I B. RUBY RICH Brokering Brokeback: Jokes, Backlashes, and Other Anxieties WORD ON BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN had been building miere at the Telluride Film Festival the next day, and its long before its release. Distributors, publicists, and other Canadian premiere at the Toronto International Film industry representatives speak of the initial impact on Festival on 10 September,2 almost simultaneously with them of Annie Proulx’s story in the New Yorker of 13 the news of its winning the Golden Lion at Venice. In October 1997.1 Passed around in tattered xeroxes in a the six months between these premieres and the Acad- decade when Internet links were not yet ubiquitous, the emy Awards ceremony, Brokeback Mountain became a story deeply moved many people. Among them were cultural phenomenon, the rare film that could jump Diana Ossama, who immediately made her writing out of the film section entirely to become hard news partner Larry McMurty read it, too. The pair contacted and editorial-page fodder, a subject of parody, a con- Proulx and, once she agreed to their plan to turn it into troversy, a matter of pride. The uses that were made of a screenplay, used their own money to option the rights. the film transformed it from a marketplace product They didn’t expect it to take seven years to be made, but into a signifier of personal worth, political position, and it did. Eventually, Ang Lee’s longtime screenwriter and cultural values, accelerating the process by which, more producer, James Schamus, assumed a leadership posi- commonly, classic films organically acquire meanings tion at Focus Features, putting him in a position to ex- and communities years after their initial release. ercise an option on the screenplay and finance the In the fall of 2005, Focus Features carried out a project. Schamus and Lee announced the project in canny marketing strategy.3 Its “platformed” release 2002. The casting of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal rolled the film out first to the prestige festivals, opened was announced in 2003. Brokeback Mountain became selectively in major markets, and only then rolled out real to the press, launching the tag “the gay cowboy slowly to more and more theaters in ever-wider sectors movie” into the American vernacular. of the U.S., first expanding to 483 theaters, up to 1,200 While the signing of up-and-coming actors with screens by late January, and finally far more in the lead- major sex appeal was thrilling to some and titillating to up to and after the Oscars. Interestingly, during this others, the gay press was preoccupied with rumors: Lee process, the anxiety that had characterized the gay (or, and Schamus were going to downplay the homosexual- to use current nomenclature, the LGBT) community’s ity and make the story more heterosexual, the actors response prior to the film’s completion now shifted to had no chemistry, and so on. The distrust of their plans the mainstream. for the film was somewhat peculiar, given that the team Instead of fretting over whether the film would had started their partnership on The Wedding Banquet be heterosexualized, though, the mainstream press (1993), an early gay comedy; that Schamus had been an focused attention on how the the film would do: would executive producer on such early New Queer Cinema it make much money? Would anyone who wasn’t gay films as Poison (1992) and Swoon (1993); and that pay to see it? Would anyone outside major cities go to Good Machine, the precursor to Focus Features, had see it? Would it break any box-office records? In other produced The Laramie Project for HBO in 2002. words, the anxiety had moved from whether the film Brokeback Mountain had its world premiere at the was gay enough to whether it was too gay. The breath- Venice Film Festival on 2 September 2005, its U.S. pre- less coverage seemed to increase with every benchmark Film Quarterly,Vol. 60, Number 3, pps 44-48. ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. © 2007 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission 44 to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: FQ.2006.60.2.12 ench r F mberly i K o: Left: Director Ang Lee (left) and producer hot P . es James Schamus atur e F Below: Michelle Williams (left), Jake cus o F Gylenhaal (center), and Heath Ledger at the 2005 Toronto film festival screening © elease r es atur e F cus o F A es atur e F cus o F 2005 © that was passed. Watching the reports and opinion Good, The Bad, and The Ugly were to stumble pieces mount up, I became convinced that the unprece- upon Jack and Ennis. Says O’Reilly, “Gunfire dented coverage, in terms of both column inches and would be involved I imagine.” MSNBC’s Chris speculations, represented a form of heterosexual panic. Matthew and radio personality Don Imus re- The language of economics and market forces masked ferred to Brokeback as Fudgepack Mountain hysteria and homophobia. among other derogatory comments they offered While many on the conservative Right seemed in- on-air.4 clined to try to ignore the phenomenon, there was con- siderable attention from its electronic bully pulpit, as The relentlessness of the satires, parodies, and jokes the watchdog reports posted on the AfterElton.com indicated a classic and transparent use of humor to website make clear: alleviate anxiety and offer symbolic protection. Main- stream media settled on a dominant response of ambiv- David Kupelian of WorldNetDaily.com wrote alent snickering. The cartoon “Boondocks” developed a an article titled “The Rape of the Marlboro Man” running storyline concerning its homophobic grandfa- and then appeared on FOX to share his opinion. ther’s desire to see this “manly” Western, while jokes Charles Kincaid, of Accuracy in Media, has man- about Brokeback Mountain proliferated on talk shows. aged to be even more homophobic. Even Larry On the David Letterman show, for example, Nathan Lee King invited anti-gay pundits on his show to de- corrected his host when Letterman referred to the film bate and criticize a movie they couldn’t be both- as “that gay cowboy movie,” retorting:“Oh, it’s so much ered to see. more than that.” But it was a set-up: the stage was trans- FOX commentator Bill O’Reilly can scarcely formed into the set of a Brokeback Mountain musical, imagine himself catching the movie, but if he did, Lee belted out double entendres, and dancing cowboys he imagines that when the romantic scene in the made a wink-wink mockery of the very idea of the film. pup tent occurs he will find himself wondering Jokes showed up repeatedly in op-ed pieces and what would happen if the cowboys from The newspaper columns. Larry David, in a New Year’s Day 45 see Anne Hathaway topless, there’s only one minute of kissing, and so on. White even appealed to a sense of fair play: “It’s your turn. Really, it is, and you know it. Imagine how many thousands of hetero love stories gay people sit through in their lives. So you kind of owe us. Now get out there and watch those cowboys make out.”7 Another tactic in the cultural mud-wrestling was the “chick flick” accusation, made with apparently no awareness of how sloppily it conflated homophobia with misogyny.8 This tactic offered an exit strategy to heterosexual men trying to avoid going to the film on dates: they could simply say they never went to “chick flicks.” Focus Features acknowledged that their strategy involved targeting a female audience with, for example, a poster that resembled the one used for Titanic.9 Still, it’s arguable that the label allowed pundits to dismiss the film without charges of homophobia. John Powers, writing in the L.A. Weekly, noticed the tenor of com- mentary, too, writing: “The most fascinating thing about Ang Lee’s wrenching ‘gay cowboy’ picture (as it’s lazily known) may well be the unlikely responses it’s provoked . The media have been filled with pieces . es either saying ‘I don’t want to see Brokeback Mountain’ atur e F or asking whether the refusal to go makes you homo- cus o phobic. I don’t know about you, but I can’t remember F 2005 an op-ed piece about not wanting to see any other © movie, or . anyone asking if skipping Memoirs of a The one-sheet poster Geisha means you’re a racist. Gee, do you think gayness may still make some people uncomfortable?”10 opinion piece, wrote that he was afraid to see Brokeback Later, gay bloggers would rebuke the LGBT commu- Mountain—because he might hear a little voice in his nity for not responding forcefully to the parodies, if not head saying: “Go ahead, admit it, they’re cute. You can’t as hate speech exactly then at least as a calculated cam- fool me, gay man . Go ahead, stop fighting it! You’re paign to “trivialize”the film.A major LGBT response was gay!”5 This parodic stance in relation to the film issued, though, to the television movie critic Gene Shalit. reached its zenith in Jon Stewart’s Academy Awards- He reviewed the film on the Today Show and made refer- show montage of gay western moments, still running ence to the way Jack, “who strikes me as a sexual preda- on YouTube.