A breakthrough called 'Brokeback'
FROM THE East Coast to the West Coast (though, admittedly, not yet a lot of places in between) everyone's talking about "Brokeback Mountain." I haven't heard such constant and pervasive chatter about a pop cultural topic since Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah's couch. Lord knows, the two phenomena having nothing in common -- "Brokeback Mountain" is a love story about two gay cowboys, and Tom Cruise is, you know, Tom Cruise.
So how has this art-house film, a "gay movie" whose target audience is ostensibly the small percentage of the population that identifies as homosexual, managed to insinuate itself into the hearts and cocktail-party conversations of so many heteros? It's that 51% of the population known as women, stupid!
Despite its vast Western landscapes, drunken cowboy talk and gay sex scenes (actually, straight sex gets far more screen time in this film), "Brokeback Mountain" is a thinking girl's chick flick with roughly the same hormonal balance (not to mention the same screenwriter) as that quintessence of high-quality estro-cinema, "Terms of Endearment."
I'm not talking about the obvious girl-friendly accouterments of the tough guy/tender heart dichotomy -- the men's skillful horsemanship, their penchant for carrying injured lambs on their laps, the way they look in jeans. I'm talking about something much more visceral.
For all their monosyllabism, Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis (Heath Ledger) are fonts of emotion. Sure, they're prone to the usual male-pattern drinking, fighting and marrying women without knowing quite what they're doing, but when it comes to their love for each other, their hearts aren't just on their sleeves, they're pinned to their foreheads.
And guess what? Chicks dig it.
It's curious to see how the Jack/ Ennis model of ideal manhood has come about just as metrosexuality -- that marketing campaign for hair gel disguised as a social trend -- is on the wane. A few years ago, men were being encouraged to access their inner woman by wearing turtlenecks and filling their apartments with "Queer Eye"-sanctioned Pier 1 furniture. As profitable as this may have been for cable-TV channels and the grooming-product industry, the result was a bumper crop of disturbingly aromatic men whose idea of expressing their feelings was to buy throw pillows.
