Redefining the Western masculine hero in Brokeback Mountain

¶ … Brokeback Mountain

The Western "Brokeback Mountain" takes the traditional masculine cinematic setting of the American West and transforms it into a love story -- between two male cowboys. According to Stephen Holden's 2005 review in the New York Times, "Brokeback Mountain" is "the first Hollywood movie to unmask the homoerotic strain in American culture [of] an unconscious romantic attachment shared by two males...as they flee the more constraining and civilizing domain of women" (Holden 2006). Director Ang Lee specifically chooses the American West as a place that is usually depicted as absent of women, or as hostile to femininity, and uses the trope of the hyper-masculine cowboy to explain the two men's attraction. The central characters of Jake and Ennis are ranch hands that almost accidentally fall into a sexual alliance on a cold, desolate night. At times their lovemaking is "indistinguishable from fighting," because they have been brought up to disdain tender shows of affection (Holden, 2006). The violence allows the director to sustain the masculine atmosphere of a Western, while adding to the genre by making love, rather than violence between men, the focus of the plot.

Another facet of many Westerns is the idea of the hero as a strong 'silent' type who cannot reveal his emotions. Of the two cowboys, Ennis is so quiet he barely speaks during the first part of the film. Roger Ebert notes that the inarticulate male hero is another Western trope which he read about in: "McMurtry's Lonesome Dove trilogy, and as I saw the movie I was reminded of Gus and Woodrow, the two cowboys who spend a lifetime together. They aren't gay; one of them is a womanizer and the other spends his whole life regretting the loss of the one woman he loved. They're straight, but just as crippled by a society that tells them how a man must behave and what he must feel" (Ebert, 2005).