printThe film “Brokeback Mountain” was available for viewing on my BA flight back from the Britain, last month. As a captive audience, I twitched through half an hour of the thing.
I have very little patience for Hollywood fare. I used to love the cinema. But that was before the motion picture industry forsook good scripts and well-developed characters for storylines fit for a stun-gunned audience, with the attention span of a nit, and an ability to focus only on fast-moving or imploding animated objects and characters as flat as pancakes.
Movies with a message are especially irksome, although film has almost always come with a moral. “Midnight Expresses” or “Deliverance” had messages, but they were incidental to the story. Because the people involved in movie making are much less talented nowadays (not an implausible thesis, and perfectly compatible with Charles Murray’s in his monumental, “Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950“), and because they think in clichés, the overall effect on the viewer is that of a giant wagging, prodding finger. They really get in your face and stay there—for two hours, plus.
Peggy Noonan once said succinctly that “George Clooney is a fellow who read an article and now wants to tell us the truth, if we can handle it.” George Clooney or Ang Lee (Brokeback’s director); it’s all the same to me. To pay for a two-hour-long sermon in the guise entertainment is not my cup of tea.
About the gay thing I’m agnostic. If, however, in Ayn Rand’s magnificent words, “civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy,” then sexual exhibitionism—homo or hetero—is anathema. All in all, it’s most regrettable that the proverbial closet has come to signify oppression, rather than discretion.
Like Hollywood, gays too have become colossal bores. Once interesting and iconoclastic, they now want nothing more than the State’s pension and its stamp of approval. They ought to go back to the days of the Stonewall Riots, when the police’s violations of privacy—and private property—were the object of gay wrath.
After sampling bits of Brokeback—it was horrible—I quickly went back to my book. Heath Ledger as Ennis (an unfortunate name) Del Mar tried to emulate Marlon Brando’s potato-in-the-cheek mumbling in The Godfather. A bad idea today as it was then. The “love scene” between the two men was, as my daughter suggested, like a bear fight. And as sexy. The only sympathetic, ever-so-sad character was the betrayed wife and her neglected babies.
Brokeback’s bathetic tagline was “Love Is A Force Of Nature.” I didn’t get that feeling at all from this flick. I got it in spades from, say, “The Crying Game,” a truly unorthodox love story. Directed by an Irishman, and starring Stephen Rea, the superlative Jaye Davidson, Forest Whitaker, Miranda Richardson (Queenie of “Black Adder“), and Adrian Dunbar—the 1992 British drama/thriller was everything Brokeback wasn’t. There was no accompanying advocacy, only an achingly bare and beautiful love story with a twist (which I cracked right away), against the backdrop of terrorism and intrigue.