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The celluloid closet

Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain
  • Posted at 1:57pm
  • 16 May 2008
  • by AndrewCollins-RT
  • 1 comment

Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain wasn’t the first film to depict a gay, male relationship and win Oscars. That honour goes to Philadelphia, Jonathan Demme's unapologetically mainstream Aids drama starring Tom Hanks, which won two out of five nominations at the 1993 Academy Awards. (Brokeback won three out of eight.)

At the time, outside of the art house and specialist circuit, films about homosexual relationships were still rare – Personal Best, Torch Song Trilogy, Cruising.

But at least a shift in attitude in the 1980s had superseded the previous cinematic norm: a hint of homoerotic ambiguity. Think of the 1958 adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which alluded to Paul Newman’s relationship with a deceased male friend, but nothing more.

Scholars have often divined a homosexual subtext in essentially heterosexual films, from Ben-Hur and Spartacus to Strangers on a Train and Rebel without a Cause. But Brokeback Mountain, adapted from the short story by Annie Proulx, and starring straight actors Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Heath Ledger, was a landmark because it doesn’t tiptoe around the issue.

The illicit affair of two married men – one a rancher, the other a rodeo rider – would have seen them lynched in 1960s Wyoming and certainly ostracised 20 years later when the story concludes. In our more enlightened times, Brokeback Mountain opened up the subject for discussion.

Taking nearly $180 million worldwide (and $83 million across the US, not just in liberal New York and Los Angeles), it gave multiplex audiences something to talk about. It seems a shame that Gyllenhaal claimed in an interview that he and Ledger’s characters weren’t actually gay or bisexual, but “two straight guys who fall in love”.

But did it actually help to reduce lingering homophobia in Hollywood? Well, as long as ambitious gay movie stars feel the need to hide behind a façade of heterosexuality to protect their box-office success in Idaho, the spectre of intolerance will still haunt Tinseltown. It takes time to climb a mountain.

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  • Posted on 19 May 2008
  • at 7:22pm
  • by xseawitch

If it's still the case, it's terrible that gay actors still feel the need to pretend to be straight. I would have thought that with such talents as Ian McKellen, Rupert Everett and Stephen Fry out and proud, the pressure wouldn't so great, but then, I'm not in Hollywood...

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