Can movies change our minds?

NEAR THE end of "Brokeback Mountain," the film widely touted as a breakthrough gay romance for straight audiences, the wife of one of the lovers tells her husband as he is leaving for one of his "fishing trips" that Brokeback Mountain is his pretend place. Movies specialize in such private fantasies, but they are also expert in using the arts of pretending to criticize -- in the hope of changing -- reality. "Brokeback Mountain" represents this kind of make-believe.

Movies can envision the need for social change, but it is unclear that they can help bring it about. They are better at pointing the way to a different, happier, more fulfilling life. Not the least interesting thing about the hopeless love dramatized in "Brokeback Mountain," which garnered eight Oscar nominations last week, is how many social hopes it has inspired. Ang Lee, after winning the award as best director at the Golden Globes, hailed "the power of movies to change the way we're thinking," although he later thought it advisable to wait to "see how it plays out."

So far, "Brokeback Mountain" plays out as a love story that has ignited the cultural equivalent of a range war. Typical of conservative salvos is Don Feder's denunciation of the film as one of Hollywood's "agitprop epics" that he lambastes for being "anti-American ... religion adverse and into moral relevancy." Frank Rich pronounced the film "a landmark in the troubled history of America's relationship to homosexuality," and he exuberantly declared that it "is not leading a revolution but ratifying one, fleshing out -- quite literally -- what most Americans now believe."

But what Americans believe may not be the same as what Americans want to see fleshed out. When recently asked whether he had seen "Brokeback Mountain," President Bush, without disclosing his reasons, reported that he hadn't. He then amiably added, "I hope you go back to the ranch and the farm ... " (without elaborating what we were free to do once we got there).

Movies can take on the great social problems of their time, but they may be the least effective -- or appropriate -- medium for solving them. Did "Gentleman's Agreement" mark the beginning of the end of anti-Semitism in America? Did "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" make it easier for interracial couples to marry? Did "Wall Street" help unseat the captains of industry and discredit their doctrine of "greed is good"? Name any "problem film" -- whether it deals with discrimination (racial, ethnic, sexual or religious), social reform (of schools, prisons, legislatures) or corporate corruption (national or global) -- and you will come up with the same unimpressive results. The more designs a movie has on us, the less willing we are to change our minds, much less our social and business practices.