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A Tale of Two Movies
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . . .” So begins Charles Dickens’ classic novel A Tale of Two Cities, which has inspired the title of this week’s essay. Two of the past year’s most controversial films – Brokeback Mountain and Munich – have been nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, to be awarded at this Sunday’s Academy Awards program. One is the best of this year’s critically-acclaimed movies; the other is the worst.
“Brokeback Mountain”: A Love Story that Challenges Americans’ Homophobia
Brokeback Mountain is much more than just “the gay cowboy movie”; it is a moving story, a tragedy about “forbidden love”; and above all, it’s a romance. The story begins in Wyoming in 1963, when two young cowboys, Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal), take a job working as sheepherder and camp tender on the lonely mountain that gives the story its title. They slowly befriend one another during the few hours a day when they share a meal at their camp fire, until one cold night when they share more than a tent with one another. (What else is there to do for two randy 19-year-old cowboys alone on a Wyoming mountain with 1,000 sheep? It’s essentially the same story for countless supposedly “straight” college roommates who’ve had a little too much to drink one night and discover feelings they’ve long repressed.) And for 20 years, after each of them has married and started a family, they continue their romantic encounters, by getting together a couple times a year, “gone fishing” as they told their wives (who know better). A reviewer in Time magazine aptly summarized the rest of the plot: “They cannot articulate to each other or themselves the love and need they feel. They express their passion as often through roughhousing as with caresses and incursions. `I ain’t queer,’ Ennis insists, and he weds the doelike Alma (Michelle Williams). `Me neither,’ Jack affirms, and he marries a take-charge Texas gal, Lureen (Anne Hathaway). But during the `60s and `70s, the men keep their furtive rendezvous, betraying their wives and kids. The movie doesn’t judge any of that. It observes, compassionately, and that’s the secret of its hold on audiences of all social and political persuasions. The movie is heartbreaking because it shows the hearts of two strong men – and their women – in the process of breaking.” (“How the West Was Won Over,” Time, Jan. 30.) Unlike most of the other movies nominated for Best Picture this year, Brokeback Mountain is not intended by its producers to be a “message movie.” Rather, it is exactly what it’s been marketed to be: a romance, or love story, albeit an unusual one. The honesty of the movie and of the emotions that it evokes in its audience – regardless of their sexual orientation – no doubt explains why there have been so few genuinely negative reviews. Even social conservative reviewers who find the theme of same-sex sexual attraction so repugnant cannot deny the beauty of the film. As Chris Mathew Sciabarra noted in his Dec. 14, 2005 review on “Notablog,” “The film is heartbreaking,” at once “tender, sad, and funny.” He adds – and I wholeheartedly concur – “The performances are superb; the cinematography is gorgeous; the minimalist score is effective; the nature-backdrop is awe-inspiring.” Despite the fact that Brokeback Mountain was not intended as a “message movie,” the film nevertheless has a message. As Sciabarra also noted, “It is a testament to the damage that is done to human lives by self-alienation, repression, and fear, internalized homophobia, and the pressure to conform to certain `roles’ in society.” Although the movie spans the years 1963-83, it focuses on the lives of the two men and their families, ignoring the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s that changed lives in other parts of the country but which apparently had no affect on small-town Western communities in which the men lived. “We do that in the wrong place we’ll be dead,” as Ennis says, haunted by the memory of the brutal murder of a homosexual man whose bloody corpse Ennis’ father forced the boy to see – a traumatic experience that continues to haunt Ennis as a man and casts a pall over his romance with Jack, whether or not the two men really faced the threat of violence at the hands of gay-bashing homophobes should their secret be discovered. (It’s a threat that’s easy to imagine in small-town Wyoming, when one recalls Matthew Shepard’s brutal murder just a few years ago.) Brokeback Mountain in some ways is similar to Making Love, the 1982 movie that has been described as Hollywood’s first major-studio film to portray gay characters in a serious, thoughtful way. It was the story of the disintegration of the marriage between two people who seemed the perfect couple: Zack (Michael Ontkean), a successful doctor, and Claire (Kate Jackson), an equally successful television producer. Eight years into their childless marriage, Zack’s long-repressed attraction to men is awakened when he meets Bart (Harry Hamlin), a brash novelist who’s a gay man unable to commit to a romantic relationship. Notwithstanding Bart’s inability to reciprocate Zack’s romantic feelings, Zack realizes he must be honest with Claire – for the sake of her happiness, as well as his own – about his homosexuality. When he summons up the courage to confront Claire, Zack tries to explain his feelings, desperately wanting her to understand: “Maybe you’re born with it, acquire it, who knows? But there’s something in me that needs to be with a man. . . . Maybe it’s his strength, his attitude, maybe he’s everything I’m not . . . maybe it’s the brotherhood, the bonding, the release. Maybe it’s just the need for another man’s approval, but it’s that feeling . . . .” Claire shrieks, “Stop it!” before he can go on, unable to bear his words – which, incidentally, summarize in a few lines of plain English what most psychologists now understand as the roots of homosexual orientation. Making Love was billed as “a love story for the `80s,” and it may be easy to dismiss Zack as a self-absorbed egotist who typifies the stereotype many people have of the 1980s. To do so, however, would be wrong: Zack was an egoist (not egotist), in the best sense of the world, with a healthy self-esteem as well as true love and respect for Claire, whom he wants to be as happy (and to have as satisfactory a sex life) as himself. Above all, Zack is portrayed as a character with integrity: he refuses to continue living a lie, and so he knows his marriage to Claire must end so they can both do what’s best for each other – a painful decision, for he still loves Claire, in a way (though no longer in that way). Brokeback Mountain’s Ennis and Jack also have integrity, though in differing degrees. Jack stays with his wife although their marriage is mostly loveless, and dominated by his wife’s father. (In one of my favorite scenes in the movie, Jack finally confronts his meddling father-in-law over Thanksgiving dinner.) Jacks finds sexual fulfillment outside his marriage, not only with Ennis but also, apparently, with some one-night stands in Mexico as well as an affair with a neighbor. (When Ennis confronts him about his promiscuity, Jack responds with the little speech that’s a defining moment in the film: “Tell you what, we could a had a good life together, a fuckin real good life. You wouldn’t do it, Ennis, so what we got now is Brokeback Mountain. Everthing built on that. It’s all we got, boy, fuckin all, so I hope you know that if you don’t ever know the rest. Count the damn few times we been together in twenty years. Measure the fuckin short leash you keep me on, then ask me about Mexico and then tell me you’ll kill me for needin it and not hardly never getting it. You have no fuckin idea how bad it gets. I’m not you. I can’t make it on a couple a high altitude fucks once or twice a year. You’re too much for me, Ennis, you son of a whoreson bitch.”
Then Jack speaks the sentence that’s become the signature line from the movie, “I wish I knew how to quit you.”) Ennis, in contrast, does divorce his wife – who nevertheless finally confronts Ennis about his “fishing trips” with Jack, amazingly, after the divorce, with her new husband in the next room. And Ennis remains faithful to Jack – hence his angry response to news of Jack’s infidelity – and, apparently, his love for Jack (symbolized by that brief time they spent together on Brokeback Mountain) remains unabated (and tragically unrequited) to the end, to the truly heart-breaking finale of the film. Ennis, so haunted by the homophobia of the society in which he lives that he has internalized it, nevertheless overcomes that homophobia enough to be honest with himself about his love for Jack, even at the price of tragic loneliness. What’s most different about Brokeback Mountain compared to its 1980s predecessor, Making Love, however, has been the differing responses of the moviegoing public to the two films: Brokeback has touched an emotional response among Americans of all sexual orientations that the 1982 movie failed to do. (Harry Hamlin, recently interviewed about the DVD release of the 1982 film, has called Making Love “much more saccharine than any of us had anticipated,” noting that even the gay community didn’t embrace it.) The explanation lies not only in the difference between the films themselves (and the obvious differences of their leading characters) but also in how American society has changed in the past 25 years. It’s not so much that American society – or, more precisely, American popular culture – has become far more accepting of homosexuality (indeed, given the degree to which issues like same-sex marriage have polarized Americans, one might argue exactly the opposite); rather, it has become more sophisticated in its understanding of human sexuality generally and thus in its acceptance of alternatives to “mainstream” heterosexuality. (The popularity of another current movie, Transamerica – which is critically acclaimed for Felicity Huffman’s performance of a pre-op transsexual meeting “her” 17-year-old son – also underscores the degree to which mainstream movie houses today have embraced themes that would have been relegated to “art” movie houses twenty years ago.) Rather than being overlooked or ignored by mainstream pop culture – the usual fate of “gay”-themed movies – Brokeback Mountain has been fully accepted, “corralling the cultural zeitgeist,” as some commentators have put it. The film’s oft-quoted line, “I wish I knew how to quit you,” is popping up on T-shirts and in the punch lines of jokes; some commentators have called it “the new `Show me the money’.” In just four weeks the movie recouped its modest budget (under $20 million) and has exceeded all box-office expectations, averaging $10,000-plus per screen in such markets as Fort Worth, Texas; Nashville, Tennessee; and Columbus, Ohio. Much of that box-office success comes from the surprising fact that Brokeback has become a “date movie”: exit polls indicate that the longer the movie remains in a city, the number of women attending with their boyfriends goes up dramatically. (An editor of a relationship magazine, trying to explain this phenomenon, has surmised, “The coffee dates after this movie surely are filled with intense conversations that get into areas of vulnerability, and women love that in a man.”) Needless to say, the movie has become a staple of late-night TV humor. (On Dec. 13 David Letterman’s “Top 10” list consisted of “Signs You Are a Gay Cowboy”: 10. Your saddle is Versace. 9. Instead of Home on the Range, you sing It’s Raining Men. 8. You enjoy ridin’, ropin’, and redecoratin’. 7. Sold your livestock to buy tickets to Mamma Mia! 6. After watching reruns of Gunsmoke, you have to take a cold shower. 5. Native Americans refer to you as Dances With Men. 4. You’ve been lassooed more times than most steers. 3. You’re wearing chaps, yet your “ranch” is in Chelsea. 2. Instead of a saloon, you prefer a salon. 1. You love riding, but you don’t have a horse.
And Jay Leno has joked that, following Elton John’s marriage – technically, his same-sex union with his life partner – the new couple will “honeymoon on Brokeback Mountain.”) The homophobic discomfort that some “straight” men have with the movie has itself become the butt of jokes. Larry David, the co-creator of Seinfeld and star of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, wrote a hilarious, tongue-in-cheek op-ed in the New York Times in which he declared his determination not to see Brokeback Mountain: “Hey, I have gay acquaintances. I’m for gay marriage, gay divorce, gay this and gay that. I just don’t want to watch two men, alone on the prairie, fall in love and kiss and hug and hold hands and whatnot. That’s all. Is that so terrible? Does that mean I’m homophobic? And if I am, well, then that’s too bad. You can call me any name you want, but I’m still not going to that movie.”
Then he explained: “I’m a susceptible person, easily influenced – a natural-born follower with no sales resistance. . . My wife won’t let me watch infomercials, because of all the junk I’ve ordered that’s piled up in the garage. . . . So who’s to say I won’t become enamored with the whole gay business? Let’s face it: There is some appeal there.”
Asking, “If two cowboys – male icons who are 100 percent all-man – can succumb, what chance do I have, a half- to a quarter of a man, depending on whom I’m with?” he then concluded – with a nod to a classic line from Seinfeld – “Not that there’s anything wrong with it.” And as a columnist in my local newspaper noted, “Most men who say they’d be repulsed by Brokeback can sit for hours in front of the tube fixated on guys in tight pants grabbing and jumping on one another while chasing a football. They don’t squirm during the hugging and butt-slapping that follow a great play. . . . That’s different, they say. It’s just guys being guys.” (Andrew Sterling, “`Macho’ men missing out on moving film,” Columbus Dispatch, Jan. 12, 2006.) Brokeback Mountain won four Golden Globe awards: Best Picture (Drama), Director (Ang Lee), Screenplay (Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, for their adaptation of Annie Proulx’s story), and Original Song (“A Love that Will Never Grow Old”). On January 28 it won director Ang Lee top honors at the Directors Guild of America (DGA) awards – an award that makes both Ang Lee and the film solid front-runners for the Oscars. (In the DGA’s 57-year history, the director who won the DGA took best-director honors at the Oscars 51 times. And over the past 35 years, the winning movie went on to take the best-picture Academy Award 30 times.) The movie has eight Academy Award nominations, including, in addition to Best Picture and Director, Actor (Heath Ledger), Supporting Actor (Jake Gyllenhaal), and Supporting Actress (Michelle Williams). The movie deserves all the honors it has received and will receive.
“Munich”: Steven Spielberg’s Moral Relativist Propaganda Piece
Munich, on the other hand, is every bit as bad as its most negative reviewers have maintained. As a movie, it may tell a compelling story; but as a “message movie” with a horrible moral message, it is rather disgusting. One might expect a film titled Munich to focus on the event cited in its title – the brutal kidnapping and murder of members of the Israeli Olympics team at the 1972 Summer Games in Munich, Germany, by a group of Palestinian terrorists of the Black September terror cell – but instead Spielberg’s film deals with the aftermath of that horrible crime: its focus is on a squad of five Israeli foot soldiers, led by Avner (Eric Bana), who are sent to Europe under orders by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, to track down the members of Black September who got away, and to kill them. As Suzanne Fields nicely summed up the plot in her Jan. 9 Washington Times review: “The Israeli avengers start out as tough, cold warriors doing what’s right for their country. Like the American soldiers dispatched to save Private Ryan, they can kill up close, looking their victims in the eye, dispatching evil men who intend to kill again. . . . But Mr. Spielberg can’t resist bringing into admiring focus the stereotypical guilt-ridden, agonizing Jew, willing to conspire in his own destruction, the stereotype whom the Israelis long ago replaced. He turns the resolute idealistic Israeli leader of the squad of avengers into a vulnerable, hesitant, self-questioning Hamlet . . . .”
Thus, when one of the Palestinian terrorists, carrying a bag of groceries, is confronted in the lobby of his old Italian apartment building, the protagonist, Avner (Bana), fumbles for his gun before shooting the unarmed man. Avner eventually concludes that killing terrorists is wrong: that it constitutes mere vengeance, perpetuating the cycle of violence. He tells his Mossad handler, Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), that “We should have brought them back to Israel for trial, like Eichmann.” In presenting their dual messages of moral relativism and pacificism, Spielberg and his screenwriter (leftist playwright Tony “Angels in America” Kusher ) intentionally distort history. The movie shows Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen) authorizing the Israeli response to the Munich massacre with a line prominently featured in the film’s promotional materials: “Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.” As Michael Medved points out in his review of the movie, “Meir never made such a statement because she explicitly viewed striking back at terror as upholding – not compromising – civilized values.” The primary purpose of the undercover hit squads sent out against the Black September terrorist cell was not vengeance, or punishment, but rather protection. A week after the Munich massacre, on Sept. 12, 1972, Meir told the Israeli Knesset, “We have no choice but to strike at the terrorist organizations wherever we can reach them. That is our obligation to ourselves and to peace.” And the leader of the hard-line opposition, Menachem Begin, spoke more directly of the need for “a prolonged, open-ended assault against the murderers and their bases. . . . We need to run these criminals and murderers off the face of the earth, to render them fearful, no longer able to initiate violence.” This is the crucial historical context that Spielberg and Kushner ignore, Medved maintains. “The filmmakers remain so focused on their violence-begets-violence formula, they suggest that Israeli killing of Black September leaders produced even more brutal reactions.” The historical record, however, shows that tough responses to terrorist provocation sharply reduces violence: in Striking Back, a new book about the real Israeli reaction to Munich by Aaron Klein (of Time’s Jerusalem bureau), the author reports that the pursuit of terrorists after 1972 led to dramatic declines in attacks on Israelis. (Medved, “`Munich’ distorts history,” USA Today, Jan. 11, 2006.) One of the hardest-hitting critiques of Munich was written by Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, reviewing the film for Jewish World Review. “The film is powerful,” he writes, “in the hollow way that many of Spielberg’s films are powerful. . . . The real surprise of Munich is how tedious it is. For long stretches it feels like The Untouchables with eleven Capones.” He then identifies the source of this tedium in the Spielberg’s and Kushner’s mixed-up moral relativism: “[F]or all its vanity about its own courage, the film is afraid of itself. It is soaked in the sweat of its idea of evenhandedness. Palestinians murder, Isrealis murder. Palestinians show evidence of a conscience, Israelis show evidence of a conscience. Palestinians suppress their scruples, Israelis suppress their scruples. Palestinians make little speeches about home and blood and soil, Israeli’s make little speeches about home and blood and soil. Palestinians kill innocents, Isrealis kill innocents.”
With all these analogies looking “ominously like the sin of equivalence,” Wieseltier notes, “it is worth pointing out that the death of innocents was an Israeli mistake but a Palestinian objective.” Palestinians kill innocents in their war to destroy the Israeli state – and who could be more innocent than athletes competing at the Olympic Games (especially as the recent Winter Games in Torino, Italy again have reminded us of the modern Olympics’ ideal of peaceful competition in athletics displacing, at least temporarily, violence and war – underscoring how truly despicable were the crimes committed in Munich in 1972). Israelis, on the other hand, kill in self-defense (although, as Wieseltier concedes, “the justice of Israel’s defense of itself should not be confused with the rightness of everything that it does in self-defense”). As presented in Munich, however, there are only two kinds of Israelis: “cruel Israelis with remorse and cruel Israelis without remorse.” All this is consistent with Tony Kushner’s view that Zionism was “not the right answer” and that the creation of Israel was “a mistake.” In response to Kushner’s comment that “creating a state means fucking people over,” Wieseltier suggests that if he really seeks to understand Middle East terrorism, “he might ponder the extent to which statelessness, too, can mean fucking people over.” No, Kushner is not an anti-Semite nor a self-hating Jew, he adds; rather, like Spielberg, “he is just a perfectly doctrinaire progressive.” (“The Case Against Munich,” Jewish World Review, Dec. 12, 2005.) But Munich isn’t just a parable about Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from the point of view of Hollywood “progressives”; it’s also a rather heavy-handed commentary on the foreign policy of the Bush administration. Spielberg himself has described Munich as a “prayer for peace.” In a recent interview, the director spoke proudly about the way his film “has already sparked off discussion in the USA about the Middle East and about the methods used today in the `war on terrorism’ declared by George W. Bush,” such as the dehumanization of terrorists. This explains not only the movie’s attempts to “humanize” the Palestinians by stressing their ordinariness but also the controversial closing shot of the film – in which the camera, following Avner walking with the New York City skyline behind him, slowly pans away to put the World Trade Center towers in center-frame – which clearly was meant to suggest that just as Israeli violence begets violence, the violent American response to September 11 will only beget violence. (Even an admirer of the film – a critic who considers Munich “the best picture of the year” – admits that the final shot was unnecessarily heavy-handed: “Spielberg is always underlining points that would be more powerful without his help.” (Erik Lundegaard, “Defending Munich,” MSNBC online, Jan. 31, 2006)) Spielberg’s and Kushner’s facile pacifism can be compared with Neville Chamberlain’s infamous comment about “peace in our time,” which he claimed to have achieved, upon his return to Britain following his conference with Adolph Hitler at (of all places!) Munich, in 1938. (In fact, Chamberlain’s compromise with Hitler really amounted to Britain’s capitulation to Germany’s seizure of Czechoslovakia – in other words, appeasement of evil.) That false hope was, as Suzanne Fields notes, “one of history’s most breathtaking moments of naivete bordering on simple-mindedness” – just as Spielberg’s film illustrates a kind of “politically correct piety” that is the moral equivalence of Chamberlain’s appeasement. (Fields, “Hollywood’s `history’ of Munich,” Washington Times, Jan. 9.) And this naïve view typifies Hollywood’s leftist elite. As Michael Medved concluded in his Jan. 11 USA Today op-ed piece, “The readiness to embrace a leftist message movie such as Munich – with its implicit critique of the Bush administration’s harsh, violent response to terrorism – indicates that it’s utopian liberalism . . . [that] represents the reigning faith of the entertainment elite.” Reacting to critics of the film – including critics from the Jewish community, like Leon Wieseltier – Spielberg recently noted, “So many fundamentalist in my own community . . . have grown very angry at me for allowing the Palestinians simply to have dialogue and for allowing Tony Kushner to be the author of that dialogue.” In response to this “self-pitying” comment, Wieseltier, writing on Feb. 2 in the New Republic Online, concludes that Spielberg’s “outburst” confirms that “he is an intellectually confused individual, and that his confusion, like his cinematic work, is standard-issue Hollywood.” If the movie should happen to win the Best Picture Oscar on Sunday, that will (as Medved has noted) reveal more about the nature of Hollywood than it will about the movie.
| Link to this Entry | Posted Thursday, March 2, 2006 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
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