Brokeback Mountain Research Articles

Brokeback Mountain, A Play with Music by Ashley Robinson (review)

Brokeback Mountain, A Play with Music by Ashley Robinson (review)

A. 먼로, A. 프루의 단편에 나타난 혐오

By analyzing the two modern short stories—Alice Munro’s “Child’s Play” and Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain”—this paper aims to show that violent expression of disgust at home and in society is not an instinctive reaction, but something that is learned from the community. To make the case, this paper examines and cites Martha Nussbaum’s theory of disgust. Nussbaum delves into the feeling of ‘disgust’, arguing that emotion is not instinctive, but is the result of the action of thinking based on belief and understanding, and she categorizes the feeling of disgust into “primary disgust” and “projective disgust”. This study analyzes the process in “Child’s Play” whereby the protagonist unknowingly embodies disgust from the surrounding environment in childhood. Projective disgust is not only distinguishable from instinctive disgust, which is inherited genetically, but also works as a mechanism for solidarity and exclusion in groups. This paper also examines the ways in which disgust in “Brokeback Mountain” is transmitted and maintained through violence, preserves existing ideologies, and controls the life of the protagonist especially his fear of being an object of disgust.

Research on Image Scheduling Based on “Tolerance” and “Release” : Take Ang Lee’s Films Sense and Sensibility and Brokeback Mountain as Examples

Research on Image Scheduling Based on “Tolerance” and “Release” : Take Ang Lee’s Films Sense and Sensibility and Brokeback Mountain as Examples

Queer and Adaptation Theory: Literature to Film in The Color Purple, The Hours, and Brokeback Mountain

Queer and Adaptation Theory: Literature to Film in The Color Purple, The Hours, and Brokeback Mountain

Building a Timeline for LGBTQ+ Global Cinemas (1910–2019): Movie Production Trends from a Collaborative Internet Cinema Database

Building a Timeline for LGBTQ+ Global Cinemas (1910–2019): Movie Production Trends from a Collaborative Internet Cinema Database

Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land by Taylor Brorby

Reviewed by: Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land by Taylor Brorby O. Alan Weltzien and emeritus Taylor Brorby, Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land. New York: Liveright Publishing. 335 pp. Hardcover, $27.95. Montana novelist Thomas Savage, a gay man heterosexually married, threw his overtly gay novel manuscript into the Atlantic (ca. 1964) when his literary agent advised him it couldn’t be published let alone widely read. As we all know by now, his character, repressed gay Phil Burbank (The Power of the Dog), who contains strands of Savage, meets a painful death as he tries to come out again. In his friend Annie Proulx’s best-known short story, “Broke-back Mountain,” Ennis angrily asks his lover, “This happen a other people? What the hell do they do?” and Jack responds, “It don’t happen in Wyoming and if it does I don’t know what they do, maybe go to Denver.” As you might remember, a year after this short story was published, Matthew Shepard, a Wyomingite, didn’t make it that far. Even now, how much safe space exists for sexual minorities in the rural West away from the coastal region? That question arguably represents the central prompt behind Taylor Brorby’s beautifully written memoir. He reminds us that it’s unsafe, outside some urban precincts, for a man to hold another man in public. Brorby’s story shows him inexorably torn between his western North Dakota home and exile. He insistently and lyrically paints his native topography in the country’s least visited state. He’s a poet of a landscape few of us know let alone cherish, and his love runs deep. At the same time, as his title and subtitle clarify, this memoir tells an all-too-familiar story of environmental degradation and destruction, of callous extractive industries that strip-mine surfaces, gouge the depths, and leave scarred ground that’s the short-grass prairie equivalent of Pacific Northwest clear-cutting. He knows the Bakken oil patch and the Dakota Access Pipeline personally and painfully, as his anthology Fracture (2016) attests. He records his Iowa arrest for protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline (260–61), about which he’s written elsewhere. Brorby knows fracking means fucking the ground beneath: yet another example of Rob Nixon’s slow violence. North Dakota means [End Page 80] a horizontal place defined by a five-hundred-foot smokestack and a dragline and endless derricks; it is a “story of self-destruction. Everything leaves North Dakota full and comes back empty. The only way I’ve understood my home is by getting out, escaping its crushing weight, watching the destruction, now from the outside” (7). Our endless pursuit of oil leaves only wreckage in its wake—no new news—and the kind of boys (and girls) drawn to oil patches pose direct threats to the Native boy who, by adolescence, in familiar fashion, discovers himself a sexual minority subject to insult, ostracism, and worse. Brorby begins, “Center [North Dakota] is a place where people only end up” (5). His memoir makes a strong case for escape. He’s escaped to Bismarck by high school and St. Olaf’s College then the Twin Cities as he struggles through identity formation. It’s the old American story of getting the hell out of Dodge particularly if one doesn’t conform to local majority preferences, including heterosexuality. Brorby lives through extensive pain and seasons of tears as he negotiates his emerging self between his roots, his family and place, and new, more tolerant and cosmopolitan geographies. What a courageous story of redefining what and where one belongs. The most painful part of Brorby’s story concerns his parents who provided him and his older sister a range of creature comfort but who turned their backs when he came out to them. In such a memoir, coming out, unsurprisingly, forms a main theme and Brorby sketches several scenes in which his older sister, his grandfathers, and ultimately his two older nephews, affirm him and their unqualified love. Those embraces make his parents’ silent hostility all the more excruciating (they’ve not spoken in years). The...

Revisiting Brokeback Mountain – how mountains matter, or: melodrama, melancholy, (im-)mobility

ABSTRACT Returning to Brokeback Mountain and its mountainous aesthetics, my contribution develops a three-part argument that reengages the cinematic landscape projected in Ang Lee’s ‘love story’ – a landscape that echoes, as I show, a national visual culture mapped and remapped by paradigmatic moments in art, photography, and film. In part one, ‘Brokeback Mountain and “the force-field of melodrama”’, I show how mountains figure and function in the central genre of film history where they foreground, yet also curtail, the political dimension of personal fears and longings. Calling on the tradition of the Western as much as on the work of Edward Hopper, Ansel Adams, Andrew Wyeth, William Eggleston, Richard Avedon, and beyond, Brokeback Mountain – so I delineate in my second part ‘(Im-)mobility, mediation, melancholy’ – superimposes its own version of the West on representations we are more familiar with, producing a visual space and soundscape that is bound to shift our perspective. In its third and final part, ‘Landscaping a desire that has no name – or art’, my contribution shows why, since then, mountains have never been the same in the US-American cultural imaginary, and why we look at Westerns, at Adams, and Avedon even more mournfully now, superimposing on them Brokeback Mountain’s gender melancholy.

Leaving Archer City: In Memoriam Larry McMurtry

Leaving Archer CityIn Memoriam Larry McMurtry Steven G. Kellman (bio) Larry McMurtry sold more books than any other author in American history. Many of his novels, including Leaving Cheyenne (1963), The Last Picture Show (1966), and Lonesome Dove (1985)—which were in fact repackaged in 1994 as a single volume titled Three Bestselling Novels—earned a place on best-seller lists. It is true that no McMurtry title has come close to outselling To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, or The Great Gatsby. Nevertheless, Harper Lee, J. D. Salinger, and F. Scott Fitzgerald never sat beside a cash register completing transactions, but McMurtry was a bookseller for more than half his life. Like Louise Erdrich in Minneapolis, Garrison Keillor in St. Paul, and Ann Padgett in Nashville, he was the rare case of a writer who also ran a bookshop. Booked Up, his emporium in Washington, DC, and then Archer City, Texas, occupied six buildings and stocked more than 400,000 volumes. When McMurtry decided to auction off two-thirds of his inventory, he was personally vending more books than J. K. Rowling ever has. His private collection was also extraordinary. By his death in 2021 at the age of eighty-four, McMurtry had accumulated 28,000 books in a large house in Archer City. "Forming that library, and reading it," he wrote in a 2008 memoir aptly titled Books, "is surely one of the principal achievements of my life." Readers might disagree. Lonesome Dove was a sufficiently impressive literary achievement to have earned the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Although they probably would not share the author's favorites (he was partial to Duane's Depressed, followed by Loop Group), hundreds of thousands of readers who never bought a book from Larry McMurtry were eager to own a book by him. The McMurtry oeuvre, comprising thirty-two novels, fourteen books of nonfiction, and forty screenplays, began inauspiciously, with Horseman, Pass By, a 1961 work that its author would later dismiss as "a slight, confused, and sentimental first novel." However, when Irving Ravetch happened on a copy in an airport shop during a stopover in Dallas, the screenwriter/producer was [End Page 201] sufficiently impressed to urge director Martin Ritt to adapt it into film. The result, which transferred the focus of the story from young Lonnie Bannon to his scapegrace Uncle Hud, became a hit. McMurtry had nothing to do with the making of Hud, as he had nothing to do with adaptations of other books of his such as Terms of Endearment (1975), Texasville (1987), and Lonesome Dove, but he found himself in demand to make screenplays out of other writers' works. His most notable assignment, an adaptation of Annie Proulx's story "Brokeback Mountain" that he did with Diana Ossana, won them an Oscar. McMurtry grew up in a bookless house on a ranch outside Archer City, which, despite its grandiose name, hardly qualifies as a hamlet. "Simply put," he wrote, "it's not a nice town." With a population that does not exceed two thousand, it is not a large one. But it is where he chose to spend much of his life and where he took his final breaths. His bookishness was not congenital, as his earliest exposure to narrative came not from reading but from listening to his grandfather tell stories of the earliest white settlers in the area. McMurtry fictionalized Archer City as Thalia and made it the site of his first three novels, Horseman, Pass By; Leaving Cheyenne; and The Last Picture Show. Aside from an occasional excursion to Hollywood—(Somebody's Darling [1978]), Las Vegas (The Desert Rose [1983]), or Washington, DC (Cadillac Jack [1982])—almost all of his fiction is set in Texas. He called Houston "the most interesting city in Texas" and set Moving On (1970), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972), Terms of Endearment, Somebody's Darling (1978), Some Can Whistle (1989), and The Evening Star (1992) in the state's largest city. So it is not surprising that the headline to McMurtry's New York Times obituary announces: "Larry McMurtry, Novelist of the American West, Dies at 84." The author referred...

“Every Nigga Is a Star”: A Critical Reflection on the Fifth Anniversary of Moonlight

“Every Nigga Is a Star”: A Critical Reflection on the Fifth Anniversary of <i>Moonlight</i>

SAME-SEX LOVE AS CHALLENGE TO COWBOY’S MASCULINITY PRESENTED IN ANG LEE’S BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN

Cowboy and his natures have made contribution to the creation of definite masculinity and love relationship between cowboys in Brokeback Mountain affects how cowboy’s masculinity is further depicted. This paper has purpose to reveal how same-sex relationship in the movie challenges the cowboy’s masculinity by analysing the subtitle. This study applied semiotics theory to identify the available data relevant to the construction meaning of cowboy’s masculinity, myth of romantic love and homosexuality. The result shows that homosexual relationships between major cowboy characters in the movie contest the long-established masculinity of cowboy. The struggle to maintain traditional relationship through marriage does not affect social prejudice towards homosexual cowboy.

Cowboys and angels and affective queers

Taking into consideration the critical and media attention American writer Annie Proulx’s story “Brokeback Mountain” has received, this paper offers a reading of the aforementioned work while problematising issues of heteronormativity in the plot. Using Sara Ahmed’s and Heather Love’s theoretical contributions, this investigation interweaves queer theory and affect studies to highlight how heteronormativity is an affective orientation in which feeling bad is crucial to maintain the structure of oppression. Although more questions rather than answers are provided, this study concludes that political mobilisations are possible when affects are read and questioned, especially those considered backward. [Recebido: 20 set. 2021 – Aceito: 25 out. 2021]

Affective Itineraries in Images and Sounds: A Formal Analysis

This article attempts to describe and then explain a set of viewing encounters with a four-minute sequence in the film adaptation of Brokeback Mountain (Brokeback Mountain 2006), directed by Ang Le...

New forms of masculinity in Western films: The end of the Marlboro Man?

Westerns are one of the most masculine and stereotypical of film genres. In a social and film context where gender equality is increasingly important, it is worth looking at the evolution of the genre in recent years. Especially because, as André Bazin said, the Western is “cinema par excellence” (1966) and its analysis allows a reflection on cinema itself. Taking the figure of the Marlboro Man as a prototype, this study carries out an analysis of three selected case studies: Brokeback Mountain, Jane Got a Gun and Godless, two films and a miniseries with main characters that do not follow heteronormative masculinity. Ang Lee’s work broke new ground not only in Westerns but also in industrial cinema by making homosexuality visible, while Gavin O’Connor’s showed the possibility of a woman playing the leading role in a classic Western. The miniseries produced by Netflix combines both by giving leading roles to female characters, some of them gay, while reflecting on homosexuality. It was noted that the portrayal of masculinity in Western films remains valid in all three cases, but it allows women and homosexuals to access leading roles, often by acquiring typically masculine attributes.

A Body without a Story: The Immortal Spectacle in The Ballad of Little Jo

A Body without a StoryThe Immortal Spectacle in The Ballad of Little Jo Shelby E. E. Grauberger (bio) As a genre intimately tied to the landscape of the American West, the romanticization of the frontier, and the American social imaginary, the Western holds a special place in Americans’ hearts. While Western films present a nostalgia for supposedly simpler times— when communities stood by each other and people lived by a moral code, at least in theory— they also develop to deal with the anxieties present in contemporary American culture. As American culture shapes the genre, pushing it to evolve over time, the genre Western likewise informs culture by teaching Americans about their own social identity. This reciprocal relationship makes Westerns troubling to critics; Western films are steeped in genre conventions that whisper disconcerting truths about American ideology and hint at Americans’ callous treatment of both themselves and the Other. One particularly troubling element of the genre Western is “the centrality of the male protagonist and the subservient nature of the female characters” (Piturro 113). Even as Western films progress to address changing American values and beliefs, they struggle to shake the patriarchal gender dynamics marginalizing women, as time and again Westerns demonstrate that “the root language of the genre is gender” (Dowell 10). Leo Braudy asserts that “genre films essentially ask the audience, ‘Do you still want to believe this?’ Popularity is the audience answering ‘Yes.’ Change in genres occur when the audience says, ‘That’s too infantile a form of what we believe. Show us something more complicated’” (179). This argument suggests that if a progressive or revisionist genre film is unpopular, the audience still believes in the classic model a filmmaker sought to challenge, ultimately [End Page 33] demonstrating that the audience is not ready to evolve as the genre progresses. Such is the case with Maggie Greenwald’s The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), a thought-provoking film that has been labeled both a revisionist and a feminist Western for its portrayal of a female embodying the classic Western hero. Earning just under $550,000 at the box office, the film’s unpopularity suggests that even in the midst of the women’s empowerment movements dominating the 1990s, audiences still believed, and supported, genre conventions that reinscribe patriarchal social structures. Although this weak box office performance leads some to believe the film does not merit reintroduction to critical conversations, I instead posit that The Ballad of Little Jo dropped off critics’ radar because scholarship about gender performativity and transgender representation was not yet prominent in the field when the film was released. Maggie Greenwald presents a female Western hero who identifies as a man, and in doing so challenges an earlier feminist criticism that was dominated by cis-gender normativity. In the early 1990s the film anticipated our present discussions of transgender experiences, asking viewers to reevaluate their understanding of gender and its relationship to identity within the context of the genre Western. Jo’s story takes place just outside a small frontier community called Ruby City during the nineteenth century, and as such, the film depicts early instances of intolerance and gender violence in the American West. Despite developing into less isolated, law-governed towns in the century following westward expansion, in some respects, western communities are still plagued by the legacy of the “Wild West,” both in modern culture and in popular imagination— a distressing reality addressed in other popular Western productions. Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), for example, addresses gender violence, hate crimes, and homophobia by alluding to the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. Productions like The Ballad of Little Jo, Brokeback Mountain, and Moisés Kaufman’s documentary play The Laramie Project (2001) speak to the necessity for scholarship addressing the troubling legacy of hate violence in the “Wild West.” By reintroducing The Ballad of Little Jo to contemporary gender discourse, I hope to address the need for more criticism about [End Page 34] hate and gender violence in Western literature and film studies. Additionally, I propose that publishing an individual’s image can be an example of necroviolence, especially when their final image is misrepresentative of their...

Upgrading &lt;em&gt;The L Word: Generation Q&lt;/em&gt;

Upgrading &lt;em&gt;The L Word: Generation Q&lt;/em&gt;

True Grit: Dirt, Subjectivity and the Female Body in Contemporary Westerns

AbstractThis article considers the significance of dirt to three Western texts:Lonesome Land,Mudbound, andBrokeback Mountain. The overall argument is that the more complicated and ambiguous dirt is permitted to be, the more imaginative and critical potential it has for the iconography of the contemporary Western. Taking B.M. Bower’s 1912 Western Romance as a model, it is argued that the dirt aesthetic is crucial to how Westerns construct the myth of the American character. This is further complicated by intersections between representations of the White rural poor, women (as for bothLonesome LandandMudbound, there are connotations of sexual impurity in the dirty White female body), and representations of queerness. In the two versions ofBrokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx’s short story and Ang Lee’s film, we see the ambiguity of dirt: it can be read as an essential part of the American land, or as polluting waste matter. The critical framework draws on feminist history and criticism via Kathleen Healey and Phyllis Palmer; sociological theories of imagining poverty in North America via Kate Cairns and Winfried Fluck; and queer theory via Christopher Schmidt.

Echoes of a Queer Messianic: From “Frankenstein” to “Brokeback Mountain”

Echoes of a Queer Messianic: From “Frankenstein” to “Brokeback Mountain”

Heinrich Heine’sThe Rabbi of Bacherachand the Ends of Judaism

Research Article| July 01 2019 Heinrich Heine’s The Rabbi of Bacherach and the Ends of Judaism Richard Block Richard Block University of Washington, Seattle Richard Block is an Associate Professor in Germanics at the University of Washington. He is the author of The Spell of Italy: Vacation, Magic, and the Attraction to Goethe and Echoes of a Queer Messianic: From “Frankenstein” to “Brokeback Mountain.” Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google CR: The New Centennial Review (2019) 19 (2): 47–68. https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.19.2.0047 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Richard Block; Heinrich Heine’s The Rabbi of Bacherach and the Ends of Judaism. CR: The New Centennial Review 1 July 2019; 19 (2): 47–68. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.19.2.0047 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressCR: The New Centennial Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © Michigan State University Board of Trustees Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Queer Theory and Brokeback Mountain

Matthey Tinkcom, Queer Theory and Brokeback Mountain. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2017. x + 125 pp. ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-1882-5

Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory by Elsie Walker, and: Sound: Dialogue, Music, and Effects ed. by Kathryn Kalinak

Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory by Elsie Walker, and: Sound: Dialogue, Music, and Effects ed. by Kathryn Kalinak Nick Poulakis Elsie Walker Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory. Oxford University Press, 2015. 448 pages; $37.55 paperback; $99.00 hardcover; $33.20 kindle. Kathryn Kalinak, editor Sound: Dialogue, Music, and Effects Rutgers University Press, 2015. 224 pages; $26.95 paperback; $80.00 hardcover; $26.95 epub/pdf. Cinema has always been considered a modern spectacle of vision. But, although film substance consists of both sound and images, it is a fact that the aural dimensions of this audiovisual medium have been regularly disregarded in academic and journalistic reviews. On the other side, there have also been certain works that deal with the so-called “film musicology,” which tend to employ extremely specialized music-centred examples, comparisons and terminology that are mainly accessible only to a small number of musicology experts. Today, scholars wonder if there is an alternative: to put it simply, how can we apply cultural theories to film music and sound in order to better appreciate and explain films? Elsie Walker’s brand-new book Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory tries to answer these fundamental questions in a methodical way. It applies to film music and sound analysis five of the most common critical theories used in film studies, in particular genre studies, postcolonialism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and queer theory. This monograph draws attention by means of a rigorous examination of films to the [End Page 30] capacity of both music and sound to reveal diverse filmic meanings, uncovering not only the “unheard melodies” (as earlier scholars of this field would put it) but also the “unseen images” of cinema. Currently serving as an Associate Professor of Film Studies at Salisbury University (Maryland), Elsie Walker has considerable experience in theoretical and educational approaches to film in three different countries: New Zealand, England and the USA. Through her published work, she has also contributed greatly to recent film and sound scholarship. Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory is the outcome of five years of research on how to attentively bringing together film and music/sound studies with critical conceptions of literature and culture. Practically, this multifaceted perspective yields a book that is adequately accessible to a great range of students, tutors and other audiences, whether expert or non-expert in this domain. The book has an instantly identifiable structure. It is divided into five general parts, each of which is motivated by one of the main theories mentioned above. These parts consist of three individual chapters apiece: the first contains a transparent theoretical preview of the subject matter, whereas the others focus, respectively, on two case studies of film and music/sound analyses. There is also a comprehensive introduction in which the film Brokeback Mountain (2005), directed by Ang Lee, music by Gustavo Santaolalla, operates as an opening case study, and a coda that sums up and, what is more, reassigns the book’s major outlines to a very recent production: Gravity (2013), directed by Alfonso Cuarón with music by Steven Price. The book also includes a glossary of terms, an index, as well as a list of films quoted and analyzed. The bibliography cited in the text is placed at the end of each part, thus framing almost autonomous sections of this engaging book. The first part of Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory starts with Rick Altman’s input concerning joint sound and genre theories of film. After that, Walker continues with the analysis of two westerns, The Searchers (1956), directed by John Ford, music by Max Steiner and Dead Man (1995), directed by Jim Jarmusch, music by Neil Young, from the perspective of the semantic and the syntactic components of this particular genre. The first one is a mainstream film of an earlier period, the second a present-day independent creation. While these offer two totally different kinds of soundtracks, they make the author’s scholar analyses more productive. The second part of the book is titled “Postcolonialism” and it begins with a brief prelude by Robert Stam and Louise Spence on colonialism, racism and representation. Based on the above mentioned theoretical perspective and...