Brokeback Mountain

There's an interesting interview with Annie Proulx online: At Close Range with Annie Proulx: Pulitzer Prize-winning Writer Shares Insights in Short Story, Film Adaptation of "Brokeback Mountain," by Matthew Testa, writing for Planet Jackson Hole.

Annie Proulx (pronounced Proo), the award-winning author of The Shipping News, is in the headlines for writing the short story "Brokeback Mountain," which has been turned into a highly praised yet controversial movie. The story "Brokeback Mountain" first showed up in the The New Yorker in 1997 [New Yorker 13 Oct. 97: 74 (11 pp)] and, later, in Proulx's anthology of Wyoming stories called Close Range.

"No, it is not difficult to move around Wyoming anonymously. Women of a certain age are invisible. And most Wyoming people don't give a damn whether you write novels or knit mittens." --Annie Proulx

"Brokeback Mountain" explores the pain of discovering love, losing it, and enduring the consequences. What makes the story different is that its lovers are two ranch kids--both male--who grow into lives where they have to hide their love for each other. Their problem has seismic effects on everyone in their adult lives.

A recent story in the Casper Star-Tribune sampled a variety of responses to the movie. One response came from another Wyoming writer: "Kaycee playwright Sandy Dixon doesn't care to open her mind to the story line of 'Brokeback Mountain,' she said. A lifelong Wyomingite, Dixon said she has never encountered a gay cowboy, and doesn't think it's right for Proulx and Hollywood to portray Wyoming as a state with gay cowboys."

In contrast, an article in Salon.com reported,"Curtis Monk, who leads an AIDS-awareness program and also coordinates events for Wyoming Equality, tends to disagree. 'I alone personally know 15 gay cowboys who come to our dances'" (All Quiet on the Western Gay Front).

nHumanities doesn't think of the movie as a cowboy movie--after all, these guys were herding sheep when they met. Nor do we think of it as a gay movie--it's about the need for love, and love crosses a lot of boundaries.

That appears to be the way director Ang Lee and Focus Films think of it, too. Lee says the movie is "not a Western. No gunslingers. I don't want to undermine the sanctified image of the American Western man. It's a love story of real people in the West." When James Schamus, co-president of Focus Films, was working on the poster for the movie, he "didn't research posters of famous Westerns for ideas. He looked at the posters of the 50 most romantic movies ever made. 'If you look at our poster,' he says, 'you can see traces of our inspiration, "Titanic".'"