Brokeback, the movie and more

"If you don't find yourself heartrendingly swept after watching the Brokeback, you gotta watch it again or accept you're numb." That's the comment from my friend Lynn, who's completely straight, yet is perfectly empathetic with the characters, and is, therefore, enamored with the whole story.

Gay romance of cowboys in the 70's Wyoming - the tag along makes an eye-opener, not to mention the "Golden" nods and the Academy favors it gains. After being accused of "heart of a stone" for not draining my last drop of tear at the "beauty-beast-bound" (or "King Kong" as known to a wider audience), I pinned my hope on the Brokeback to defend against my friends' accusation of my lack of ability to appreciate less-ordinary-love. Unfortunately, it took me two hours and a quarter, only to confirm that their verbal charge was well-founded.

Indeed, there IS some appeal in the movie: the views are, after all, spectacular; the hetero-playing-homo efforts are professional and admirable; and the scene in which Ennis inhales the scent of their secret love token preserved in Jack's closet does engrave on every audience (heart-of-whatever-material) the grief of loss. Other than this, however, the movie didn't hit me with much majestic depth as I anticipated, or I'm simply too "numb" to feel it as Lynn suggested. There is no complexity of story, only conflict of emotion between what men want at heart and what they need at home (as social convention allows).

The homo-phobic era has long gone. Although I still hear straight guys claiming "you'll need to DRAG to see me in the theatre", the movie proves to be a great success even without those reluctant votes - so successful that it has crawled out of it screenland and crept into the area of the humanities. Take, for example, the linguistics (which's supposed to be the only area I have some knowledge of): the popularity of the movie seems to have made the word "brokeback" a near-synonym for "gay", with a sense of euphemistic subtlety though.

For example, if you heard a man saying "He got a Hummer", which one would you expect to be the next line?

A. "Oh, that's so brokeback!"
B. "And people actually thought he was brokeback?!"

In the above case, the word is used in reference to things that are so exaggeratedly masculine as to call into question the sexuality of the man involved. Thus a man driving a minivan wouldn't be brokeback, but a man driving a Hummer would be.

The movie may have lost at the Oscars, but it's winning the battle of spawning irritating yet irresistible neologisms.

... ... ... ...

original post on blog: http://wiiching.blogspot.com/2006/02/brokeback-movie-and-more.html