Conversely, watching the slower, quieter, heartbreaking Brokeback Mountain, I didn't think of any pop song metaphors. I didn't chuckle to myself at the thought of some light-hearted moment. I didn't walk away with a sense that the protagonists were going to succeed despite their obstacles. I could barely speak, because what I walked away with was sadness, longing and, most importantly, anger.

It made me angry to watch these two otherwise decent men screw up their lives and the lives of the women who loved them.

It made me angry that they were barely even making these choices but doing what they were basically forced to do to survive in an unforgiving environment.

It made me angry that they weren't given the ability to know what they were feeling, and even angier to know that deep down inside they knew exactly what they were feeling but couldn't put it into words because that meant abandonment, shame and even death.

It made me angry that we watched this movie over Christmas break in a theater filled with loud cell phones and giggling teenagers who laughed at all the wrong places and swooned over Jake Gyllenhaal as if the movie were a two-hour Tiger Beat ad.

And it made me angry to know that despite all the PR claiming this movie will "change minds" that, despite how great the movie really is, if you made a bunch of extremely conservative, homophobic assholes watch it, the final scene would fade to black and they would say out loud, "Well, they got what they deserve," because even though we'd like to think that we're so different than the narrow-minded mentality of the conservative, rural 1960s, most of this country isn't so different at all, even as we near 2006.

Article Author: Don Baiocchi

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