The Bechdel Cast - Brokeback Mountain with Matthew Tinkcom

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

This week, Jamie, Caitlin, and special guest Matthew Tinkcom wish they knew how to quit discussing Brokeback Mountain (2005)! Check out Matthew's book, 'Queer Theory and Brokeback Mountain,' as well as the new edition of his book 'Grey Gardens' -- https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/grey-gardens-9781839029295/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Start changing it with the Becadale cast. Jamie, I wish I could quit you. Caitlin, I wish I could. It's the only way it feels like I wish I could quit this podcast, but that's not even true. That's not even true. I'm thrilled to say, I like my job, you know? I love it.

I don't wish I could quit this podcast or you. That's what I meant to say. The other, the alternative was Jamie Twist, Jamie Nasty Ooh That is What a beautiful turn of phrase

Every time I hear it It hits It really gets me It hits Welcome to the Bechtel cast My name is Jamie Nasty My name is Caitlin Nasty

Doesn't quite Roll off the tongue as much But this is our show Where we examine movies Through an intersectional Feminist Lens Using the Bechdel test simply as a jumping off point.

Now, Jamie, what on earth is that? Well, it'll be an interesting discussion today. We use the Bechtel Test as a jumping off point for discussion. It was originally created by friend of the show, guest of the show, queer cartoonist, Alice in Bechtel, who originally wrote or sort of invented the Bechdel test, sometimes called the Bechdle Wallace Test. In her comics collection, Dikes to Watch out for it in the 80s,

1985 and was written in the context of, and we've talked about this recently, how there were so few first, not just women in movies that spoke to each other, but specifically queer women who spoke to each other. And the joke of the strip was that, you know, the characters would have to ship characters together because there were so infrequently canonical lesbian couples on screen. There's now many versions of it. It has sort of been adapted to a more, mainstreamified version of that. The version of the test that we use requires that two characters of a marginalized gender with names speak to each other about something other than a man for more than two lines

of dialogue. But again, this is a jumping off point for discussion. Not every movie is going to pass it. And it really is a case-to-case basis. Yeah. If Brokeback Mountain doesn't pass the Bechtel test, which who can say, we'll find out later. Yeah. It's so, I mean, it reminds me so much, Caitlin, I was wondering if you were thinking about this as well, where a couple of years ago, I think some bad faith actors weaponized the bectal test against Fire Island. And I'm like, get a life. Grow up.

You know what you're doing. Anyways, we'll talk about it. But yes, that is what it is. And today we are covering at long last, a movie that we have almost covered so many times, but it was never, it either didn't win a poll. or we didn't have quite the right guest, and the stars have aligned we are covering Brokeback Mountain 2005. We sure are. And our guest today is a professor of communications and film at Georgetown University. He's the author of books like Working Like a Homosexual, Grey Gardens, and Queer Theory in Brokeback Mountain relevant. Hello. It's Matthew Tinkum. Welcome. Thank you. It is really lovely to be here with you. I'm talking about this film. and I already have a sense of whether I may fit with the Bechdel test or not,

but I think if it fails, it fails for really great reasons, which are all the more compelling. Yes. Yes. Yes. I mean, our listeners know this at this point, but sometimes I feel like it's like when people lie to Caitlin and I at parties about having listened to the show,

they're like, right, it's the podcast where you figure out if something passes the Bechal test and therefore it's good or bad. And you're like, get a library card. And it takes us two hours each episode to figure it out. I know. It's like, what do you think we're saying? Anyways, yes, if this, I honestly, I was so locked in that I was not particularly paying attention for the Bexel test in this particular movie. But we'll talk about it.

I mean, story of my life. Yeah. Every episode. But yeah, we'll talk about that a little later. For now, Matthew, tell us about your relationship, your history with Brokeback Mountain. Sure. So a little bit of back story, literally, which is that the film, Brokeback Mountain, is based on a piece of short fiction by the writer Annie Poole. And the original, really short story, it's not even a novella, was published in 1997 in the New Yorker magazine.

And I remember just randomly finding it and reading it and being astonished at what an amazing piece of writing. it was. And Pruill was such an interesting figure. She's a famous important novelist and her attentions have been on lots of places. But this seemed kind of an anomalous, fascinating project for her to take on, which is in kind of really the space of about 30 pages of writing. She rethinks of the American West and the American Western in terms of same-sex or between these two figures, these two men and Estal Marr and Jack Twist. And the story at the time, well before the film was even sort of, you know, thought of being developed, really sort of grabbed a lot of people's attention and for a number of reasons, one of which, as I say, was she was rethinking how to write about the West.

She's sometimes identified as a kind of environmental writer. And then she was aligning it with, you know, the Western and this kind of, you know, mythological storytelling, especially in American, you know, popular culture around these kinds of heroic figures, the cowboy in the Western, which was really interesting in as much as a, you know, straight-identified cisgender woman, and what's going on with this project of taking on with All Western, and doing it in this very careful, very sensitive and loving way, which is not to dismiss or insult these characters,

these white working class men, and to think about a world in which some kind of romantic and sexual and erotic possibilities sort of are thinkable. And that what's going on is I think that it's, and this will get to, I think, our topic, which is, you know, I think it's a feminist project kind of coming in sideways towards thinking about masculinity and white working class masculinity. And as we'll talk about it in a moment when we get to the film,

I mean, there are adaptations then that happen in the movie that sort of build out from what's implied on the story, in the cruel story. So I remember reading it in 97, and this was when a particular body of sort of scholarly, philosophical and political work that we now kind of call in broader fashion queer theory was really a taking off. And so this was when I was writing my very first book, which was working like a homosexual, and thinking about the larger queerness of America. and popular culture than even had been sort of recognized and that people like, and I discussed her work at length in the queer Brokeback Mountain book, Eve Sedgwick's sort of just amazingly important scholarship and writing was really becoming influential. So it felt as if Annie Proul was kind of doing over on the literary fiction side, something that Eve Sedgwick was working

over in kind of the literary and philosophical fellow side. So that happened. The story was published in 1997, and then in the early 2000s, this rumor starts circulating, which is that there's going to be a film adaptation of it. And as the details unfolded, it got more and more exciting, which was that the kind of Chinese American filmmaker-a-li had signed up and was actually really the person who was pushing most. most of to see if this could be made into a film

and a little bit of back sort of knowledge about that. Ung Lee is one of those directors that never makes the same kind of movie twice. So, you know, this idea of much like, you know, cruel, who wouldn't be the first person you might identify with the Western, wants to do this project. And it seems like there are all these question marks over, you know, well, why? And what's his interest?

And we'll talk a little bit later when we unpack the film in more detail. But so first it was Aung Lee, and then when the cast started to be sort of discussed, the then really sort of, you know, hot emerging figures of Kate Ledger, John, Jake Ellen Hall, Michelle Williams, and Anne Hathaway for the sort of four main leads really said, ridiculous. This is an important film. This is not just some kind of niche little smaller production. and then the kind of jewel in the crown was going to be that the film was being adapted by Diana Asana and Larry McMurtry.

And especially Larry McMurtry was so associated with these kind of colossal pieces of American popular culture about the West, the big project being a lonesome cowboy. And in a certain sense, everyone was wondering, what is Larry McMurtry doing, like basically working on a Western about, as it was then called, the gay cowboy story and what's going to happen? And so there was a lot of excitement around the possibility of this film being made

because the perception was, and I agree with the perception, there's never been a film of this budgeting or stature dealing with a queer erotic in the American corporate film and that it was getting more and more interesting to think about this possibility. So when the film came out in 2005, there was a lot of anticipation. And there was also a lot of a sense of, can this thing even work? Is it going to be weird? It's going to be sanitized?

What level of nuance might it have? There's a certain variance that was attached to it. Then it turned out to be a really interesting work of art that took seriously its source material and understood the stature of what it was trying to do. which was to try to kind of assert a kind of different narrative of same-sex erotics in the face of probably the genre that's most difficult and in certain sense resistant to that, the genre being the Western. So I remember seeing the film and coming out of the cinema being astonished and then seeing it several times, just sort of wanting to really understand what was going on. And then because of the film, and the film did, by the way, extraordinarily well. I mean, it was, I think, produced for about $15 million, and it earned a global sort of box office,

but I think $180 million, which just meant this thing, was just going, yeah, like, you know, it's a worry, you know, this is a success. And what that seemed to Harold at the moment was the idea that Hollywood was now able to take on career sexualities and not be weird or squeamish about them. So then just to follow up in the last chapter is that when I was asked by an editor named Todd McGowan, it's a faculty member at the University of Vermont, if I would like to write a book in a series he was editing and the idea of his book was very similar to how you think about your podcast, which is pick a film and then find that as the doorway into a

particular intellectual topic or area. And so Todd had asked me if I wanted to write on queer theory and to think about a particular film that I thought that this would work with. And so I gave it a lot of thoughts. And although I ultimately obviously arrived at Brokeback Mountain as the film to write on, I thought about some others. And that included, you know, Todd Haynes' film Carol, the One Carrey film, In The Mode for love. But Todd's sort of response was, and I know he was right, not that I disagree, was he

was like, look, Brokeback Mountain will get people excited in a way that those other films, wonderful as they are, they're smaller, they're more niche kind of perception, whereas this thing, we won all these awards, and won Best Director for Ron Lee, won the BAFTA for Best Film, and that for a reader who wasn't be particularly sort of knowing how to approach say queer theory, the doorway of this film would be then a kind of imitation and entrance into thinking about what this body of work of queer theory is. So that's how the book came out of then that longer history. Incredible. Thank you for outlining all of that. A rich history, a broke backstory, if you will. That's right. Nice, nice. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Jamie, what about you? What's your history with this movie? Oh gosh, I will be far less articulate and say, although I had seen this movie once before. In college, I believe, is when I first saw it. I didn't see it when it came out. But I think it was because I was in seventh grade and this was a grown-up movie. Yeah. So I was still seeing whatever kids' movies. But I do remember I read the short story before I saw the movie.

I don't remember why. I think I just read it because it was at the library. It must have just been, I used to be all about the front table at the library. And so I read the collection of Annie Pruill stories that this, the Prokback Mountain appears in, which has the word Wyoming in the title. Anyways, she's an incredible writer. The short story is I reread it last week and it's still so beautiful. It is like so overwhelming and inspiring how much.

much emotion and story and interiority she fits into so little space. I have no idea. It's like a magic trick, but it's really a really beautiful short story. And then I saw the movie once and it may be so sad that I didn't return to it for for years because it was making me feel too much. But it was, I first saw it in a film history class. This would have been college. in the early 2010. So still fairly new at that time. And yeah, I'm very excited to talk about it today. I had another thought, but it has left to me. So we'll leave it at that. I'm very excited to talk more about it. And it was really a pleasure to revisit both. Oh, I was thinking, if either of you remember this, I looked for this story. I remember very strongly. It was a radio story. Maybe it was

of this American Life story. I'm not quite sure. But there was a story I heard years ago about a super fan of Brokeback Mountain who was a gay man who had read it when it first came out and then had really, like it was a whole radio story about his history with the short story and then later the film and just like how much it had affected him. And I don't know, I just, if anyone remembers hearing that radio story and is able to find it for me, I remember that story and this particular person's connection to the material almost as strongly as I remember the story itself. So just shouting that possible piece of lost media out as well.

Caitlin, what about you? I saw this movie around the time it came out. I was in college at the time. I don't think I saw it in theaters, but it would have probably been within a year of it coming out for the great Caitlin movie binge, which I always say it was of 2005, but it really started in 2004 and lasted into like 2007 and eight. So I saw it then and it was like, I mean, we'll talk about this movie's cultural legacy, of course, and then culture's response to it when it came out. But I just remember, in addition to the film itself, all of the jokes, spoofs, references that were made in pop culture for years afterward.

And so that was just like a part of the zeitgeist at the time. And then I rewatched the film and read the short story for the first time when I was in grad school because I took a film adaptation class and shout out. to my master's degree in screenwriting from Boston University that I hate to bring up and never mention. Yeah. But this is one of the films that we studied, one of the adaptations that we, you know, read the source material for and then studied the adaptation. And so I got pretty like in depth with that from an adaptation standpoint. But then I hadn't seen it since then.

So it's been a number of years since I've watched the film. and I was excited to revisit it. I forgot how just wrenching the final scene is just crying, crying, crying. But yeah, I'm excited to discuss it. Yeah. So let's take a quick break and then we'll come back for the recap. Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay.

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What a f***. It's like a way to say like, oh my friend, oh, my my brother, what are the . Look, I've never I've ever had to with nobody. Except with my

my children, my my son- Uff. Uff! That's incredible! Yeah, the telenovela. You're the only person I know that loves a yellow starburst.

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We're broke back. We're broke back. Yeah. And if you don't like that joke, buckle in because it's going to keep happening. Yeah, unfortunately. So we'll provide a content warning at the top here for violence against women and anti-queer violence. We meet Ennis Del Mar, played by Heath Ledger, and Jack Twist, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. They show up in Signal, Wyoming, looking for work.

A sheep rancher named Aguirre, played by Randy Quaid. Jump Scare. Truly did not remember him. Completely forgot Randy Quaid was in this. The Quaid lineage should be studied. And not by me. And not by us. No.

Someone should do this. had. Truly. So he hires these two men to camp on a place called Brokeback Mountain for the summer to look after his flock of sheep. Jack and Ennis get acquainted with each other. They settle into the daily life of tending to the sheep. They're camping. They're eating beans. They're dealing with bears and coyotes. Jack has to travel several miles to the like sheep grazing. area each day. And after a while, he says, you know, I spend too much time commuting. We should both sleep here at the camp together, wink. And Ennis maybe doesn't get the hint or maybe he simply ignores it because he says, oh, I don't mind switching with you. I'll go off and look after the sheep.

So they kind of switch roles. After more time, Jack gets Ennis to open up a little bit because he's a like stoic, quiet, reserved man. And they start becoming friends. And then one night, Ennis gets too drunk to head back to where the sheep are. So he has to stay at the campsite. And Jack offers to let him sleep in the tent with him. And eventually Ennis agrees. And after a short time, Jack makes a move.

Ennis is taken aback and he pushes Jack off at first. But after a few moments, the tides turn and they start having sex. The next morning, Jack tries to be like, hey, boo. But Ennis, you know, leaves in a hurry. It's awkward a bit later. They both deny being queer. And so we're not sure if anything is going to happen again because Ennis makes a reference to this being sort of like a one-off thing.

But then one day, Ennis goes into Jack's tent and they, they start kissing and snuggling and it's very tender and intimate. Then one day, the boss man Aguirre sees them in the distance. They're kind of like roughhousing with their shirts off. And he gets the sense of what is going on between them. And then a short time later, he tells Jack and Ennis to bring the sheep back down from the mountain a month earlier than they were expecting. Basically, he's like firing them.

but before they go Ennis and Jack start sort of like playfully rough housing again but then it gets too rough perhaps they resent having to leave each other and Ennis ends up with a bloody nose and he bleeds on Jack's shirt

and we'll put it and maybe his own shirt as well there's such a this I forgot what a like master class on like masculinity this this movie is repression. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And also Chekhov's shirts. We'll put a pin in those. He was always talking about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So things get physical. They're punching each other. The repression is palpable. They're about to part ways. And it seems like they'll never see each other again. After Jack leaves, Ennis has a panic attack or, you know, he's vomiting or dry heave.

Clearly he's in emotional turmoil. We cut to Ennis getting married to Alma, Alma, character played by Michelle Williams. And then a few years pass, they've had a couple daughters. I always love that they have Alma Jr. You don't see that very often. More, shout out Alma Jr.

More junior girls. Yeah, I liked that. Then meanwhile, Jack goes back to, Geary asking for work. Aguirre says, no, the subtext being like, I'm not hiring you again because I'm homophobic. So then Jack goes to Texas to try to get some rodeo work. And there he meets a woman named Lurine, played by Anne Hathaway, who I learned, auditioned for this movie while on break from Princess Diaries too, which I just find delightful.

She came in a ball gown. And. Yeah. I was like, well, what a, what a story. Princess Diaries, too, I'll say it, not the cinematic masterpiece that broke back Mattin is. Right. Yeah.

Okay, so Jack and Loreen get married, cut to they've had a baby, so a few years have passed. And in that time, Ennis and Elma are doing their best to raise their little girls. They're trying to make ends meet, but, and we'll talk about class as it relates to this movie. And generally, they're struggling. And it seems like their marriage isn't that great. Then out of the blue one day, Ennis gets a postcard from Jack, inviting him to get together with Jack and hang out. And Ennis lies and tells Alma that they were fishing buddies.

They reunite after four years of not seeing each other. They make out a little bit right in front of Ennis's house, which Alma sees. And she's shocked and upset. but plays it off like everything is fine. Ennis and Jack spend the night together. Then they go on a quote unquote fishing trip in which they never actually fish. But Jack, and he'll do this throughout the story, but he suggests that they try to make a life with one another.

He suggests that they buy and work on a ranch together. But Ennis doesn't see how that's possible. He says we can't abandon our wife and kids. and if people find out we're together, we might be killed. And then Ennis tells a story from his childhood to this effect. We can talk more about that later. So the plan becomes for them to meet up every once in a while in the privacy of the middle of nowhere on Brokeback Mountain.

Sometime later, Ennis and Alma get divorced. Jack hears about the divorce and drives up to Wyoming to see Ennis, thinking that maybe this means they can finally start a life together. Jack is such a romantic. No. But this is the one weekend of the month that Ennis gets to see his daughters. So he sends Jack away. And Jack is so disappointed and he's crying on his way back home. It's again so heart-wrenching. He goes to a town in Mexico by the border to go cruising and he picks up a man to be with for the night. It seems like he does this somewhat regularly. Then it's Thanksgiving time.

We see two separate scenes, one with Jack and his family and in-laws, and then another scene with Ennis, his daughters, Alma, and her new husband. And both scenes are quite tense. We can also talk more about those later if we would like. And then Ennis meets a woman named Cassie, played by Linda Cardalini. Also did not remember she's in this movie. No, much less. Anna Ferris, David Harbour, Kate Mara.

You're just like, so many famous people bit parts going on. So Ennis meets Cassie and they start romantically seeing each other, but he seems to be keeping her at arm's length. Meanwhile, Jack and Loreen make friends with another couple. This is the David Harbor and Anna Ferris pair. And it seems like this guy, Randall and Jack, something might be happening there. It seems like Randall is interested in Jack. He suggests they go camping together.

We never fully know what might transpire there, but there's something happening there. Then we see a couple more of Ennis and Jack's trips. Again, Jack longs to see Ennis more frequently. He wants to build a life together. Ennis thinks he's being unrealistic about that being a possibility. They argue we get the famous line of Jack saying, I wish I knew how to quit you.

You know, they're breaking down crying, and this is a goddamn bitch of an unsatisfactory situation to quote the movie again. Ennis returns home, and sometime later, he receives a returned postcard in the mail that he had sent to Jack, saying that the recipient is deceased. So Ennis calls Jack's house to see what's going on,

and Lorene tells him, that Jack died after a tire-changing mishap on the side of the road, but we see a flashback of either what really happened or what Ennis speculates might be what really happened, which is that Jack was beaten to death by a group of men who presumably found out that he was queer. Loreen tells Ennis that Jack wanted his ashes to be spread on his favorite place, broke back mountain.

So Ennis goes to Jack's parents to retrieve the ashes and carry out his dying wishes. After a tense interaction with Jack's parents, especially his like mean old son of a bitch of a father, Ennis goes into Jack's childhood bedroom where he finds

those two shirts, one belonging to Jack and one belonging to Ennis. They're tucked into each other. Yep. The idea being that Jack kept these as a memento of their relationship, and you're just like crying, crying, crying. And his clutches the shirts, he's fraught with emotion. And then he returns home.

His daughter, Alma Jr., played by Kate Mara now. She's, I think, late teens, early 20s. She pays her dad a visit to invite him to her wedding. and at first he's like a hetero wedding. I don't think I can do that. But then he's like, it's my daughter. I'll be there. And then after she leaves,

he discovers that she left her sweater behind accidentally. So he goes to put it in his closet where we get a reveal that he has hung up the shirt that he took from Jack's parents' house along with a photograph of Brokeback Mountain. Cry, cry, cry, the end. Wow. So that's the story. Let's take a quick break and we'll come back to discuss.

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What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the host of Everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. Because let's be real. Women's Sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii.

My first thought is like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we eating? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire timeline. And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week. Every week, we're breaking down the biggest. stories across women's sports. Naomi Osaka showing out. She beat Sabalinka. Shout out to you, Naomi.

You get the palm, Naomi. You get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested in what happened. We're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports. On the Iheart radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us or rather you know them. Tony and Candace, Nina and Lance, Spike. and yes, the chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast.

Each week we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea?

We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators and friends, including director Jonathan Chryssel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more.

Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song. Well, I thought he was going to write. I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Ayo rewatch on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My first guest is Paris Hilton, Shakira, Luke and Yerrin, Samira and Gracie. I'm so excited. On the bouncy bed. You have surprises? Many surprises. Welcome to Sweet 305 where the group chat comes to life. What a .

It's like a way to say like, Oh, my friend, oh, my best amina, oh my, my brother. What up? Look, never I've ever had to have to be a lot. Except with my kids. My kids, if you know. See my amante. my amant.

Oof. That's incredible. Yeah, the telenovela. You're the only person I know that loves a yellow starburst. It's lemonade. And no, there's someone. I'd like to collaborate with this person. This is Sweet 305.

Listen to Sweet 305 with Lele Pons as part of my Culture Podcast Network on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're broke back. We're in. And we are broken. after that. That was our last break, so you won't need to hear it again. Okay, there is so, so much to talk about.

I get emotional even hearing the plot described to me. Matthew, is there anywhere that you would like to jump off? Guest privilege? Well, you know, thank you for that description, and it always really helps to kind of see the narrative arc of this thing. And one of the things that's, you've remarked, about this film. I'm interested, you know, in your experience, Caitlin, in terms of, you know, studying it in terms of adaptation from this piece of fiction writing into cinema, is that a lot of

what this film is about is about languidelessness. It's about silences and misunderstanding and attribution and never clarity. And so one of the things that is so significant about it, And one of the things I do in the books, I locate sort of rules locating of it in the early 1960s, right at this moment in which it seems kind of in hindsight, we know that there's an incipient new kind of politicization of sexuality coming, both in terms of second-way feminism, but also in terms of the then, what we're called gay and lesbian and liberatory politics. And that this is kind of the threshold moment in which what we see is a world, in which there is no language per se to talk about sexuality and desire and its effect on all of these institutions, most importantly, the family. And so the Western, especially as a genre, which is full of these, you know, magnificent landscapes that are sort of empty of language and can be kind of filled in, right, in a way with these figures.

But who themselves, they don't have any way to describe what's happening to them. And so much of the films sort of then drama unfolds over the fact that there are these, you know, really sad. You know, this is, I think, you know, you've both said it, you know, it's like, this film really just never, it's a deep emotion sort of impact never really dissipates. I mean, as many times as I see the film, I always think, like, it's going to get easier and it doesn't because that languagelessness thing is about this kind of ache of wishing that these characters could find some way of telling you. each other, what's going on. And that's both between the two figures of Ennis and Jack, but it's also within their marriages. And that the fact that their marriages are these frames that sit around through

their bond with these two women, Elma and Marine, who, and this is one of the things I really respect about of the films kind of building out of their characters, because they're not huge in the source material, but that they are understood, even though they had a lot less sort of development as characters, but they're understood with a great deal of compassion as to their situation. And they are not made into villains of Jack and Emerson's desire for each other. In fact, I think especially, you know, Alma's confusion over what is essentially excluding her from

any understanding what's going on with with her husband and the ex-husband. And the Michelle Williams character or performance is just really beautiful in terms of her anger and fear and her sense of, you know, and this is the thing about the class politics of the movie as well, which is that, you know, there's this thing about the fact that with Ennis and her no longer together as a kind of viable heterosexual couple with children, this jeopardizes her as a woman. And, you know, that this is about her livelihoods. And on the one hand, it's, you know, about a certain kind of homophobic sort of inheritance that she probably has as a woman of that historical moment, but it's also about the fact that what the film wants to, in a certain sense, depict as this

kind of utopian sexuality of Jack and Ennis up on the mountain in social life puts her and her daughters, you know, into financial jeopardy. And I think it's very subtle and sympathetic, you know, around that. But, you know, just to close the point on that, this ache of language, sort of loss of language or not having language and that the only sort of ever approach that you see in the film is, you know, between Ennis and Jack, the I ain't no queer, I ain't either sort of, you know, thing is about the fact that, you know, you really want like Stonewall to happen. It's like these men need like, you know, something to come into their world for them to be able to describe it. Yeah.

Absolutely. I thank you for, I mean, you've, have literally written the book on it, but it's, it's really helpful. Here it framed that way. This was the first time that in conversation with this movie, I did, you know, I guess like just research alongside of like, well, what history, like I, you know, specifically in Wyoming, where they are, where this is such a rural area and, and that how much class figures into this movie in a way that I feel like isn't as talked about. But there was a wonderful friend of the show, Matt Bome made a really thoughtful video about that as well of specifically speaking to your point, Matthew, why this story is set when it's set and where it's set, which is all very intentional where it's like on the cusp of a step forward for visibility, but also still a time of incredible danger.

And that's not to say that that has changed meaningfully enough, but just to root it in this specific. moment that you just are like so desperate for something to change for there to be some cultural conversation that could just make Ennis feel comfortable envisioning a life for himself that he's just so unable to and and to really sit in and obviously the Heath Ledger performance is incredible like where you really feel not just how his internalized homophobia is corrosive, but just how homophobia is corrosive to everyone. Everyone in this story is touched by it in one way or another, and it's done so devastatingly, but not, but still somehow not whacking you over the head with, with anything. It's so personal to every character. Yeah, I really was able to

appreciate the historic moment it was set in at this time. And like, part of the tragedy is that they are so close to possibly being able to envision a different kind of life together. And then Jack is. That's right, which is that, you know, one of the distinctions between them as characters is that Jack can envision something and says this, you know, talk about, you know, one of the few people in the film who seems to be, you know, bordering onto a language to think about a different possibility, you know, this idea he has. Like, you know, look, we could, we could live together.

Well, we could both be in a, you know, place together. And, you know, he has that sort of idea, and I think the Gillinghal performance has this exuberance around it. And then by contrast, and before he died, you know, Keith Ledger said that one of the things that on Lee and he talked about was how to sort of have Ennis as this character. And it's in Ledger's beautiful performance who, like, words just, like, he has to, he can't get them out. He's hunched over. And the way the ledger uses his mouth to have almost like, you know, it's like a struggle. It aches for him to have to speak. But, you know, that language just doesn't come to him.

And that's why, you know, and this is that when I teach the film, I always ask my students in the conversation. The film concludes with this assertion from Ennis, you know, Jack, I swear. And I ask my students, what's the second half of that sentence that we always wonder, like, what is it? he is swearing. What is he making a vow around? And because we know Ennis, we know that he himself is, you know, it could take forever

for him to finally figure out the second half of that sentence. Totally. Yeah. Well, I mean, we get the impression throughout the movie that Ennis is so haunted by an image he saw as a boy. One of two flashbacks in the movie, both show anti-quivocry.

violence, where the first one is Ennis describing something he saw as a boy, something that his father deliberately showed him as like a cautionary tale, because he tells this story about how there were two men who lived together and that everyone in the community presumed that they were in a romantic relationship. And then one of the men was murdered, and Ennis's father shows Ennis, Ennis as a, I don't know, eight, nine, 10 year old boy, the body of the murdered man, something that clearly affected him for life. And Ennis even speculates, like, it might have been my dad who murdered this man. I'm not sure. And we also get the impression that no justice whatsoever was, was done for the victim. Well, it's still, this was a time, like, in Wyoming specifically, but also in so many states,

where it wasn't just that homophobic hate crimes weren't, you know, explicitly against the law, but that the law would sometimes encourage them, you know, by how it wasn't just that gay rights weren't codified. It's that anti-gay legislation was the state of the law. Right. So that's the nature of the first flashback. And it's clear the impact it has had on Ennis. It has led to repression. It has led him to believe that it.

If he and Jack live the life together that Jack wants them to live, one or both of them will probably be killed. And then the second flashback we get is of either the real event of what happened or Ennis's speculation of what might have happened regarding Jack's death, which might have been another homophobic hate crime. Either way, Jack dies, which means Ennis will never see him again and any future that they might have. have had together no longer exists. And so the movie ends in tragedy. And that got me thinking about queer cinema of the time. And then even in years that follow and how so much of it ends in tragedy. And I was thinking about how it seems like a hetero mainstream audience tends to be more

comfortable with queer love stories that do end in tragedy than not. because again, this was such a hugely successful film, both box office and critical. We've shifted away from that a bit, but I couldn't help but think about that. Yeah, that's a really important question for this film in terms of the implications of it. We could kind of it from a couple of directions,

one of which we would say, what it's trying to describe is the sort of deep suffering of sort of queer people, you know, like queerphobic society, and that, you know, there are no miraculous, more heroic outcomes in their face of such monumental violence and exclusion. So in a certain sense, it tells a truth about that historical sort of moment. And on the flip side, does the film, in a certain sense, I don't necessarily agree with this reading, but I respect it,

sort of in a certain sense, and join with a long tradition of pathetic queer people who ultimately never can have any kind of sort of life. You know, it's like a don't they all die or kill themselves kind of, you know, frame. Everyone's doomed. Exactly. I guess I wonder, well, I'm curious what you think, Matthew, because we've recently also covered, we've covered a lot of queer cinema on the show over the years, but it is like this clear pattern of it's not even something that I hold against the movie. specifically, I think it more is just as an industry, like the film industry tends to elevate

and promote and award tragic stories versus stories that center queer joy or even just has queer characters that doesn't end an abject tragedy. Like we just covered Desert Hearts, a movie that definitely, you know, is also rooted in the past, addresses all of the homophobic elements that existed in that moment. time, but doesn't end in abject tragedy is made by and written by a queer woman. And these are both tremendously great movies as far as I'm concerned. But one movie gets the mainstream approval, and it's the one that is more centered on tragedy. So I don't view, yeah, I agree with you. I don't view it as a fault of Brokeback Mountain. I think it's just more the pattern of what gets

uplifted and sort of put into mainstream. canon and why a movie like Desert Hearts sort of remains more obscure, I guess. I don't know. Yeah. Well, this gets at the heart of, you know, what, you know, earlier I was describing as the anticipation of the film coming out in 2005 and leading up to, you know, its appearance was a, was an excitement over the idea that, you know, a large-scale, well-funded, you know, with star and mass appeal film was now possible. And then in a certain sense, a kind of, uh-oh moments, sort of say, but does it replicate the pattern of the pathetic queer,

yet again, only with maybe a bigger budget and more star power? And then you kind of ask yourself, like, oh, is that a progressive politics? Or is that just, you know, the same one with, like, you know, more movie stars? And then a sort of larger framing historical issue around is that the American corporate film just doesn't have a great track record of any kind of, you know, queer positive sort of long-term, you know, practice. And that we can we could love a film like Rockback Mountain and sort of say it's nuanced and subtle and his complexity in all the ways that it does. And then kind of go, but it's like one movie, you know, that happens on a very rare occasion.

And this seems to be, you know, in a certain sense, a larger indictment of the, what I'll call the conservatism of the American corporate film. Absolutely. It did not seem like this was an easy movie to not. I mean, first of all, just make, much less make well. This was my first time sort of digging more into the production history that I'd love to talk about with both of you. Matt Bowman also talks about this in his video. And also I think he was in high school or college when the film came out and sort of his experience of being frustrated with the film's popularity and also feeling quite defensive of it, especially when I think most famous. it was

you know Crash won best picture over Brokeback Mountain which I think now everyone can say makes absolutely no sense

and even at the time most people were like this this feels homophobic for Crush to be winning an Oscar like this like if you've seen it it has no

it barely has a right to exist as far as I've concerned but in any case just to get a little bit into the production history of this movie There's so much, so everyone feel free to jump in. But this started with Diana Osana reading the story and immediately saying, like,

I want to adapt this. I want this to be a film. Annie Proul, who I think like many great short story writers, is somewhat prickly, was like, it can't be a movie. Sorry. I was like, girl, take the check. But, you know, she has her dignity. And I respect her for that.

But in terms of, and we've talked about this quite a bit when it comes to any marginalized identity being represented in a Hollywood film, really, that there is so much internal pushback. There is a pressure to change material. There are actors who are quote unquote not comfortable portraying a queer character. Oh, yeah. In as few words as possible, I mean, Gus Van Sant was on board to direct this movie for some time and encountered a enough frustration and pushback that he ended up leaving the project and ended up making milk, which is a movie I have not seen, actually, but would be an interesting discussion. I hate Sean Penn.

I don't, how do we do with that? It's complicated. But anyways, just going through the list of actors, all of whom are still famous and working, who were considered or approached for the roles of Jack and Ennis and how many, many, many of them were quote unquote not comfortable or just responded in an overtly homophobic way to the suggestion. I think the most famous examples are Matt Damon who said Gus. He's saying this is when Gus Van Sant was still the attached director. He said, Gus, I did a gay movie referencing the talented Mr. Ripley, then a cowboy movie, all the pretty horses. I can't follow it up with a gay cowboy

movie. Really awesome response. There was also Mark Wahlberg. Oh, yep, I have this one as well. It feels almost absurd to approach in this context, but they tried. He, of course, responded in the way that Mark Wahlberg would respond. He said he was, quote, creeped out, unquote, by the script, which again, Mark Wahlberg wouldn't know a good script if it, like, you know, so anyways, that it took some time to find, I mean, the right writer found the material almost immediately, but in terms of building the rest of the team in a way that was respectful and reverent of the material took quite a long time.

And it had everything to do. And I feel like it's a direct mirror of the homophobia of the time. For sure. Yeah. And as you pointed out, Jamie Gus Van Sant eventually abandoned the project because he had such a hard time casting it. So he dropped out. And then other directors were approached, including queer directors.

like Joel Schumacher and Pedro Almodovar. It's so wild. A Joel Schumacher, Brokeback Mountain would have been. The mountain would have had nipples. Like, what would have happened in Joel Schumacher broke back? We'll never know. I don't know. Three amazing directors, I mean, including, like, three amazing directors,

three wildly different versions of this story you would be getting. Absolutely. I didn't know about Pedro Almodovar. I mean, that's just kind of mind-boggling to contemplate. It's almost like, you know, because, you know, he's a famous director of women, right? So it would have been, basically, the emphasis would have been, if it's my version of the Almodova, Bar Brokeback Mountain,

it's all all non-lorine and then the two men are in the background. Right. And Aungle ends up taking the role, who, I, we've covered one other Aungley. I mean, obviously we, I've seen a lot of his movies, but I think the only other Aungley movie we've covered on the show is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I believe so, yeah. But he had directed movies with queer characters before in The Wedding Banquet. But it is kind of a fascinating run of movies.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hulk, Brokeback Mountain. That is range. Sense and sensibility? Sense and sensibility before that, yes. But going from Hulk to Brokeback Mountain is kind of incredible. Right. Well, he was in the middle of debating, retiring from the film industry. He's like, I made a few movies that were.

exhausting and I want to quit. And he had been approached to direct Brokeback Mountain. And initially, he was like, I'm so tired. But then he reconsidered and he decided to give it a go and he tried to get financing, which was, as you can imagine, a struggle at first. People were not interested in financing a film like this, typically. But then he eventually met a producer who had, had a partnership with focus features. And they stepped in to finance the film. And Aungley was attached as a director. There were more casting hiccups.

But then Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal were both really enthusiastic about the script and their characters. And they were cast. Obviously, it has been criticized the casting of two straight actors to portray these characters. And that is fair. that was far more common at the time. We have seen more of a shift in casting queer actors to play queer characters. But for a very long time, it was the standard to cast cis-hete actors to play queer characters. That was pretty normalized up until like even in the last, when did Carol come out?

I mean, that was the last time I remember really seeing that conversation. I know we discussed it when we talked about Carol in the show years ago. Yeah. Yeah. I think there are some examples even after that, especially of cis actors playing trans characters, because that was a conversation that was still being regularly had up until like the late 2010s, maybe even into the 2020s. Yeah.

And then the last thing I want to say about the like, you know, production and development and casting and stuff like that was the marketing of this film. I don't know much about it. But the one thing that I did make note of is that the poster for this film was heavily influenced by Titanic, 1997. And then when you do a side-by-side comparison, you're like, oh. That's actually so true. Wow. Wow. Two tragic love stories.

Yep. Wow. I didn't know that. And now once you see it, you cannot unsee it. You simply cannot. Yeah. I'd love to go back to talking about. the wives.

Matthew, you talk about this in your book about how Alma and Lorene's labor make it possible for their husbands to go off on all of these fishing trips and how their labor is pretty wildly underappreciated by their husbands. Again, I forgot how much class and labor

plays into this story, as does some misogyny of the characters. I'm thinking about a scene where Ennis is supposed to be taking care of his two small daughters, but he drops them off at Alma's workplace at the grocery store while she is working because he has to tend to something with his job. And he's like, well, my thing is more important. So, woman, you take care of the children, even though you're working also, I have to go do my work. That scene really struck me. There's another scene where Ennis and Alma are screaming at each other because she had agreed to pick up another shift at work because they need the money

because he's always running off to go on fishing trips. And Ennis is furious. He wants her to stay home and serve dinner, but she defiantly leaves saying like, I need to work to help support this family. So just a few moments that I didn't really clock the first time. I watched this movie. And then also, I think the first time I watched this movie, I remember thinking, I confess, that I viewed Alma, not as a villain necessarily, but as an obstacle or kind of like a foil to Ennis and Jack's relationship. I was sort of like, leave him alone. Let him be in love with Jack Twist. Because there's that scene where she confronts him after Thanksgiving dinner.

she says like, you know, I thought you were going fishing, but then you never brought back any fish. And then I looked in your fishing box and all the equipment had never been used. And then he reacts with violence because she has clocked the situation accurately. So I remember thinking at the time, I was like, oh, like, she's a foil to this relationship. Watching it this time around, I was way more empathetic to her character. because all she's asking for is like honesty and transparency in their marriage, which she had done throughout, which she was never able to get. So I'm like, oh, of course, like, I absolutely understand her frustration.

But then you also understand why Ennis is withholding information. Yes, he is cheating on her in a monogamous relationship, but he can't be honest about his sexuality in a time and place such as this. or at least there's great risk associated with him being honest about it. But either way, I was way more empathetic to Alma's circumstances on this watch. I think, you know, one of the things that, you know, it has to be sort of seen as implied, but not explicitly articulated in film, you know, sort of works in subtle ways in this regard, is that class is in here in this very sort of, you know, important ways.

both Jack and Ennis, you know, sort of are, but the very bottom of the sort of ranking of social prestige around labor, you know. And famously, you know, the film was called The Gay Cowboy Movie. And then, you know, one of the things remarkable about it, and this is very much in the Pruel story and the film, they're not even cowboys. They take care of sheep, you know. I mean, they're... Yeah, sometimes. And it doesn't even have, I mean, the landscape is out of the sort of west, but the sort of prestigious. of them being these kind of cowboy figures, you know, in a certain sense, is diminished.

It's like, you know, the West is now no longer the space of cowboys. It's the space of a certain kind of, you know, kind of grunt labor that's not particularly glamorous or dignified. So there's that with class. But then to come to the topic of the women, I think the class ordinances get even more explicit, which is that, you know, Alma works in the supermarket, trying to make ends meet around this sort of occasional labor that Emma seems to do.

And then Lorraine is attached to sort of her father's business, and it's a successful business. And the film really, and I love the way that the film builds out from what little there is in the short sort of fiction. But Lorraine's this really interesting figure. You know, she's in the rodeo. She knows how to dance.

She's really got a social life. And she is making this big. business happen and that in a certain sense Jack has married up in that particular sort of organization of social prestige and there comes a point in which she's kind of not really all that worried about what he's up to on the fishing trips because she has her own life in a way that Alma is still reliant on you know on NS is sort of unreliable as he seems to be and then you know the other thing and I want to come back a little bit to what you were talking about a moment ago, Caitlin, in terms of the fantasy sequences in this film. And this is very cinematic. This is where

I think the film really sort of can handle because it's on the visual sort of score here. And this is description of the shock of violence of the murdered figures from his childhood and implication that his father is a participant in that's at some level, whether he is the murderer or simply, you know, showing his child that this kind of violence is possible and to be respected, conversely. And then the second fantasy, which I think is just really an amazing piece of filmmaking of the conversation between Ennis and Loreen,

who, you know, narratively, if you kind of piece it out, you figure out this is the first time they've actually ever had to talk to each other. And the class ordinances get even more sort of complicated. And part of it is that the beauty of the editing in that sequence, the heartbreaking editing is both of them know what each other thinks of the other because of the figure of Jack who is gone. And both of them are freighting this conversation,

the last sort of conversation about Jack, this thing on the telephone about the meaning of it or the circumstances of Jack's desk, Lorene saying, well, the official explanation, we will agree upon. is there was an accident on the roadside. And then this sort of, you know, then momentary fantasy of, no, he was murdered. This was a scene of queer violence. And that this is, you know, in a certain sense,

getting into Ennis's head, but also understanding, you know, and the context of what's going on in sort of Ennis's mind through this conversation, you know, with Lorene. And I think that that has a kind of class dimension to it, which is I think that there's a way that he kind of realizes that Lorraine lives in a world of sort of wealth and material comfort in a way that he never will.

And the strange connection through Jack is about him realizing Jack had that life of living with someone that he, Jack, had proposed to Ennis. Jack had that with Lorraine, fraud as it might have been, because her family is not ideal by any means. But that comfort was there, that wealth was there. Yeah. Anne Hathaway's performance in that scene is also so stunning to me

because there are a couple moments where when Ennis makes a reference to his relationship with Jack, and it's all very, you know, like coded where it's like, oh, yeah, we met that time on Brokeback Mountain, summer of 63, where we just herded sheep and nothing else. else and it's implied that she knows exactly what that means and what happened there. And you see her give a little like like a whimper. She's like suppressing. Yeah. Crying because she knows who Ennis is to Jack. And then she does it again a second time when he makes another reference to him and Jack's connection without being explicit about who they actually were to each other, but just saying something about their friendship. And she whimpers again. And it's just like, oh, that like

that performance just it blew me away. It gets back to what you're saying, Matthew, about like the conversations without words that happen at so many points, like the what can't be expressed by the characters that is like physically seeping out in their performances is like it's just, it's unreal. Yeah, I think I also sort of did not remember how crucial class is to the whole story, but also specifically the women's stories. On the reread of the short story,

yeah, there's not too much on the page about them. And I really appreciated how it felt like these characters were built out, first of all, in like a very sympathetic and grounded way, but also in a way that really distinguishes them from one another, even though obviously they have so much in common. I was weirdly thinking about how if you flip it and then move the timeline ahead 50 years, it's Grace and Frankie. That's another story, though.

But that Alma and Loreen, they both have their own distinct personalities, but that Loreen in some ways, you know, has the financial ability to move on in a way that Alma never does. And in a way that I think women in this place at this time would have, have been more beholden to a marriage. There's always going to be the stigma that comes with divorce, you know, really at any time,

but certainly in the 60s and 70s, but that Loreen, we know she has the ability to move on financially. She has the support where Alma, you know, sort of needs to, and it's lovely that it seems like she moves into a relationship that is positive for her.

I mean, and on this rewatch, the second you see the, the grocery store manager, you know, be okay with all the glass being knocked down. You're like, there's the guy. It's like such a well-directed moment. He has a little crush on her. Yeah, I was like, oh yeah, your boss doesn't mind if you broke the whole store.

The whole inventory. I think he's interested. But it does make me happy for her to some extent. But it also means, you know, like Alma's not living at a time or within a, a socioeconomic class where she can really consider being fully independent, where Loreen sort of has more leeway and seeing how class affects, obviously, Jack and Ennis as well. A moment that stuck out to me on this viewing was after Loreen has their baby,

how immediately dismissive her parents are of Jack. They're calling him rodeo and hyper-fixating on Loreen and the baby. it is so clear that he is incidental to them. He is not important. Oh, yeah. And just sort of watching all of these, like, tiny fractures and structures being built in trying to, you know, sort of keep this relationship, at least functioning.

It's done very subtly. But if you're looking for it, it is, like, so crucial to the story. And then a scene that follows that between Jack and his father-in-law is the Thanksgiving scene where they're basically doing a dick measuring contest about who has more power in this situation where the father-in-law is like, oh, your boy should watch football if you want him to be a man when he grows up. And Jack is just like, fuck you, this is my house, my rules.

Loreen spent a lot of time and effort preparing this meal, so we're going to appreciate it without being distracted by a football game. And eventually, I mean, you could argue that, like, Jack exercises his enough masculinity over the situation that he defeats the other, like, masculine boy man of the scene. Masculine boy man. Awesome. Thank you.

I will be saying that every day from now on. But because, I mean, a lot has been written about this movie in its relation to the setting, the genre of Western, the implications of masculinity therein, where, including you, Matthew, you know, in your book, you talk about how, like, you know, the rugged, stoic cowboy character that is the center of the Western genre

and is like, you know, the embodiment of the masculine ideal for what a man is, quote, unquote, supposed to be, especially an American. man has been present throughout cinema history, but also there have been homo erotic undertones present within this genre, but that Brokeback Mountain was one of the first films to bring that homoeroticism to text rather than subtext. Right. Yeah. Now, one of the things that's remarkable about how this film is trying to work on its topic of this particular version of a white,

American masculinity in this genre of the Western is that the Western, which paradoxically only becomes a kind of popular culture genre right at the moment in which the idea that the Western has about the West has concluded. The American frontier has in a certain sense been enclosed. And so the expansive utopian sort of idea of it around 1890 to 1900 is the demise of actual Cowboys is these kinds of, you know, mythical figures. But then the Western takes off many critics, and especially Jane Tompkins, whose wonderful book, West of Everything, is really worth finding. But the Western takes off, especially just by coincidence or maybe not,

but because cinema is taking off at the exact same moment. And so the Western becomes this very kind of American project to, in a certain sense, keep this narrative going, even though the historical circumstances of the actual West have concluded. And at the center of, you know, that genre is this particular idea of a man, of a cisgender man, and what makes this person the hero that they might be. And it's that thing that, you know, we were talking about, you know, earlier. What makes him heroic is that he doesn't need language. He stands outside of society, and he doesn't need human.

sort of language. And then the second part, and this is where the homoerotics come into it, is, but at the same time, this fantasy of the American West is populated largely by men, and that sort of women are seen as sort of associated with civilization and all of the kinds of obnoxious encroachments on male freedom. And this comes up again and again in Western films. And so one of the things that's remarkable about Brokeback Mountain is it takes all the pre-existing ingredients of the Western, and then it tweaks them enough for us to see them in a different light. And it's this thing about, you know, on the one hand, you know, I'll make the assertion that we want Jack to succeed in a certain sense because there's a certain kind of openness to experience that he has. And he's, you know, adventurous in a way that Ennis is not. But the real hero in a conventional sense of the Western is Ennis who doesn't like language and has no use for society and kind of just does what he wants.

And then, you know, the irony is it's like, is Ennis really any kind of hero? You know, he turns down, though, the new possibility of a shared life with someone he seems to care about, which is this idea that Jack has that they'll go off and then live together. And so the film puts you in this awkward position of trying to, on the one hand, know that you should identify with Ennis as this kind of American hero. And on the other hand, see him as really, really disappointing as any kind of role model for that. Yeah, and that acting out these masculine tropes really only brings suffering to him. Yeah. Yeah, and that where we leave him at the end is just like in the most tortured place. And we don't really know, I mean, and we're not meant to know, is he ever going to move through or pass this?

It seems like, I mean, we'd end with a shirt in the closet. So I don't know. I once had a friend say to me, it's like, well, you know, Jack is gone, but Ennis actually still has something left of his life. And his friend said, I have a fantasy that he just gets the hell out of there finally. to San Francisco. I love that. I want that for him. Yes.

But I do also then want to double back on something you mentioned earlier, which is that, you know, this sort of erotics between these two men is so much about repression, but repression as something that produces something else. And that the sort of first parting scene when they leave the mountain results and then having this, you know, this fist fight, they attack. They attack each other and there's this idea that's like, do they not know how to, you know, embrace or say something of mere kindness to each other? And the answer is no. They have no language except for physical, you know, violence. And that, you know, the thing about it is that that repression is productive of violence in this particular version of masculinity in a way that, you know, what we want to see is that it could be, repression could be productive of a new kind of sexuality and a new kind of. shared life that the film is just

kind of glimpsing out that doesn't sort of open the possibility to which is the way I think you know you end up having a heartbroken over and over again by watching this movie I know it's just they they don't have the tools they need

to be able to communicate with each other another scene that stood out to me with especially like with regards to how masculinity is like I think it's like another scene where Ennis is doing what he thinks is necessary and it causes discomfort. It's the scene where they're at the fireworks of Alma and Ennis bringing the girls to see fireworks.

There are some drunk guys doing drunk NPC dialogue behind them being like, oh, that guy, you know, his wife probably doesn't even like them. They're being very like. They're being wildly misogynistic and gross. They're being assholes. No doubt about it. but Ennis almost provokes a fight with them in front of his family, which clearly is distressing and upsetting to everyone.

And it's, I think just another example of Ennis, you know, doing what he thinks, quote, unquote, a masculine Western guy should do. He's doing the cowboy thing. He's defending his family. Don't talk about my wife that way. All that stuff. He's defending his own masculinity,

which we know he is constantly calling into question. But it doesn't produce the victorious moment we're trained to sort of expect from there. It's not like a hero beating down a bully. It's just this tense, uncomfortable moment that Alma doesn't seem particularly happy about. It freaks the kids out. And even Ennis, I don't know,

this is just my like, I guess, interpretation of the performance, but even in that moment, it doesn't feel like the character is even sure of what he's doing. It just feels like this is this is what I'm supposed to do and that's you know at the core of so much of NS's behavior is like performing masculinity because he thinks that that is what he's supposed to do and that it's what will keep him and his family safe even though it is just a corrosive force and we learn why that is from the flashback with his dad. Yeah. I'd love to talk about the cultural impact of the movie, especially at the time and the, like, the media landscape and just like

the cultural landscape that this came out in. Because, I mean, this movie is largely considered a pretty pivotal moment in queer cinema in the sense that it centers a queer love story that entered the mainstream, it was critically acclaimed and it was a huge box office success. There were not a lot of examples of a movie that fit those criteria prior to Brokeback Mountain. And so it paved the way for more representation of queer characters and queer love stories on screen. It started to normalize that as a narrative vehicle, at least stories that featured white cis queer, characters. But yeah, I just, you know, the general cultural landscape at the time in 2005, I mean, this was in the middle of George W. Bush's presidency where like homophobia was part of his

platform. This was an era where in, in the media, mostly queer representation was obscenely homophobic jokes in raunchy comedies. The best you might get would be a, tropey character like, you know, a gay best friend or, you know, the hairdresser or something like that in a film, very stereotypical roles. And society at large was just like was very homophobic. And so this movie coming out and being the success that it was like represents a cultural shift or, you know, kind of a turning point. But also there was a lot of conservative backlash to this movie. There was a lot of jokes made at this movie's expense. Many of them were extremely not tasteful and were punching down. And Heath Ledger, I mean, to the point where Heath Ledger, there's like an anecdote that resurfaces

about him every so often that he refused to appear on any like awards broadcast during the promotion cycle for this movie that featured homophobic jokes. He like would not appear. I mean, he, I think, refused to present at the 2006 Oscars for the movie. this reason because he caught wind that there was going to be a homophobic joke at broke box expense in the opening. So, you know, shout out to him there. But it's again, like this, even when there was this massive moment for queer cinema breaking into the mainstream, the movie and its fans then had to deal with how America only spoke about queer people after that. And with, you know, it seems like relatively little pushback, which is why that Heath Ledger anecdote stands out.

Well, I think in terms of the, you know, the sort of sense of the impact of the film, both in the moment of its appearance and then kind of in the long life that it's had, you know, 20 years later, well, one of the things I become ever more sort of aware of is that the sort of culture of cinema in the past two decades has changed so much in as much as we live in such a, almost. Zsaic media environment now that the idea of a big movie like this, kind of grabbing the attention of lots of people simultaneously, you know, seems almost impossible. I say almost because then I think about something like Barbie, which is a little other like podcast episode. But it's much less common than like monoculture doesn't exist anymore really. No, that's right. And so, you know, it's hard to in a certain sense remind ourselves that, you know, that this was in a, in a cinema culture of, you know, going to the cinema. This is where, you know, you had to wait six months before something came out on DVD in order to do a home viewing, you know, that there was an event of going to see a movie like this at the theater. And then, you know, word of mouth built, and then there became this kind of endless kind of, you know, and I do say, I mean, I think it built out a more nuanced popular audiences' ability to talk about a film like this without immediately just resorting to homophobic tropes.

I mean, those are available, but I think that it also opened up a lot of people's sort of imagination to sort of say, this is a really interesting film. It doesn't hand me the tools just simply, you know, insult these people, especially these two men. Which I think, you know, really means a lot in its moment. And then the other thing is that, you know,

you'd mentioned that, you know, it was nominated but didn't win. In this case, the Academy Award for Picture that year, Crash won. Crash has not gone on to have anywhere near the sort of monumental stature that broke back out and has. I mean, not at all. Sub-zero. I feel like it's honestly most famous for the fact that it like could have got stole so

many, you know, Oscars from superior movies. Yeah. And I attribute that to basically, and I'll be a little bit mean-spirited here, but basically kind of go to the kind of, the white neol liberal politics of the academy was basically sort of like more invested in an idea of race politics that were available. and crash than they were in the more nuanced and subtle and actually radical politic that a film like Brookback Mountain, which offers ambiguity and subtlety and, you know, all of this complexity that I think have only more so built Rhode Back Mountain's sense of

importance in the kind of cinematic culture. No, we definitely needed the movie that was written and directed by a since-canceled Scientologist. That was the movie that should have. So it's so wild to look back on. Yeah. But you know, there's a funny thing about this film that really is always fascinating to me, which is that in China and the PRC, Brookback Mountain came out at the moment in which the gray market cinema sort of economy

was developing around bootleg copies of non-Chinese films on Compact Disc on the DVD. And this was a hugely important film in China for the distribution illegal because the government prohibited it because of its perceived tolerance of dissident sexualities. But that reports, and I trust them, largely because some of my students from China said, oh, yeah, like my mom, love broke back mountain. And we had a copy of it at home that because you could buy these things in, you know, the gray market. economy and that part of the appeal of Brookback Mountain is that it is literally a global piece of filmmaking in as much as audiences in lots of different places that I still don't know enough about did things with in order to sort of embrace this film and it's like I say it's interesting ambiguity and complexity and what my sense of the kind of one of the reading formations among

Chinese audiences was that the film is an allegory about conformism and individuality, and that it's about asking what price does a person pay in order not to have a life that they want to lead kind of independence, and that this sort of resonates strongly with audiences in that context. And I love that, that sense of, you know, this is a subtle work of art that can handle a lot of sort of multiple interpretations and never resolve them in a way that, let's be honest, I don't think Crash really holds up that well. No. I haven't seen it, but I can't imagine it. You don't need to.

Okay. Okay. It doesn't seem worth the squeeze. I also, I didn't do enough of a deep dive on it, but I think that, yeah, Angli's connection to the material and how this was received, because Angli is Taiwanese, he has said many times that even though, you know, he's made movies that take place in England. And in this case, I mean, it's hard to find a more white American working class setting than where we are, but that all of his movies are connected to Taiwan and to who he is. And that is how he chooses the stories that he adapts. I would be curious to hear how Hulk ties in there. But that's not the conversation for today. But that when he, you know, won an Oscar, that the way that even on

Lee has talked about in China is very particular and heavily censored, where he was celebrated in China for being, like, look at this Oscar-winning director, with the caveat that all references to both Taiwan and queerness were removed from his acceptance speech. I don't know how long of an acceptance speech that leaves you with. I think it just sort of leaves you with a sentence, but... Thank you. Bye. Right. Hello. And it's a lot of lovely speech. But I, yeah, I just wanted to mention that as well, that, you know, Angli has had a really fascinating life and career that we don't really have the bandwidth to talk

about in its entirety in this episode. But the international reception of this movie is not just in connection to the theme, but in connection to the director. Yeah. Yeah. One thing I'll also say, if I can just add on in terms of this, you know, topic of the genre of itself is that one of the brilliant things that only did, not only him, but he, you know, recruited a great cinematographer on Diego, Pietro, to photograph this film. And that one of the things that, you know, it's so fascinating about this movie is that it is visually ravishing in terms of its sense of the American West. You know, there's this way, you know, that's been talked about is that the landscape is one of the characters in the movie, and the landscape is in that

face of in the context of the lack of language among the sort of, you know, human actors, that the world is expressing something about what's going on. You know, it has this kind of presence and that Pietro photographs these in sort of lush and then they're just magnificent. You just want to sort of stop the image and then like, you know, just look at it in terms of its beauty and that he does this in multiple layers of both distance photography. the opening shot across them towards the mountain range, kind of this sort of, you know, place of longing and yearning that we'll learn about.

And then up close when you have these beautiful sort of senses of the landscape, is this layers of trees and green and animals. And that's really necessary in order to not just have this become this very claustrophobic domestic drama. That really why these characters want to go to, you know, the natural world, world is to escape this enclosure inside, you know, those households that do feel very, very enclosed. And then there was a trope of, of especially Ennis, looking out of windows, trying to find his escape, you know, to those vistas.

It's really important. And I think if that hadn't been achieved in this film in terms of that sense of the visual presence of the landscape as an expression of something about the erotic, I don't think the film would have been quite a sort of a thing that it turned in. into. It's so beautiful. I love how he uses, like, I don't know, it's hard to think of a movie that more like intentionally uses distance and close, like, it's just, it's gorgeous.

And as with a lot of great movies about America, it is shot in Canada, which I always find delightful. You're just like, as far as movies are concerned, New York is Vancouver, Wyoming is Alberta, don't worry about it. Does anyone have any other thoughts about the film? The last thing I'll say in terms of just shoutouts

for, you know, the talent involved is that this also does this very, you know, it takes a budget to do this in any kind of filmmaking anymore, which is it has a score. It has this gorgeous score that wants, actually, you know, the Gustavo

Santo Alalo score, which won many awards, rightly so because part of this thing that we're describing in terms of this, just, you know, emotional intensity is because of that lack of lack of language that, you know, we've been talking about gets articulated musically and that that score is basically booming, you know, with these emotions at these moments of, of, you know, heartbreak or rapture. And again, much like the Pietro cinematography, you know, if you were to take that score away, it'd be a really interesting experiment to kind of go emotionally, what happens to this film, what happens to this story.

Absolutely. And we've talked about this so many times on this show, but this is yet another example of the film industry in Hollywood specifically, insisting that there isn't an audience for this movie because it's about marginalized people. And how many, I mean, this add this to the list of examples that has wildly proven this wrong. I mean, how many, this movie made its budget back like 15,

times or something like that. And we hear that every time there's a movie that is too centered around women, two centered around people of color. I mean, that's the whole story around the production of Black Panther and so many other movies that are extremely successful and well regarded. And it's because these are movies that actually got, you know, reasonable budgets and marketing campaigns. It's the, you know, you don't need us to tell you. If you're listening to the show, you probably agree, but that it's so infrequent that movies that center marginalized people in any way receive the support that they deserve. And when they do receive that support, and sometimes when they don't, they find their audience because the audience is very much there. And even when they do

extremely well at the box office, like Brokeback Mountain did, Hollywood will still be like, That was a fluke. That was an accident. Yeah. We can't make any movies like that again. It always seems to be an anomaly, right? It's like, hey, who knew that this might be succeeding? Right. I mean, well, even speaking to your point with Barbie, Matthew, it's like the takeaway from there is we need to make more movies around toy properties, not that people are interested in a diverse cast of women.

Right. Right. I mean, also worth noting that after the accolades that broke back Mountain received, the next queer-centered story to receive a major Academy Award was in 2017 when Moonlight won for Best Picture. So over a decade had passed before there was any like Academy Award attention for a queer story. And in that context, it really, it turns the. the fake out for Best Picture, even more charged if La La Land was about to once again take the Oscar from.

That's right. No, it's like, it's like, oh, no, another crash moment. Right. And thankfully, it did not go that way. But, oh, Caitlin, I remember we were together that night. Never forget where you were. Oh, my gosh. When it seemed like we were at your friend from grad school's apartment.

What a night that was. Truly. Wow. Anyways, and, you know, does Moonlight win without the success of Brokeback Mountain proving that queer stories, you know, deserve the backing of studios? I don't know. It seems like Brokeback Mountain definitely has a massive place in the history of American Queer Cinema. Yeah, and that said, I think, you know, Angley, unquestionably has made a gorgeous movie here. And I did notice, this was the first time I'd really gotten into the production history. how many queer directors almost directed this movie and then didn't. And while nothing takes anything away from Aungli, I think that that is kind of a shame, that there were at least two very famous queer directors

who really wanted to make this movie and were not able to get to the finish line with it. Well, does this movie pass the Bechtel test? I don't say no. I don't think there's a scene in which two women talk to each other. I don't think so. I don't think so. No.

I think that this is rectified by Grace and Frankie eventually. Grace and Frankie is about Alma and Lorene moving in together in a world where Jack and Ennis get together. And then they form a beautiful fun family. Right. Yes. But similar to the discussion that was happening around Fire Ireland a few years ago, the Bechtel test is not, it's not relevant here and it doesn't need to be applied to every movie, especially when it's a movie that's doing so much else. Well, and I think it kind of, to some degree, and only our dear

friend Alison Bechtel could tell us for sure. But to say that this movie is any less wonderful because it doesn't pass the Bechthel test flies in the face of the part of the Bechthel test that people are less aware of, which is that it began as a commentary on how there is no queer representation in movies. So it's, I think, kind of antithetical, you know, it doesn't pass the mainstream version. But I think in some senses, you know, spiritually, it holds true to the reason that the joke existed in the first place, which is that there was almost never queer characters that were actually canonically queer on screen. Right. Right. You could interpret the Bechtel test as, is there explicit queer representation on screen? Totally. Of characters that we don't have to

ship together, in which case, yes, Brokeback Mountain does pass the Bechdel test. Which, by the way, again, I'm going to start doing this on the show. Like, if you do a cursory, I mean, the amount of fan fiction written about Jack and Ennis is just overwhelming, overwhelming. To the point where I think at one point, Annie Pruill, a little grumpily was like, people need to stop writing to me about what they think should have happened, okay? Fair enough, but also people love it. People want, you know, I think it's beautiful.

And then that brings us to our nipple scale, where we rate the movie on a scale of zero to five nipples. It's tough. It's tough. It's tough. It's tough. But because the movie examines masculinity in the prison they're in and its effect on people and the repression that it leads to and the torment that that repression leads to

and the fact that it was a significant milestone in queer cinema, is it a perfect film? Perhaps not, but it did do so much to pave the way for more inclusive and just more representation in general. Does it focus on cis white characters? Yes. But that wouldn't be as much of an issue if there were plenty of other movies that centered a diverse array of identities within the queer community. But even today, there aren't that many options and certainly not in mainstream cinema.

You really have to dig for them usually. But because of the cultural impact this movie did have, on queer cinema and American cinema in general, I'll give it like three and a half or four nipples. Does that sound nuts? You're a decision. That's so true. Your decision. I'm going to do three and a half.

I'll give them to, I'll distribute them between only the screenwriters and any prule. Yeah, I think I'll go three and a half or four. decide and so I'm going to not decide. But I think, you know, speaking to your point, Caitlin, that the frustrations that I totally understand people may have with this movie, I think, aren't necessarily criticisms of the, or to me, aren't criticisms as much of the movie as of what Hollywood is willing to finance and elevate versus what it is not. Sure. I think that this story, I appreciate that it is very, it seems very intentionally written where, when, and who it's about, going back to the original short story, that this movie is entrenched in the white working class masculinity of this place and this time. That is not incidental to the story and that Annie Pruill is commenting on it. And I think to some extent the movie is commenting on it pretty extensively. Less so on whiteness, we are sort of presented with a white actor void.

think as we are in many movies, but most of these elements are pretty thoroughly commented on. I think that especially in the moment that this movie was released, the fact that it was as difficult as it was to get a movie with a queer couple at its center released, it almost feels like the movie, I hope I'm articulating this correctly, that often when seeing marginalized identity represented it's starting at almost the most easy difficulty level to do so, which is having famous white actors do it and almost ideally prove that these are stories that people are eager to hear. It's like a proof of concept almost, which sucks because it's, again, this is a criticism of Hollywood of like that we're so often told, well, there's no

interest in anything except action movies starring white CISC. eyes, right? Like overgeneralizing there, but that any marginalized story has such a significant barrier to even being produced or seen that I think that that is why we often see famous cis white straight actors at the center of stories. And that ideally they're used as a successful template for more diverse stories to be told. I'm not saying that that is necessarily what happens, but I do sort of see broke back as a building block in more

diverse queer cinema going mainstream in the years that followed. I hope that makes sense. Yeah, totally. Outside of, I think, yeah, incredible in its cultural impact and it's just a beautiful movie. It's so, so, so beautiful.

And I think for 2005, for a movie to be so faithfully adapted and also expanded on, I love the ways that the movie expands on the source material. Really skillfully. Yeah, really beautifully. In a way that I think works great for our show because a lot of it expands on giving the women more interiority and sympathy than there's like a space for in the original story. So I just, it is beautiful.

I guess I'm going to, I'm going to go 3.75 because I'm feeling indecisive. and I will distribute it between Angli, Larry McMurtry, Diana Osana, and Annie Pruhl. Matthew, how about you? Yeah, so I think in terms of getting some kind of assessment around it being intersectionally, having an intersectional, you know, feminism, I think what I would say is it comes at it kind of sideways in terms of having a kind of feminist critique that relates to other. kinds of ideas. And we've talked about, you know, in terms of how it's racialized without sort of announcing

that that's what it's working on. It has a class politics without necessarily announcing that that's what it's, you know, working on. And, you know, there's this way that I think about it in terms of an intersectional feminism, which is that one of the things I think is interesting about the film is that it's historical. It says, you know, 1963 to whatever, 1968. But it's not nostalgic at all or any of that. And that's one of the centerpieces of a lot of what I would call

sort of reactionary popular culture. It's always like, you know, because that's part of the current conservative political formation, starting with Reaganism, but you know, in the present moment with Trumpism. It's let's go back to the past when it was better. This film does not do that. The good old days. Right.

And so part of it's, what I would say, sort of relationship to feminism is that, especially in relation to the, the women characters, that second wave feminism is literally just about to sort of emerge as a public discourse in 1963. And that, you know, it's so needed. It's sort of the film's not nostalgia. It's about the constraints around these women and the fact that a feminist political project that's about to emerge, and, you know, with understandings that it's largely a white middle class feminism in the first iteration of the second wave.

But that nevertheless, that it's about thinking about new kinds of possibilities for the lives of women. And that, you know, the pathos of just to take, say, you know, Alma's situation is that she is left high and dry by NSOM sort of disappearing on their marriage. And that, you know, she has to take the initiative and basically sort of like figure out what's going to happen next because he won't. And that, you know, in the utopian world, it would be like sort of, like, why must Alma be reliant on anyone to have the life that she would like to have to lead? Or Lorraine, for that matter. She does rely on her father, who's, you know, no role model of patriarchy, you know, in his particular, you know, fight at Thanksgiving.

So I think, so I think, you know, yes, I'm with you, I'd say around three nipples would allow me to sort of say, I think that it's sort of inadvertent feminism still is a kind of intersectional feminism of sorts. Totally. Absolutely. Matthew, thank you so much for joining us. This has been such a wonderful conversation. Truly. Oh, my pleasure.

This has been a lot of fun. Come back anytime. Truly, yeah. Bring another favorite. Well, if you haven't talked about great gardens, I'm always up for that. I was going to say we have not somehow done that yet. So please come back. Sure.

And I can do a plug, in fact, in regards to that, which is that a new edition of the Great Gardens book has just come out from the British Film Institute. They asked me to update it. The first version came out in 2012, and they're doing a reissue of some of their top titles. And so they asked me if I would revise it, and so I did. And largely what I do is put the new version that just came out in the context of drag culture and thinking about Great Gardens is this, like, having this presence in sort of drag performativity now, which it didn't as much in 2012.

Sure, right. Yeah. Please come back for Grey Gardens. That would be a blast. Yes, please. I would love that anytime. Wonderful. Excellent.

Is there anything else you'd like to plug in addition to that? No, that's it. Yeah, just look for Grey Gardens. And it has a beautiful new cover of the, I mean, you know, covers, yeah, what's the big deal? When the first version came out, it was okay. And then for the reissue, they said, would you like unredesigned? If you go Google it, you can see the beautiful and elegant vision with Little Edie on the cover. I think it's much more loving and respectful of her than the first edition was.

I remember the first edition clear, yeah, vividly. Oh, this is wonderful. And let this be a lesson that sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. That's right. People do whether we like it or not, unfortunately. Yeah. Oh, this is so wonderful. Thank you so much again for joining us, Matthew.

My pleasure. Thank you. Yes, indeed. You can support us by joining our Patreon, aka Matrion. It's $5 a month that gets you access to two bonus episodes every single month, plus access to the back catalog of over 200 bonus episodes, all for $5 a month at Patreon.com. slash Bechtelcast.

And with that, shall we, it's always hard to do a send-off in a movie that ends tragically. Yeah, I think we just have to say we quit each other and, you know, not let it break our hearts. Shall we quit this episode? I wish I could. This episode.

Bye. The Bechtelcast is a production of I-Heart Media, hosted and produced by me, Jamie Loftus, and me, Caitlin Durante. The podcast is also produced by Sophie Lichtenen. And edited by Caitlin Durante. Ever heard of them? That's me.

And our logo and merch and all of our artwork, in fact, are designed by Jamie Loftus. Ever heard of her? Oh my God. And our theme song, by the way, was composed by Mike Kaplan. With vocals by Catherine Voskrasinski. Iconic. And a special thanks to the one and only Aristotle Acevedo. For more information about the podcast, please visit Linktree,

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Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form. We're launching Podlandia A.O. Rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together. breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guestrars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more.

Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song. Well, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. A.O. Rewatch on the I. Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam?

I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam Jay. And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. We're breaking down the biggest headlines. Naomi Osaka, show it out. Shout out to you, Naomi.

The viral moments. I've been obsessed with Kashan Rock's boxing journey. She looks good. Her combos are swift. And the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports On the IHeart radio app

Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast Guaranteed Human