heartbreak mountain

Well, how did you think it was going to end?

As we all know by now, Brokeback Mountain lost to Crash in the final award of the evening. I guess what made it so shocking was that there was no buildup. Matt Dillon didn't win or anything like that. Brokeback won all the awards that I expected it to win and then, just when everyone was getting sick and tired of the whole ceremony and was glad that everything was over, Jack Nicholson said the word "crash." And that's what it felt like, a car wreck. I never expected to care this much.

I had my reservations about Brokeback; as a film, I think it went off course towards the end and failed to sustain the really very powerful emotional impact of the movie's first two-thirds. It is not quite, in other words, one of the great Hollywood weepies. But it is in many, many respects a very fine piece of filmmaking. Crash, however, in my humble estimation, doesn't have an ounce of art in it.

It deals self-righteously with Issues of Race with about the same level of depth as a Lifetime TV-movie. I fail to see a single insight that it offers the viewer beyond banalities along the lines of "Not all racists are bad people. Some good people are racist" etc. When one thinks back to an impassioned, inflammatory and yet deeply humane movie like Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (which was made seventeen years ago!!), you have to ask yourself has the national conversation on race advanced at all if Crash is the kind of thing that people say pushes boundaries? We ought to remember, though, that the same Academy which honored that film last night also saw fit to include the 2004 Diane Keaton vehicle Something's Gotta Give in a montage (along with Do the Right Thing!!) commemorating films that addressed "controversial issues." I'm sorry? What "issue" does Something's Gotta Give address? Menopause? The dilemma of Botoxing???

Normally, I am neither surprised nor upset by the Academy's obtuseness (A Beautiful Mind's victory taught me, in fact, to expect it), but this turn of events caught me off guard. Perhaps it was because Brokeback had not only won every single critics award and every single industry precursor from the Golden Globe to the Directors' and Producers' Guild Prizes but was also the highest grossing of all five Best Picture nominees. In addition, it was not an "issue film," as I wrote before, but a sentimental tear-jerker that seemed, to me at least, emotionally accessible to a wide audience. All of these reasons seemed to indicate not only to me but to virtually every Oscar prognosticator (except Roger Ebert) that Brokeback was golden.

The shock of the loss was not dissimilar to the feeling that grew upon us slowly over that long night of Nov. 2, 2004 as we all owned up to the fact that John Kerry never had a chance at being elected President. And just as pundits then chalked up that loss to the "values vote," to the idea that Red Staters could never accept gay marriage, the immediate response to this Oscar selection was that it was inherently homophobic (a smattering of responses can be found here). I don't think that homophobia explains why Bush won (Kerry was a crappy candidate with no interesting message, we just all pretended he wasn't), but I am inclined to say that there is some kind of internalized homophobia at play.

Objective as I try to be, I find it hard to believe that a significant majority of Academy voters actually felt Crash was all that good. In other words, I think they voted for it because it wasn't Brokeback. But why? Do Academy voters have trouble with gay people? Probably not in their real lives, I suspect. But I think they think their audience might. In other words, they're worried about being as "out of touch" as George Clooney praised them for being last night. They were worried that the choice of Brokeback wouldn't play in the heartland; they were afraid to blaze a trail where they felt the mainstream audience was not going to follow.

It's no wonder that Brokeback broke, what with all the pressure that was heaped upon it by the media, pressure for it to be a crossover movie that proved our tolerance for gay relationships, pressure to be the movie that embodied our cultural zeitgeist. It's no wonder voters got sick of that -- the movie wasn't just a movie anymore.

Unfortunately, the result follows the familiar outlines of so many painful gay relationships themselves, outlines that Brokeback Mountain itself illuminates. The Academy flirted with Brokeback, flirted with the idea of acknowledging their unspoken belief in the dignity of people to choose whom to love. But they couldn't make that final definitive profession; like Ennis himself, they couldn't come to terms with their desires. How else could this picture possibly have ended?

Brokeback Mountain is an austere and painful film, a movie about love that is repressed, hidden, truncated, never allowed a chance to flower. It comes to us from Ang Lee, a noted poet of self-abnegation and it seems fitting that, even after he was finally rewarded individually, his work was dismissed. If Mr. Lee in real life is anything like the directorial persona that comes across in his films, I doubt that he was that surprised by the outcome. He's told us before that life is pain and self-sacrifice, with very little reward. He doesn't expect happy endings (Sense and Sensibility is a notable exception; one senses that Lee himself would have jumped off the waterfall with Ziyi Zhang in Crouching Tiger).

Which leads me to think that maybe it's OK that Brokeback was denied; so was Jack Twist after all, denied by the one he loved. There's something fitting about it, something right in line with the movie's own wallowing in bathos. The real question is when we'll see a movie about two gay men who can speak to one another about their love and share it with the world. I think that day is a long way off...

That should be the end, but I can't be too downbeat. Cate Blanchett never showed, but something even better happened. If you look at my predictions in the previous post you'll see that I got 18 out of 24 -- certainly respectable, but not as well as I'd have hoped. BUT.... it's exactly the same score that my boyfriend got! Yes, S and I were spared the painful predicament of one of us beating out the other. It was a beautiful, mutually supportive tie.

Maybe there is hope for same-sex couples after all.