Brokeback Mountain

Abstract

North American western historians who are perturbed by mainstream representations of the West in film should be encouraged by Hollywood's efforts in 2005, including not only Brokeback Mountain but also Crash and Transamerica. Only Brokeback Mountain looks like a western; it features white men in cowboy hats on horses. Nothing else about the movie fits the genre. Its genre-busting depiction of same-sex intimacy no doubt strikes most viewers. But film buffs note as well the studied absence of a narrative thread often spun out in classic westerns, anti-westerns, and nihilistic later westerns—the story of tension between “civilization” and “savagery,” and of the hero who negotiates it. Western historians, for their part, should be just as heartened by the sheep cast in the movie as by the humans and their relationships. This is because western history as a field has been about as attracted to sheep as it has been...