the week in reviews

[radfrac_archive_full]

Monday I had late latkes with the ex-co-con and his fella. No way for that not to be good. Ate enormous amounts of potatoes and homemade apple and pear sauce. Their house is a small Earth Ark, with spaceship-shaped wood stove and everything. The Left Shoulder Cat recently had to be shaved because he was so matted. He's a Maine Coon, so it was bizarre to see him look so small.

There's a bird (I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name, sir) who lives in the living room, and he made evocative little bird comments throughout the evening.

Tuesday... yeah, I've got nothing. But...

Wednesday was a day. I was conflicted between going to the regular Gay Men Read Books!(tm) meeting, or seeing Brokeback Mountain with a group that Captain was organizing. Then the facilitator of GMRB!(tm) wrote to ask if we could postpone, and my strife was neatly resolved.

I immediately went out and bought some more strife. I'd hate to run out. I went to Brokeback Mountain, where I entirely failed to locate Captain or the group. There were certainly many gay or gay-like men there, but I couldn't determine which was the official clique, so in the end I just found a good seat and didn't worry about it.

Brokeback Mountain

I liked it. I like it more, now, in retrospect, than I did right after I watched it. In no particular order, here are some of its attributes:

a) Beautifully filmed. Ang Lee, natch. I thought "So that's why people live in Wyoming. I mean Alberta."

b) (in my opinion) a pretty good evocation of the physicalization of desire/repression between men.

I thought Heath Ledger was pretty great, and I am no particular fan of his work in A Knight's Tale. His embodiment of Ennis was remarkable. The way he used his hands and arms to make one gesture at once a defensive shield, a choked striking-out, and a caress -- damn.

Yes, it did seem a little 'directed' rather than completely natural to the actor. But not more so than in a thousand other movies. I don't see how you can call his portrayal 'stiff' in the negative sense when you've seen the scene with him crouched under the bridge.

c) I loved that. I loved that instead of the usual 'two-ostensibly-straight-men-fall-for-each-other' dynamic, in which the Obviously Gay one essentially harasses the Pretty Much Straight one throughout the film and probably gets murdered at the end for being so creepy, Ennis was clearly as drawn to Jack as vice versa.

d) In fact, although it's fair to criticize this movie for re-enacting the stereotype of the Doomed Queer, it also does some subtle things within that framework. They don't quite transform it, but they make the movie worthy of consideration.

For example, Ennis, the More Manly, does withdraw from Jack as the affair wears on, but not because he doesn't desire him -- because the way he's constructed his life, out of reflexive fear and denial, means that he is gradually shutting down to all intimacy.

His withdrawal is consistent with the one-sided cliche of the queer love story* (and lots of Gay Cinema is as guilty of this as the mainstream stuff, because apparently we're all still obsessed with that guy in high school), but it's for a much truer emotional reason.

That's why I read the final scene with his daughter as an emotional victory for him. He's learnt to risk reaching out. That his gesture is probably also a huge economic loss is a brilliant cruelty of the story. Even a huge personal effort is ruinous.

Same with the

SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT

death. It also fits the pattern of doom. But surely what it means in this case is not so much 'if you're queer, even if you aren't murdered, you will inexplicably die horribly,' but, 'you can lose someone no matter what you sacrifice for safety, so you might as well grab your chance for happiness when it comes.'

e) depictions of amusing hair, cars, and fashion via recreations of decades past. By circa 1983 everyone was pretty nasty-looking.

f) Speaking of everyone, the supporting characters and cast were pretty wonderful. I wish I'd gotten to see a little bit more of them than I did, because they really enriched the movie, and just one notch more ensemble-ing would have made this into something larger and potentially great, a sort of period piece about love and loss, instead of a single pretty good story.

I liked that Ennis' daughters still loved him. I liked the depiction of the men's married lives. I liked that Ennis was the one who got divorced and Jack was the one sort of making it work. And the one with a son. The story sets him up as the weak/feminine one, so it was nice to see that messed with. As I say, all through, the movie both plays out and quietly messes with its tropes.

This may be because of the unusual emotional involvement of this particular audience, but when Jack finally shouts down his father-in-law, we broke into a spontaneous round of applause. You hardly ever see that in movie theatres anymore.

f) slow-moving, and a little plot-thin -- if you didn't come to see two men be in love, there really wasn't much else to think about except the scenery. That's a potential weakness of any romantic film.

g) A weak opening. watching the first interaction between the two leads, I was like, hmm, this might be kind of... bad. But it wasn't -- it was more like the movie hadn't quite found its footing.

h) melancholia a-go-go

i) understated and devastating final moment. inlandsea asked me if I cried. I didn't, not then.

I wished we'd had a minute more in darkness, before the credits rolled, to sit and think about it, because it couldn't register in me properly. It's a thing that unwinds in you slowly, until you can't believe this thing inside you, like a barbed hook you've swallowed before you noticed it, which unfolds and holds you until you feel all of its pain.

The next day, walking home past the dentist, I thought about it again, and that's when I cried.

SPOILER! ALERT!

Okay, I'm going to spoil the final line here. If you don't want to know what it was, don't read on.

I love this line. It's like a punch to the stomach, and it's all in the delivery. Talking about it ruins it, but I want to anyway because I need to praise it.

"Jack, I swear--"

And inside that: his amazement. his bemusement. That was my life? That was what became of my love? This is what I have left?

"I swear," which is such a throwaway little bit of conversation, something you put in like "eh" or "huh" just to make the talk flow, and yet here there's so much in it. And not only what you'd expect, not just regret.

That was what got to me -- his surprise. Coz that's all of us, looking at our losses thinking -- "What? Wait. This isn't what I meant at all."

And of course they're living together at last. And, hmm, I might cry again.

j) I do think that the story is a little more bleak than necessary. Ennis is only about 45 by the end of the film, and it's somewhere between 1983 and 1987, which is when it suddenly starts getting a lot easier to be queer. I know he's still in the wrong state (in many senses), but it seems like there's more hope possible than we're allotted.

*I am aware that I am doing my damndest to act out this cliche in my own life, yes.



Coming out of the movie, I saw an old friend of mine chatting up a bloke. I went over and made rabbit ears behind the bloke's head until he went away, and S. (friend) invited me out for a pint. At first I wasn't going to go, but I said I'd walk him, and then, well, it just seemed natural.

The great thing about a movie like that is you can't come out without feeling just a little bit like a cowboy. Our gestures were more expansive, our laughter deeper, our stride more Manly.

He's a tranny too, so we talked about my recent chest surgery, and recovery, and his experiences with it, the way you talk shop when you're part of a select surgical experience.

We went to hell, of course, since there was nowhere else to go, down a dingy staircase into a room that might as well have been one big urinal.

He ordered a couple of pints of Guinness for us. You need to know that he's British, so you'll know why he said "Do you have anything warmer?"

I started to laugh, and he socked me in the chest, then looked horrified at what he'd done, whereupon I started to laugh harder.

We convinced them to microwave the empty mugs so that the Guinness would warm up when we poured it in.

It was a hell of a good time. Just talking and laughing and reminiscing. Easy, obvious, but I never do it. I almost never let myself relax that much.

Anyway, around about a pint later, we decide that it would be a great idea to go into the bathroom and compare chest surgeries.

"Should we shut the door?" I suggest, prodding the doorstop with my foot.

"Nah. Hey, what you going in there for?" he chided, pushing me away from the stall.

"I just want to hang up my shirt!" We laughed merrily at our own antics.

So we took off our shirts and peered at each other and talked about revisions, contouring, the fading of scars.

"But look at all your chest hair!" he crowed, and mussed it up. We agreed that arse hair was the bane of masculine existence, and then we got dressed and went and had another pint. (Full disclosure: I am an utter lightweight, and he had to finish mine for me.)

A bit later, I went back to the bathroom for a pee. When I stepped out the door afterwards, I realized that I was facing a wall of mirrors, and that anyone standing near the dance floor could have shared in our surgical revelations.

It just seemed funny rather than horrifying, and it still does. It's amazing how much easier it is to be brave when you've got someone to be brave with.


Thursday and Friday
Thursday's a blank. Friday chromemagpie, Leirdal and I broke with tradition, and instead of my going to Leirdal's place to scam some of their nachoey goodness, we went out for Ethiopian, and then for a walk along the ocean, and thence home to Firefly -- 'Our Mrs. Reynolds' and 'Jaynestown' -- two great eps, back to back. My idea of a good Friday night.


And on Saturday I wrote it all down in my Livejournal...

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