How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (35 page)

Less appealing, and more damaging to your sense of the balance of the text, are the cliché madwoman-in-the-attic, off-rhythm mumblings of Mary-Louise Parker as Harper, and the misfired performance by Emma Thompson as the Angel. (She also plays a homeless woman and, disastrously, the brisk Italian-American nurse who watches over Prior in the hospital.) On Broadway in 1993, Marcia Gay Harden had a solidity and concreteness that made Harper's slide into madness all the more pathetic—her physical presence provided some traction; whereas Mary-Louise Parker's wispy, whiny, one-note pathos seemed culled from old Julie Harris movies, and got to be grating fairly early on. (This Harper makes you realize, now, how necessary it is for the play to work that we feel sorry for her, that she be a victim.) And Thompson's Angel, writhing in her harness and seeming always to be on the verge of giggling, has none of the angular authority that Ellen McLaughlin brought to the role onstage, and as a result you cringe through the Angel's scenes.

 

One result of these performances, good and bad, was that you were likely to shift your focus in different directions—to notice different elements of the play, to reevaluate characters. To my mind, the most significant result of this refocusing—away from the supernatural material, away from those characters you felt compelled to feel sorry for or admire (the fact that the black drag queen is the fount of all wisdom and realism in the play strikes you now, if anything, as patronizing)—was to be made aware of a fundamental dishonesty, something not fully worked out or perhaps even avoided, at the heart of
Angels
. The terrible anguish evident in every facet of Patrick Wilson's fierce performance as Joe Pitt—his telephonic coming-out conversation was, for those of us who have had conversations like that, almost impossible to watch—made me realize, as I had not done before, that Joe is, in fact, the only truly tragic—Greek-tragic, that is—character in the play. And yet the play itself seems neither to know nor acknowledge this; if anything, Kushner goes to no little lengths to make us think of Joe as morally deficient, when in fact he isn't. Why?

From the beginning of “Millennium Approaches,” we are asked to see Joe as an exact structural counterpart to that other lover who abandons his spouse, Louis. Many elements in the play invite us to draw parallels between the two men—not merely the fact that they end up in each other's arms, but even more to the point, the number of split scenes that the two unhappy couples (Louis/Prior and Joe/Harper) share. (In the film version, the splitting is elegantly conveyed by some very adroit cross-cutting between the two pairs at crucial moments.) And yet this parallelism is surely both unfair and unbalanced. Louis, after all, abandons Prior out of weakness and fear of AIDS, whereas Joe abandons Harper because of his dawning self-knowledge: in order to be who he really is, he can't remain in a marriage that has become a lie. It's true that both Louis and Joe cause their loved ones to suffer horribly, but this ostensible similarity is undercut by an important moral difference: the freedom and happiness Louis seeks—freedom from messy diseases, freedom from responsibility to someone else—isn't, in fact, a bona fide good (it's just selfishness), whereas most of us, today, would agree that for Joe to come out of the closet, to realize and emancipate his true self, is both a psychological good and, in the end, a moral necessity, whatever the temporary pain it causes.

And yet the moral difference—the difference that ought to redeem Joe—is overlooked in
Angels
; indeed, in the television version, it's papered over quite purposefully. There's a scene in the stage version of “Perestroika” in which Hannah confronts her son after he's gone to live with Louis; she hasn't heard from him in weeks, and they have a spat in the Mormon Visitors Center, where she's got herself a job. Exasperated, Joe cries out that he's fled the breadth of a continent to get away from her. “And what are you running away from now?” she snaps. “You and me,” he replies. In the film version, some lines have been added between Hannah's impatient question and her son's weary answer, and the addition is a telling one, because it reveals a failure of sympathy on the author's part, which in turn illuminates a great problem of the play:

The added exchange is clearly an attempt to saddle Joe with a moral failure (he's failed in responsibility to his wife, a responsibility that cannot be wished away) and, further and much more doubtful, to make it seem as if the reason for his abandonment is a kind of selfish, self-indulgent whim, like the reason for Louis's abandonment of Prior: “What you want, what you want,” his mother dismissively snipes, as if the desire to be a fully fledged human being unashamed of his most profound self is nothing more than a between-meal snack. It's an odd line for a gay playwright to have written: you somehow suspect that, in real life, Kushner doesn't expect gay men to remain in false marriages to make their mothers happy.

The truth of his inner nature is of course a great deal more than a whim, and it's for this reason that the spectacle of Joe's suffering is a true tragic spectacle: which is to say, the spectacle of a man torn between two competing goods (his happiness, his wife's sanity), neither of which can be attained without the destruction of the other. In the classical sense, Joe is the only character in the entire work deserving of those tragic emotions, pity and fear; he's the only character who has a kind of Sophoclean grandeur. Or, that is, should have, but doesn't—because instead of working through the meaning of Joe's conundrum, Kushner sweeps it under the dramatic rug, trying to persuade us that, like Louis, he's just a selfish monster. (The real evil that Joe does—the legal opinions that he composes—can be seen as a function, if anything, of his closetedness; like many closeted gay men, he is attracted to repressive ideologies that seem to promise the “order” he craves at this stage, the control he wants over his own irrepressible desires.)

Indeed, of all the desertions that
Angels
depicts, none is as striking as the desertion of Joe by his creator.
Angels
presents many images of suffering: Prior's abandonment and illness; Harper's loneliness and madness; Cohn's pain; Rosenberg's death; the angels' confusion; the discrimination and racism to which Belize alludes; Hannah's nervous failure as a mother, for which her compensatory crispness can barely cover; even selfish Louis's spasms of guilt and self-torment. Each of these characters
is, by the end of the play, healed, comforted, or forgiven. Prior's fever breaks, and we are meant to understand that he'll grow better (in the epilogue, we learn that he's doing just fine on AZT); Harper asserts herself, grabs Joe's credit card, and takes a night flight to San Francisco to start a new, emancipated life; Hannah is seen at the end of the play, relaxed, attractively dressed in New Yorker chic, amiably chatting with her new gay pals; Louis has been forgiven, if not taken back, by Prior; and, as we know, even Roy Cohn is absolved, by no less a personage than his most famous victim, Ethel Rosenberg. Of all the sufferers in
Angels
, only Joe is left alone at the end, the only character who is neither forgiven nor redeemed in a way that conforms to Kushner's sense of “Perestroika” as a “comedy.”

Why is this? When you look over the cast of characters in
Angels
and think about whom we're supposed to sympathize with, and who gets forgiven, you can't help noticing that the most sympathetic, the “best” characters are either ill, or women, or black, or Jewish. Looking over this rather PC list, it occurs to you to wonder whether, in the worldview of this play's creator, the reason why Joe Pitt—who alone of the characters is the most genuinely and interestingly torn, who in fact seeks love the hardest and suffers the most for self-knowledge—can't be forgiven by his creator, and is the only character who goes unredeemed in some way at the end of the play, is that he's a healthy, uninfected, white, Anglo-Saxon, male Christian. This in turn makes you realize how much of the second part of this play depends, from the in-joke of San Francisco as Heaven to the closing scene (in which Prior addresses the audience and in a valedictory blessing vapidly declares us all to be “fabulous creatures, each and every one”) on a certain set of glib, feel-good, rather parochial assumptions about the world, assumptions that in the end undercut the ambitions and, occasionally, the pretensions of what has come before. I, for one, would have respected much more a play that invited its presumably liberal, often largely gay or gay-friendly audiences to see as its central and truly tragic figure a white, healthy, Protestant male on the verge of something truly transformative and redeeming: not illness and suffering, but self-knowledge. When all is said and done,
Angels
itself is guilty of its own kind of reprehensible abandonment: abandonment of the tragic for the merely sentimental, of real intellectual challenges for feel-good nostrums, of hard questions
about guilt and responsibility for easy finger-pointing at all the usual suspects.

For this reason, it's hard to know just how the television
Angels
is going to play during its inevitable reruns and airings during the next few months. The excitement that greeted the six-hour, $60 million production has had, perhaps appropriately, something of the messianic about it—something redolent more of those latter-day, heralding, biblical angels than of their drab classical forbears.
The New York Times
devoted not one but two front-page Arts & Leisure articles (on the same day) to Kushner and the
Angels
film;
The New Yorker
deemed the TV version “cause for celebration.” More ecstatic than either by far was
The Washington Post
, which declared the TV film “awesome,” “spectacular,” and “one of the most dazzling movies ever made for television or any other means of projecting a film.” I say “messianic” because, behind all this enthusiasm, it was hard not to detect a sense of deep satisfaction that Kushner's American epic was finally going to be seen in—well, in America. “The number of people who see it the very first night should easily outnumber those who have seen the play in the several hundred North American stage productions since it opened on Broadway 10 years ago,” the
Times
exulted in one of its two articles, entitled “Hurricane Kushner Hits the Heartland.”

Within
Angels
lurks that great work about America itself, one that could well speak to the heartland, a work about migrations and revelations and about the essential tragedy of American and possibly even human experience, in which one person's liberation—now more than ever before—often means another's suffering. But the play as we have it is a more limited affair, one meant to reassure not the heartland but the marginal groups whom the play cozily addresses. What, in the end, can the “heartland” be expected to make of the play's real message: that those who come from it are unforgiven, and unforgivable, by those of us who reside on the coasts? Still, the fanfares are loud. Not for the first time, in the case of angels, will the messenger have outdazzled the message.

—The New York Review of Books,
February 12, 2004

B
rokeback Mountain
—the highly praised new movie as well as the short story by Annie Proulx on which the picture is faithfully based—is a tale about two homosexual men. Two gay men. To some people it will seem strange to say this; to some other people, it will seem strange to have to say it. Strange to say it, because the story is, as everyone now knows, about two young Wyoming ranch hands who fall in love as teenagers in 1963 and continue their tortured affair, furtively, over the next twenty years. And as everyone also knows, when most people hear the words “two homosexual men” or “gay,” the image that comes to mind is not likely to be one of rugged young cowboys who shoot elk and ride broncos for fun.

Two homosexual men: it is strange to have to say it just now because the distinct emphasis of so much that has been said about the movie—in commercial advertising as well as in the adulatory reviews—has been that the story told in
Brokeback Mountain
is not, in fact, a gay story, but a sweeping romantic epic with “universal” appeal. The lengths to which reviewers from all over the country, representing publications of various ideological shadings, have gone in order to diminish the specifically gay element is striking, as a random sampling of the reviews collected
on the film's official Web site makes clear.
The Wall Street Journal
's critic asserted that “love stories come and go, but this one stays with you—not because both lovers are men, but because their story is so full of life and longing, and true romance.” The
Los Angeles Times
declared the film to be

Indeed, a month after the movie's release most of the reviews were resisting, indignantly, the popular tendency to refer to it as “the gay cowboy movie.” “It is much more than that glib description implies,” the critic of the Minneapolis
Star Tribune
sniffed. “This is a human story.” This particular rhetorical emphasis figures prominently in the advertising for the film, which in quoting such passages reflects the producer's understandable desire that
Brokeback Mountain
not be seen as something for a “niche” market but as a story with broad appeal, whatever the particulars of its time, place, and personalities. (The words “gay” and “homosexual” are never used of the film's two main characters in the forty-nine-page press kit distributed by the filmmakers to critics.) “One movie is connecting with the heart of America,” one ad that's part of the current publicity campaigns declares; the ad shows the star Heath Ledger, without his male costar, Jake Gyllenhaal, grinning in a cowboy hat. A television ad that ran immediately after the Golden Globe awards a few weeks ago showed clips of the male leads embracing their wives, but not each other.

The reluctance to be explicit about the film's themes and content was evident at the Golden Globes themselves, where the film took the major awards: for best movie drama, best director, and best screenplay. When a short montage of clips from the film was screened, it was described as “a story of monumental conflict”; later, the actor reading the names of nominees for best actor in a movie drama described Heath Ledger's character as “a cowboy caught up in a complicated love.” After Ang Lee received the award he was quoted as saying, “This is a universal story. I just wanted to make a love story.”

Because I am as admiring as almost everyone else of the film's many
excellences, it seems to me necessary to counter this special emphasis in the way the film is being promoted and received. For to see
Brokeback Mountain
as a love story, or even as a film about universal human emotions, is to misconstrue it very seriously—and in so doing inevitably to diminish its real achievement.

 

Both narratively and visually,
Brokeback Mountain
is a tragedy about the specifically gay phenomenon of the closet—about the disastrous emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression and of the social intolerance that first causes and then exacerbates it. What love story there is occurs early on in the film, and briefly: a summer's idyll herding sheep on a Wyoming mountain, during which two lonely youths, taciturn Ennis and high-spirited Jack, fall into bed, and then in love, with each other. The sole visual representation of their happiness in love is a single brief shot of the two shirtless youths horsing around in the grass. That shot is eerily—and significantly—silent, voiceless: it turns out that what we are seeing is what the boys' disgusted boss is seeing through his binoculars as he spies on them.

After that—because their love for each other can't be fitted into the lives they think they must lead—misery pursues and finally destroys the two men and everyone with whom they come in contact, with the relentless thoroughness you associate with Greek tragedy. By the end of the drama, indeed, whole families have been laid waste. Ennis's marriage to a conventional, sweet-natured girl disintegrates, savaging her simple illusions and spoiling the home life of his two daughters; Jack's nervy young wife, Lureen, devolves into a brittle shrew, her increasingly elaborate and artificial hairstyles serving as a visual marker of the ever-growing mendacity that underlies the couple's relationship. Even an appealing young waitress, with whom Ennis after his divorce has a flirtation (an episode much amplified from a bare mention in the original story), is made miserable by her brief contact with a man who is as enigmatic to himself (as we know but she does not) as he is to her. If Jack and Ennis are tainted, it's not because they're gay, but because they pretend not to be; it's the lie that poisons everyone they touch.

As for Jack and Ennis themselves, the brief and infrequent vacations that they are able to take together as the years pass—“fishing trips” on
which, as Ennis's wife points out late in the story, still choking on her bitterness years after their marriage fails, no fish were ever caught—are haunted, increasingly, by the specter of the happier life they might have had, had they been able to live together. Their final vacation together (before Jack is beaten to death in what is clearly represented, in a flashback, as a roadside gay-bashing incident) is poisoned by mutual recriminations. “I wish I knew how to quit you,” the now nearly middle-aged Jack tearfully cries out, humiliated by years of having to seek sexual solace in the arms of Mexican hustlers. “It's because of you that I'm like this—nothing, nobody,” the dirt-poor Ennis sobs as he collapses in the dust. What Ennis means, of course, is that he's “nothing” because loving Jack has forced him to be aware of real passion that has no outlet, aware of a sexual nature that he cannot ignore but which neither his background nor his circumstances have equipped him to make part of his life. Again and again over the years, he rebuffs Jack's offers to try living together and running “a little cow and calf operation” somewhere: he is hobbled by his inability even to imagine what a life of happiness might look like.

One reason he can't bring himself to envision such a life with his lover is a grisly childhood memory, presented in flashback, of being taken at the age of eight by his father to see the body of a gay rancher who'd been tortured and beaten to death—a scene that prefigures the scene of Jack's death. This explicit reference to childhood trauma suggests another, quite powerful, reason why
Brokeback
must be seen as a specifically gay tragedy. In another review that decried the use of the term “gay cowboy movie” (“a cruel simplification”), the
Chicago Sun-Times
's critic, Roger Ebert, wrote with ostensible compassion about the dilemma of Jack and Ennis, declaring that “their tragedy is universal. It could be about two women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic groups—any ‘forbidden' love.” This is well-meaning but very seriously misguided. The tragedy of heterosexual lovers from different religious or ethnic groups is, essentially, a social tragedy; as we watch it unfold, we are meant to be outraged by the irrationality of social strictures that prevent the two from loving each other, strictures that the lovers themselves may legitimately rail against and despise.

But those lovers, however star-crossed, never despise
themselves
. As
Brokeback
makes so eloquently clear, the tragedy of gay lovers like Ennis
and Jack is only secondarily a social tragedy. Their tragedy, which starts well before the lovers ever meet, is primarily a psychological tragedy, a tragedy of psyches scarred from the very first stirrings of an erotic desire that, beginning in earliest childhood, in the bosom of their families (as Ennis's grim flashback is meant to remind us), the world around them represents as unhealthy, hateful, and deadly. Romeo and Juliet (and we) may hate the outside world, the Capulets and Montagues, may hate Verona; but because they learn to hate homosexuality so early on, young people with homosexual impulses more often than not grow up hating
themselves
—they believe that there's something wrong with themselves long before they can understand that there's something wrong with society. This is the truth that Heath Ledger, who plays Ennis, clearly understands—“Fear was instilled in him at an early age, and so the way he loved disgusted him,” the actor has said—and that is so brilliantly conveyed by his deservedly acclaimed performance. On screen, Ennis's self-repression and self-loathing are given startling physical form: the awkward, almost hobbled quality of his gait, the constricted gestures, the way in which he barely opens his mouth when he talks all speak eloquently of a man who is tormented simply by being in his own body—by being himself.

So much, at any rate, for the movie being a love story like any other, even a tragic one. To their great credit, the makers of
Brokeback Mountain
—the writers Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, the director Ang Lee—seem, despite the official rhetoric, to have been aware that they were making a movie specifically about the closet. The themes of repression, containment, the emptiness of unrealized lives—all ending in the “nothingness” to which Ennis achingly refers—are consistently expressed in the film, appropriately enough, by the use of space; given the film's homoerotic themes, this device is particularly meaningful. The two lovers are only happy in the wide, unfenced outdoors, where exuberant shots of enormous skies and vast landscapes suggest, tellingly, that what the men feel for each other is indeed “natural.” By contrast, whenever we see Jack and Ennis indoors, in the scenes that show the failure of their domestic and social lives, they look cramped and claustrophobic. (Ennis in particular is often seen in reflection, in various mirrors: a figure imprisoned in a tiny frame.) There's a sequence in which we see Ennis in Wyoming, and then Jack in Texas, anxiously
preparing for one of their “fishing trips,” and both men, as they pack for their trip—Ennis nearly leaves behind his fishing tackle, the unused and increasingly unpersuasive prop for the fiction he tells his wife each time he goes away with Jack—pace back and forth in their respective houses like caged animals.

The climax of these visual contrasts is also the emotional climax of the film, which takes place in two consecutive scenes, both of which prominently feature closets—actual closets. In the first, a grief-stricken Ennis, now in his late thirties, visits Jack's childhood home, where in the tiny closet of Jack's almost bare room he discovers two shirts: his and Jack's, the clothes they'd worn during their summer on Brokeback Mountain, Ennis's protectively encased within Jack's. (At the end of that summer, Ennis had thought he'd lost the shirt; only now do we realize that Jack had stolen it for this purpose.) The image—which is taken directly from Proulx's story—of the two shirts hidden in the closet, preserved in an embrace which the men who wore them could never fully enjoy, stands as the poignant visual symbol of the story's tragedy. Made aware too late of how greatly he was loved, of the extent of his loss, Ennis stands in the tiny windowless space, caressing the shirts and weeping wordlessly.

In the scene that follows, another misplaced piece of clothing leads to a similar scene of tragic realization. Now middle-aged and living alone in a battered, sparsely furnished trailer (a setting with which Proulx's story begins, the tale itself unfolding as a long flashback), Ennis receives a visit from his grown daughter, who announces that she's engaged to be married. “Does he love you?” the blighted father protectively demands, as if realizing too late that this is all that matters. After the girl leaves, Ennis realizes she's left her sweater behind, and when he opens his little closet door to store it there, we see that he's hung the two shirts from their first summer (Jack's now encased protectively within Ennis's) on the inside of the closet door, below a tattered postcard of Brokeback Mountain. Just as we see this, the camera pulls back to allow us a slightly wider view, which reveals a little window next to the closet, a rectangular frame that affords a glimpse of a field of yellow flowers and the mountains and sky. The juxtaposition of the two spaces—the cramped and airless closet, the window with its unlimited vistas beyond—efficiently but wrenchingly suggests the man's tragedy:
the life he has lived, the life that might have been. His eyes filling with tears, Ennis looks at his closet and says, “Jack, I swear….” But he never completes his sentence, just as he never completed his life.

 

One of the most tortured, but by no means untypical, attempts to suggest that the tragic heroes of
Brokeback Mountain
aren't “really” gay appeared in, of all places, the
San Francisco Chronicle
, where the critic Mick LaSalle argued that the film is