So Queer Yet So Straight: Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet and Brokeback Mountain

Abstract

THE TERM NEW QUEER CINEMA was coined by film critic B. Ruby Rich to describe emergence in early 1990s of a number of independent films that dealt frankly, even aggressively, with politics, culture, and identity (New Queer).1 Writing for Guardian in September 2005, Rich described Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005) as the most important film to come out of America in years, and credited it with bringing about a shift in of a scope and tenor so profound as to signal a new era (Hello par. 2). With Rich's argument in mind, I explore in this article some of challenges involved in seeing Ang Lee as an exponent of cinema. Through a close reading of his two queer films-The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Brokeback Mountain-I shall define particular quality that sets these films apart from other films. What makes these films distinguished and original, I argue, is not so much that Lee has embraced cinema per se; rather, in each film Lee has come up with a cogent and credible way to reconcile sensibility of queer with formalist aesthetic of narratives. In process, Lee may have perfected his own subgenre-the queer film done straight-through his ability to balance and preserve both power of queer content and integrity of straight narrative style. Strange Bedfellows: Queer and Ang Lee There are broadly three ways to categorize cinema (Benshoffand Griffin 1-2).2 The first way is to look at status of filmmakers: cinema describes films made by gays and lesbians. The second is to look at content of films: cinema describes films that address issues relevant to gays and lesbians. The third way is to look at reception of films: cinema describes films that are watched by gays and lesbians. The implication of reception can be narrow or broad. Narrowly, it means being embraced as a movie by audiences. Broadly, it means being subjected to a theoretical approach to cinema; hence potentially any film can be queered by a interpretation. Most of filmmakers who belong to New Queer Cinema movement of 1990s have benefited directly from insights of theory.3 For them, filmmaking and theoretical practices are interconnected. Consequently, works of these filmmakers tend to reflect polemical concerns of postmodernism and avant-garde theory. These films are characterized by their idiosyncratic visual vocabulary; theoretical sophistication; overt political thrust; self-conscious stylization; uncompromising thematic exploration; and intellectual skepticism of conventional metanarratives.4 By any of above criteria, Ang Lee would seem a most unlikely advocate of cinema. Lee is a Taiwanese American whose first language is Chinese. Lee is a married heterosexual with no apparent political affiliation or background in civil rights activism. Lee, to date, has directed ten major films, films so diverse in subject matter that he is arguably most wide-ranging of contemporary mainstream directors, his two films making up only a part of his range.5 And despite enthusiastic receptions of Brokeback Mountain, Lee can hardly claim to enjoy a cult following among audiences. Moreover, his directing style shows no evidence of being influenced by theory. Lee is no Foucaultian auteur; rather, he is a literalist who favors adaptation of literary fictions, and invariably he stays faithful to his source material. On top of this, Lee's approach to filmmaking is conspicuously unpostmodernist, being character-plot oriented rather than style-polemic oriented. Lee favors a traditional humanist and social-realist approach to storytelling, so much so that to describe him as a classical filmmaker would strike most people as apt.6 One way to summarize all this is to say that typical Ang Lee film is very straight-used here to mean not so much heterosexual as straight/brword. …