Brokeback Backlash?

Last week during a class discussion of Annie Proulx, I took the opportunity to read the following response paper on Brokeback Mountain (see below). Last night, when a student who was absent asked what she had missed people told her gay stuff, lots of gay stuff. Then they went on to say how being gay is cool and hip and everyone is doing it. It was all for my benefit and maybe funny for a second (maybe?), and then I finally told them to stop being ignorant. For those of you at home dying to know how I spend my time, here is the gay manifesto (not) that took over the entire four hour class and started a week ling riot in the brains of my classmates:


November 23, 2008
Laura Campagna
Reading Experience
Brokeback Mountain
I Wish I Could Quit You, Annie Proulx

Gay and transgender characters of the page or silver screen have a tendency to be murdered. When Brokeback Mountain came out, some of the queer community critiqued the wholesale embrace and public lauding of a story in which the gay protagonists end up lonely and miserable or dead. “This is progress?” people asked. 'No,' I thought, 'This is America.' When I told my friends I was reading Brokeback Mountain for class, several people asked me how Jack really dies. There was ambiguity in the film, was it a hate crime or an accident? I had read the story before, but honestly couldn't remember. I was in the accident camp; Ennis needed to believe it was murder because that was the only way he could live with the choice he had made. The choice to live without love. “I hear it's really clear in the book,” my friend said. But I've just finished the story for the second time, and it's still not clear to me. Is it my own stubbornness? Maybe I've had enough of real and fictionalized queer people dying in the Mid-West stories. I'll take the unlucky accident, thank you very much.

What is really going on? Is it just another slight of hand by Anne Proulx whose abstruse and precise writing I love to hate? The story is told in the third person and the tire iron theory is exclusively Ennis' nightmare. According to the information provided by Jack's wife, Lureen, he was killed while changing a tire on a back road. That situation does sound a little fishy, but how would the murders fake a tire explosion? The narrator gives us no reason to suspect she's lying about that detail. Ennis feels her voice is cold, but that could have been his own projected guilt. When Lureen tells Ennis that Jack drowned in his own blood he thinks to himself that they got him with the tire iron. He goes to visit Jack's family and his dad tells him that Jack was always promising to bring Ennis up to the ranch, but after their fight he started talking about a new fella. The information about someone else in Texas confirms to Ennis that it was the tire iron. However, that sentence read as free indirect discourse to me, more like the narrator reporting on Ennis' thoughts rather than a fact of the story. In the final section, we are told that Jack appears to Ennis in dreams; young as they were on Brokeback Mountain and sometimes eating a can of beans with a spoon. That the spoon handle morphs into a tire iron could be seen as further proof of the murder or just a haunting part of the dream.

I think Proulx leaves it deliberately vague because in the last sentence we are told that: “there was an open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe...” What Ennis knows is that Jack is dead and that men get killed for living with other men. He believes in the tire iron, but whether this is PTSD paranoia or what he tells says to be able to sleep at night, we'll never know. It's like trying to fetter out the happening truth of a fictionalized story when I think its clear that Proulx is much more interested in story truth. By refusing to confirm for the reader, she leaves space for Ennis' emotional truth to live which I think O'Brien would approve of. In the end, it doesn't matter how Jack actually died because the threat was real for Ennis, so Proulx makes sure we know how it feels to live with those consequences.