http: // agenda.liternet.ro/articol.php Sturza, C. 2006. „O iubire absolut inutilã. Brokeback Mountain”. Cultura (March). 3pp. http://agenda.liternet.ro/articol.php?art=2731