Cowboys in Love

"All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," writes Leo Tolstoy in the opening line of his saga of thwarted passion, Anna Karenina. All great love stories too are unhappy, but each in their own way.

Brokeback Mountainis a tragic love story of epic proportions. The passion shared by Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), grabs hold of the young men on a lonely mountain-side one summer and never lets go, marking them for a lifetime of sorrow and yearning that is the inevitable reward of true love. This is the stuff of Anna Karenina, Romeo and Juliet, Abelard and Heloise.

Brokeback Mountainis just the latest iteration of a narrative of tragic love that has gripped the Western imagination ever since troubadours in medieval France began to sing the legend of Tristan and Iseult. In one of the definitive books on the history of romance, Love in the Western World, Swiss philosopher Denis de Rougemont wrote:

Love and death, a fatal love -- in these phrases is summed up … whatever is universally moving in European literature, alike as regards the oldest legends and sweetest songs. Happy love has no history. Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself.

A love affair between two hard-bitten cowboys set in Wyoming back in 1963 (or for that matter, today) meets all three criteria. Like star-crossed lovers through history, Jack and Ennis pursue a love forbidden by Church and Law, consummating their fevered desire in isolated mountain meadows, seedy motel rooms, with the knowledge that it may literally kill them. As it did Earl, the old cowboy a nine-year old Ennis sees lying dead in an irrigation ditch: "They'd took a tire iron to him. Spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp."

This is love as affliction, a madness that defies human reason and self-control -- "There's no reins on this one," says Ennis -- wreaking havoc and misery in their own lives and those closest to them. It is as great a tragedy for their bewildered wives, who too followed their hearts only to find themselves tied to unhappy, distant strangers unable or unwilling to love them. "I wish I knew how to quit you," says an older Jack, saddened by a passion that in twenty years has given him little more than fleeting moments of happiness over a near-lifetime of solitary yearning.

Epic love stories have always been the stuff of great Hollywood movies, and the movie's PR machine is selling Brokeback Mountainas just that, doing its best to play down the fact that this particular version involves two penises. Ledger told Time magazine, "I don't think Ennis could be labeled as gay. Without Jack Twist, I don't know that he ever would have come out. I think the whole point was that it was two souls that fell in love with each other." His co-star Gyllenhaal also did his bit (though with far less eloquence) in an interview with ABC Australia: "Like, these aren't, in my belief, these aren't two, like gay guys. These are two people who fall in love."

"This is not a gay cowboy movie," he asserted again while walking the red carpet at the movie's premiere.

But herein lies the irony: only a "gay cowboy movie" can meet the literary requirements of grand passion in 21st century America. As Rougement explains, love is only as immense as the barriers that prevent its fulfillment: Unless the course of love is being hindered there is no 'romance;' and it is romance that we revel in -- that is to say, the self-consciousness, intensity, variations, and delays of passion -- not its sudden flaring. Passionate love at once shared and fought against, anxious for a happiness it rejects, and magnified in its own disaster -- unhappy mutual love.