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This study of 113 reviews of the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain finds that although U.S. critics applauded it, the discourse underlying their reviews created three complementary but conflicting frames that direct attention away the movie's core theme of destructive rural homophobia. Our interrogation of press reviews revealed that reviewers framed the film as a “universal” love story while simultaneously encouraging audiences to read it as a “gay cowboy movie.” The tension between these competing frames—perhaps an artifact of reviewers’ lack of language to articulate the queer issues privileged in the film's narratives beyond a heterosexual–homosexual dichotomy—results in disagreement about the “proper” interpretation of the film. The result, whether we see the film as “universal” or “peculiar,” is a paradoxical invisibility for queer identity, and yields a third frame in which homophobia is represented as a relic of the past. The tension among these contradictory frames illustrates how efforts in the mainstream press to privilege queerness struggle to exist within heteronormative space. Comparing the film's queer protagonists to culturally familiar heterosexual symbols such as Romeo and Juliet, or Western icons John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, ironically elevates queer visibility while simultaneously relegating queers and queer experiences to the margins. Rather than celebrating Brokeback Mountain for its challenges to heteroideology, press reviews ultimately worked to appropriate Annie Proulx's voice, diluting her story's intended condemnation of brutal and destructive homophobia.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank CSMC Editor Eric King Watts and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback.
Notes
1. Ledger died on January 22, 2008, of what New York City medical examiners ruled was an accidental overdose of prescription medications (Lieberman, 2008).
2. Worldwide box office gross takings exceeded $180 million by early 2006; production costs were below $14 million (“Box Office,” 2006). For complete list of nominations and awards, see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0388795/awards
3. For the purpose of this study, we define “peculiarity” as a discourse representative of homosexuality's disruption to the heterosexual order. In other words, queers and queer experiences reside outside the boundaries of heteronormativity, and, thus, are regarded as a peculiar transgression of these hegemonic norms.
4. Our interest in this topic grew out of responses to a newspaper column by one of the authors about her brother's similar “Brokeback Mountain” experience in the early 1960s. His “Brokeback Mountain” was a U.S. army base in Germany, where he and his lover also were also thrown together. After their relationship was exposed and they were dishonorably discharged, the Cooper's brother attempted suicide when his “Ennis” couldn't face coming out of the closet. This excerpt from a Minnesota rancher's email is typical of other responses to the newspaper column:
I too struggled with my ‘adverse affections’ for men as I was in the '60s in H.S. and college and went out teaching in rural Minn. in 1964. I remember with pain and sorrow a similar experience I had at that time. I have since come to grips with my choices/feelings and have concluded that we do NOT CHOOSE our physical attraction; just as we cannot choose our sex. At any rate this Cowpuncher/cattleman is now happy with who he is. (Personal communication, January 7, 2007)
5. The Production Code mandated, “No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it,” and, further, “Sex perversion or any inference of it is forbidden” (quoted in Noriega, 1990, p. 22).
6. According to Entman (1993), “[S]alience is a product of the interaction of texts and receivers”; thus, he explains, explicating the frames within a specific text does not necessarily dictate how individuals may respond (p. 53).
7. Reviews were collected online from Academic Search Premiere, Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com), Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, Movie Review Query Engine (http://www.mrqe.com), ProQuest NewsStand, Rotten Tomatoes (http://www.rottentomatoes.com), the official Brokeback Mountain website (http://www.brokebackmountain.com/home.html), Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (G.L.A.D.D.). online links to reviews (http://www.gladd.org/eye/brokeback_mountain.php), and Google searches. Of the reviews, 97 came from newspapers (four duplicates from wire service reviews) and 20 from magazines. In all, 36 states are represented in our sample. Efforts were made to include reviews from each of the 50 states, including email requests to specific newspapers. Many newspapers did not have staff movie reviewers or had not reviewed the film. Many newspapers run material from wire services such as the Associated Press and Knight Ridder, whose reviews are part of our analysis, but most archives do not include wire service stories. Thus, we can assume that AP and Knight Ridder reviews reached a much larger audience nationwide than the 117 publications in our sample.
8. Our findings are consistent with reports from online film databases. For example, the “Rotten Tomatoes” database of reviews from print and online sources reports that 191 of 220 Brokeback reviews were “fresh” (i.e. positive) and 29 reviews were “rotten” (i.e., negative; see http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/brokeback_mountain/). Among 6,997 Hollywood Westerns, Brokeback Mountain ranks 19th, based on reviewers’ scores, the number of reviews, and awards won (Top Ten, n.d.).
9. Some of the negative reviews are not surprising. For instance, the conservative National Review scoffed that the “very title sounds like a definition of unsafe sex” (Steyn, 2005, p. 56). The only review that explicitly criticized the film's homosexual theme appeared in The Spectrum Daily News in St. George, Utah, which chastised Ennis and Jack for their “lustful … same-sex tendencies” (Bennett, 2006, p. S19). Even so, The Spectrum still gave the film two and a half stars.
10. We acknowledge that our interpretations of the reviews’ framing strategies may not reflect those of average readers or other researchers—but as Dow (1996) asserts, the goal of scholarly media critiques is to convince others that their insights may be enhanced by reading a media text similarly, to argue for meaning possibilities and not meaning certainties.
11. Erstein (2005, p. TGIF6).
12. Turan (2005, p. E1).
13. Of our 113 reviewers, 16 are women.
14. Stuart (2005, ¶ 2).
15. Despite the snickering references by late-night comics and conservative talk radio hosts to the “gay cowboy movie,” some critics used the term to condemn the label as inaccurate and a “cruel insult” (Rogers, 2006, ¶ 1). The New York Daily News complained: “Lee's magnificent achievement is being reduced to the catchphrase ‘the gay cowboy movie’” (Bernard, 2005, ¶ 2). The Virginian-Pilot's Mal Vincent agreed this was a cheap shot that shortchanged both the movie and its audience: “To identify it as ‘the gay cowboy movie’ may be good for a sneering laugh over a beer at the local bar, but it is woefully inaccurate and inconclusive when it comes to describing the movie” (2006, p. E5).
16. While the reviews in our sample are a definite improvement on the explicit condemnation of Production Code era reviews, a few critics did dismiss Jack and Ennis's relationship by suggesting that neither was truly gay, and that they were just two bored men who might otherwise have lived happily as heterosexuals had they not spent the summer together on Brokeback Mountain (e.g., Blake, 2006; LaSalle, 2005; Lemire, 2005; Meltz, 2006). A few others condemned the men as selfish for indulging their sexual urges and destroying their marriages (e.g., Bennett, 2006; Hibbs, 2006).
17. Rickey (2005), ¶ 1).
18. Some reviewers did try to resist relegating sexual bigotry to the Old West, acknowledging the continuing challenges of modern-day homophobia. However, this was not typical; fewer than one-quarter of critics related the film to contemporary society. In some instances, writers referred to the residual machismo of American society and Hollywood. Others reminded readers that modern America still isn't exactly welcoming to people with transgressive sexual identities, and speculated about audience reaction (e.g., D'Angelo, 2005; Gallo, 2005; Smith, 2006). Given the film's Wyoming setting, it was also an easy leap for those few critics who chose to address the more difficult issues of modern-day homophobia and sexual bigotry to invoke the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie (e.g., Holden, 2005; Hornaday, 2005; Whittey, 2005). This brutal hate crime was widely reported and sensationalized in the media (Ott & Aoki, 2002) and, thus, was probably a familiar frame of reference for mainstream viewers.
19. Vary (2006), p. 36).
20. Further, it is estimated that only one-third of hate crimes against sexual minorities are reported to police (Ireland, 2007).
21. Only 37% of Americans support gay and lesbian marriage, but 55% approve of civil union rights for same-sex couples (Lozano-Bielat & Masci, 2007).