I Love My Gay Cowboy Brother-In-Law. But...

Americans don't want cowboys to be gay – Larry McMurtry

I feel compelled to note at the very beginning of this entry that Lew, my brother-in-law, is gay and that Lew, my brother-in-law, is a cowboy. I love my gay cowboy brother-in-law! There. I've gotten that out of the way.

I should also note that I don't get out much; thus, I didn't see a whole lot of movies on the big screen this year. Of the ones I did see, Hustle & Flow was by far my favorite, with King Kong coming in a distant second. (Capote I also liked a lot but for idiocyncratic reasons having to do with how brilliantly that vampirish relationship between writer and subject matter was explored. Best Picture of the Year material? Nah.)

Crash was a mere mote in the rearview mirror.

But I liked it way better than Breakback Mountain.

Here's something amazing: not everybody who didn't like Breakback Mountain is a homophobe.

Face it: Larry McMurtry & longtime writing associate Diana Ossana (who really should think twice about wearing a sleeveless gown to the podium if she ever gets nominated again) wrote a dreadful adaptation of what is a brilliant, stirring, moving short story. Everything that was good about that movie came from Annie Proulx. (With one exception: I did like how the Princess Diaries wife grew blonder and blonder and blonder with each passing year of wedded alienation.) Everything that was bad about the movie came from Larry McMurtry. McMurtry wrote one perfect novel early in his career (The Last Picture Show) and has been on a downhill slide ever since. Where has his sled come to rest? Well, on that lush green flat part of the mountain (presumably Brokeback), bursting with purple flowers, the exact same spot where The Color Purple was shot, and a locale that has inspired numerous commercials for feminine hygiene products over the years.

The short story works precisely because it's not an epic story of forbidden love and disasterous consequence. It works because it's a very specific portrait of Ennis, a man to whom all expression is dangerous, a man for whom expression is an avenue for emotions that lead him to a vision of Jack's bad end -- that may, or may not, be true. The reader doesn't know! The writer isn't going to insult our intelligence by telling us! That's the brilliance of the story.

The prose in the story is very spare; the incidents -- relived through Ennis's selective memory -- chosen very carefully. (When I say "spare" here, I don't mean bad Hemingway imitations. I mean the author keeps a tight hand on the flow of information.) So I had to wonder about the screenwriters' own choices here – the things they took away as well as the things they put in. Why, for example, in the anal sex scene, did they feel the need to remove Jack's ejaculation (pun intended!), "Gun's goin off!" Why did they remove the immensely brutal but primal scene where Ennis sees his father's uncut dick? Why did they choose two actors with heart-throb looks to portray two characters who are described in homely terms?

Does the addition of the scenes in various bars, the scene at the fireworks, the Mexican scene, the Texas scenes give more depth to Ennis' saga? No. They're clichés, stations of the cross, little dioramas from the history of homosexual repression designed to make the saga more "universal."

I say fuck universality in story-telling. I say it's an insult to the reader and the filmgoer. I say clumsy manipulation of heart strings belongs on Lifetime, Television For Women.

I also say the gay community is behaving worse than Spike Lee this post-Oscar morning. God help us all if Chloe wins Project Runway.