The press for this movie is like some weird new kind of audial torture that alternates from ear to ear. On one hand, I keep hearing the phrase “gay cowboy movie” - which, really, has all the haunting appeal of someone saying “literate nigger film”. That is to say it reeks of a condescension I could perhaps do without.

At the same time, in my other ear, everyone makes incessant constipated bleats of “I hear it’s really well written!!!”, and, “it actually has a great story.” Oh yeah, okay: as if there’s some kind of argument of High Art that has to be made in order for people to tolerate gay films, when last week you set seven bucks on fire and watched “Mr. & Mrs. Smith”. Damn you all - I have sat through more straight romance films without complaint than you have grown hairs on your legs, and when one gay film comes out that you actually want to see, the best you can do is to make me obscenely over-aware of all the various excuses you’ve made that allow you to go watch it? Brokeback Mountain’s living, breathing press junket makes me want to switch out the reels for a five minute short entitled “Me Sodomizing Your Dad”.

Hasn’t the whole thing been a tad too, I don’t know, conspicuous? A holiday houseguest of mine who can be a bit socially awkward at times had apparently told his (Chinese) girlfriend I am gay.
 
“Has he seen Brokeback Mountain yet???” she asked him over the cellphone.
 
Gosh, I don’t know. Has she seen Nihao My Concubine yet? It involves Asia from what I hear. For that matter have any stray negros reading this blog been to see Malcolm X lately? It’s really fucking tasteful. It’s not just a black movie for the sake of being a black movie!

Adding insult to injury is the weird hipster-porn event of a lifetime that is the real basis for watching. This piece of shit which I will
never see stars hunky, repulsively smug newfound Hollywood nudist Jake Gylenhaal and his illiterate pal, the compulsive drunk Heath Ledger, best known as That Guy In A Knight’s Tale, or perhaps as someone who probably boned Julia Stiles. And everyone going to Brokeback already knows long in advance there’s sure to be copious shots of creamy buttcheeks in moonlight.

Great. The female-audience equivalent of two lazy, paid-to-moan lesbians.

The new collective moist-panty’d nomination of Jake to Indie Girl Heartthrob has also given me a raging soft-on. Sure, he’s a little more compelling than that whipped dog Orlando Bloom, but the ladies’ idea of a studly rapscallion looks like nothing but a trust fund kid turned actor who happens to have a great bod. Jake Gyllenhaal looks to me like his idea of fun is sitting around with Kirsten Dunst bragging about how few books they’ve read.

The same goes for pretty much everyone nodding their heads thoughtfully at articles in the weekly local rag about what a “tasteful adaptation” it is. Uh huh, like you were really sitting around reading Ring Lardner before this came out, wistfully musing on the fate of short stories in the modern age.

The actors themselves play the same retarded minstrel show tapdance in the press. First off, I know I read an interview with Ledger where he said something like “we just tried to get the love scenes over as quickly as possible”. I can’t find it anymore, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was frantically pulled by all and sundry, to be replaced by the paradoxical bullshit that’s now going around. Here’s two separate interviews combined for contrast:

“One of the reasons I took the role was because he was so complex,” says 26-year-old Ledger. “The complexities are so deeply embedded inside him, and rarely spoken. You’d think you would kind of build up and work out to play a superhero or something, but it ends up being for a gay cowboy story.”

And then there’s this jewel from Jakey-boy: “They’re all like, ‘Dude, you’re gonna kiss a guy,’” he said in a recent interview. [Incidentally, WHO said this? The crew of cokehead stockbrokers and rugby-playing date-rapists he rolls with?] “But it’s not about that for me. It’s about how impossible love can be sometimes, and I can relate to that. As well as that, every man goes through a period of thinking they’re attracted to another guy.”

Oh, good. Now the cowboys aren’t really gay. America is safe in the end after all.

Credits: Ari Rust