Some days you just feel more isolated from your culture than others

This is the third in my intermittent series of posts that might also be called "Why I don't want to see it." In these I talk about movies that I find myself with surprisingly little desire to see, despite the fact that they're well-reviewed, have a story or a kind of story that has been of interest to me in other formats, or both.

I always feel the need to draw the perhaps-thin distinction that I am not criticising these films, because I haven't seen them. I'm just talking about my response to what I have seen about them.

Today I'm talking about Brokeback Mountain. By RT consensus, this is

A beautifully epic Western, [a] gay love story...embued with heartbreaking universality, helped by the moving performances of Ledger and Gyllenhaal.

That comes from movie critics, but it goes along with most bloggers and columnists I've seen discussing the movie too. Yet, when I saw the trailer for the movie earlier this month...it just looked silly to me. So I ask myself: Why silly?

I have no trouble conceiving of a love story, one that I hope is universal, between two women, as I think most of you reading this know. It's the project that has been dominating my life for a couple of years now.

Could it be that when it's my own sex I get a little embarassed? Yeah, maybe. I mean I don't think so, and I certainly don't think that's all of it, but I won't deny the possibility. On the other hand, a few of my favorite flicks have been, in whole or in part, love stories between two men. And they didn't look silly to me at all.

I'm also bothered by the apparent "heartbreaking" nature of the film. The sense I get from the reviews that I've read is that an underlying theme of the film is: "Isn't it tragic that these two men had to marry women and live a lie rather than being allowed to celebrate the truth of their gay love from the highest mountain?"

Such stories really did and really do happen (usually, these days, they involve high Republican officials). And they are tragic. It's just that I'm bored with them. I admit I have a chip on my shoulder about stories where gay=unhappiness, tragedy, and probably death. I don't know that's the case in this movie (so that's not a spoiler), but I have a bad feeling.

I've seen them before; they've been done to death, no lame play on words intended. What I haven't seen nearly enough of is stories where gay=happy (ironic, that). They don't so much incite my ire politically; this is beyond politics, I'm bored with it dramatically; as an audience member.

One of the things I'm most sensitive to in writing about my lesbian characters is that I never want their story to be what I call "The Plight Of The Young Lesbian." Where the story just becomes about all the trials and tribulations they must suffer simply because they're gay.

Very few of my characters' problems occur because they're gay. One or two of them do, because it would be sadly unrealistic to say we live in a world in which everyone can just come right out and be gay and get no static.

But mostly, I hope, it's a love story in which people make the same mistakes, and dream the same dreams, that we all do regardless of the sex of our love objects.

At Shakespeare's Sister, greatest blogger name ever SomeWateryTart complains about Brokeback Mountain being regarded as a gay love story, rather than just a love story. Others have pointed out in the comments that we live in a world in which the political nature of this film cannot help but overcome its other aspects.

I would also offer the observation that, unless I'm very much mistaken (possible), the men in this film would not have a problem, and thus there would be no story, if they were not gay. So perhaps "gay love story" is accurate.

I hope the "universality" mentioned in the consensus above is true; it's entirely possible that this could be a film like Philadelphia. That was a movie I did not like a lot; I found Tom Hanks' award-winning performance to be unbelivable in the main, and in places ghastly. Don't get me started on the opera scene.

Yet as I mention here with almost fetish-like regularity, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is a place where, for obvious reasons, while it is sadly still possible to be homophobic...you really have to work a lot harder at it.

So Philadelphia is a movie that didn't tell me anything I didn't already know (homosexuals really, really are people too!); it failed for me possibly for that reason. But I've seen and heard at least anecdotal evidence that in the "red states" it actually did open a few minds. Maybe what seemed to me like its arms-length treatment of the gay characters made them easier to swallow for that audience.

My understanding is that Brokeback Mountain is doing pretty kickass business, especially for a film not yet in wide release, and it's considered a no-brainer for next years Oscar nominations. Maybe it will open up those minds yet wider still. Frank Rich seems to think so (courtesy TGW).

I'm sure I'll see it one day, in some format. If for no other reason, a supporting role is played by Anne Hathaway. Who, I have to admit, from my POV is amazing casting for the unhappy wife of one of these gay cowboys.

Any man married to Anne Hathaway who is still not satisfied...must really, really, really be gay.