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Jennis.x
Why 'Brokeback' strikes a chord
Lauri Githens Hatch
Staff writer
(March 2, 2006) — Three times I saw Brokeback Mountain: Once to see it; once to take two teen stepdaughters to see it; and once to watch everyone around me see it.
And when the lights came up for the third time, to reveal for the third time faces of all ages and races streaked with tears, then I knew.
This movie isn't about the life-defining sexual relationship that two men didn't get to keep.
This is about the life-defining love that none of us got to keep.
We've been focusing on the wrong body part, folks. This film ends focusing on two entwined shirts because of the organ that rests just beneath them — the human heart, and the space in it that each of us reserves for our own love that never grows old.
You know the one. The person you weren't looking for and, God knows, weren't prepared for, but who found you nonetheless, reached in and rearranged the inner workings of your heart, transforming you — over years or maybe overnight — from girl to woman or boy to man.
And right now, that is the love that dare not speak its name.
Why? Because after dating for as long as we do, and dating as many people as we do, and marrying as late as we do, there's no excuse for not getting it right when we finally do pair off. There's no excuse for lingering feelings. They're not just uncool, they're downright unseemly. They bespeak mess, emotional complexities and the mysterious many-chambered mansion that is the human heart — the thing we like to believe we can control like an internal iPod: Download and add this person, delete those. Ping. Gone.
Except some loves never really do go. And what does it take to bring yours back to you? The purplish sky at dusk? The scent of an autumn night? For thousands, it is this movie.
It is almost impossible to see it and not feel some internal door that you've kept carefully closed for years suddenly bang open, and then blowing through your life again is all of it: Your meeting. Your discovery. The years between you. The tears between you. And then, ultimately, the truth you both knew like you knew your names: Right person, wrong time. To paraphrase Stephen Sondheim: You should have belonged together. But you did not belong together.
Perhaps a war got in your way. Or parents. Or religion. Or geography. Or simply diverging paths that you each chose to follow, only to turn around at the end and find the other gone.
Of course, whether it's a blessing or a curse, modern life makes it easy for us to partly retrieve what was lost — to find these people so indelibly ingrained in us. In a café, at work, in the dark of a quiet house late at night, we can tap computer keys, search and find. Sending an electronic hello isn't necessary — sometimes it's enough just to know they're alive.
Never for a moment would we give up the lives we've painstakingly carved out since them.
But never for a moment either would we — can we — give up that Jack, that Ennis, that defining love that molded us as surely as our childhoods.
Maybe we have children to mark that time together. Maybe a picture. Maybe nothing at all tangible. But deep inside, we all have a closet. And in it rests a shirt; and the memory of the person who filled it; and of the person you were, with them.
Brokeback Mountain makes you realize the beauty and sheer wonder of ever getting to feel that way at all; some never do.
But it also makes you realize that years down the road there may come a moment — not courtesy of a postcard, but of an Internet search engine — when James Taylor's lyric will prove wrong:
You always thought that you'd see them, baby, one more time again. But you never did. And now you never will.
And then that closet — its shirt and its memories — will be all that any of us have left. Yet for all the pain, we wouldn't have missed that person, not a single bit of them, for the world.
And that, I think, is why after two hours and 14 minutes, Brokeback Mountain finds us, gay and straight, male and female, young and old, in our seats with eyes closed and streaming, and heart constricting, as undone as we were a lifetime ago when we first laid eyes on them, and undone once again.
Some loves, it turns out, are forever.
LGITHENS@DemocratandChronicle.com
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