Why do Women Like Brokeback Mountain?
Meghan Daum writing for the San Jose Mercury News says that a big reason for Brokeback Mountain’s success is that it’s a “chick flick.”
So how has this art-house film, a “gay movie” whose target audience is ostensibly the small percentage of the population that identifies as homosexual, managed to insinuate itself into the hearts and cocktail-party conversations of so many heteros? It’s that 51 percent of the population known as women.
Despite its vast Western landscapes, drunken cowboy talk and gay sex scenes (actually, straight sex gets far more screen time in this film), “Brokeback Mountain” is a thinking girl’s chick flick with roughly the same hormonal balance (not to mention the same screenwriter) as that quintessence of high-quality estro-cinema, “Terms of Endearment.”
I’m not talking about the obvious girl-friendly accoutrements of the tough guy/tender heart dichotomy — the men’s skillful horsemanship, their penchant for carrying injured lambs on their laps, the way they look in jeans. I’m talking about something much more visceral.
For all their monosyllabism, Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis (Heath Ledger) are fonts of emotion. Sure, they’re prone to the usual male pattern of drinking, fighting and marrying women without knowing quite what they’re doing, but when it comes to their love for each other, their hearts aren’t just on their sleeves, they’re pinned to their foreheads.
And guess what? Chicks dig it.
But why do women want to see a movie where the two best looking guys in the story have a 20-year affair behind the backs of their wives?
Instead of merely acquiring the trappings of kinder, gentler manhood, Jack and Ennis actually walk the walk. The sight of Jake Gyllenhaal crying in his truck as he drives away from Ennis (who retreats to an alley and vomits in tortured despair) is enough to make even the bitterest woman swoon.
That moment, like so many in the film, feels like an epiphany not because of the gay context but because for once someone other than the woman is crying. Traditionally, women have done the heavy emotional lifting. We’re the ones who scream and probe and force conversations about the relationship while the man stews in confusion as to whether he’s feeling vulnerable or just hungry for a steak. With Jack and Ennis, however, there’s no woman to pick up the emotional slack, and they’re forced to experience their feelings without the benefit of female translation or analysis. In other words, they are (at least for each other) as emotionally available as it gets.
Talk about something being worth the price of admission! For women, “Brokeback Mountain” is kind of like a vacation from our own brains, at least the part of our brains that obsesses over relationships. Instead, we get to watch men express the feelings we always want them to express but often end up doing for them. The sex, whatever the brand, is incidental compared to the unprecedented purity of male emotion on the screen.
So let me ask the question again.
Why do women want to see a movie where the two best looking guys in the story have a 20-year affair behind the backs of their nagging, emotionally needy wives?
Though what “Brokeback Mountain” amounts to, in effect, is female-targeted emotional pornography, both sexes of all inclinations could learn a thing or two from it. By acting like men but emoting like women, by embodying both sides of the divide, Jack and Ennis cover all the bases of the romantic equation. This makes more conventional movie characters — male or female — seem woefully one-dimensional by comparison.
I think that guys like to be around each other to get a vacation from the non-stop emoting of their women, who tend to do more than enough emoting for both people in the relationship.
Straight men shut down emotionally because so many women can’t get enough emotion. When one person is falling apart emotionally, the other has got to keep it together.
The “heavy lifting” is the woman’s need to satisfy and validate herself isn’t it? It’s not really for the relationship.
One of my readers painted this blunt assessment of the dynamics behind a woman taking her man to see the movie:
Though women may believe they want to know what a man is thinking and feeling, a man with even limited experience with women knows the only acceptable response (that will avoid setting the woman off even more) is to validate the woman’s feelings.
I think that’s what women are doing in their endless girl-talk chattering is validating each other’s feelings. A man can’t play that game and still represent the manliness that a woman really wants.
Think of a woman taking her man to see BM. That experience cannot ever be about what the man thinks and feels. It’s a test to see how sensitive he is to what she’s thinking and feeling. If he confirms what she’s experiencing, he’ll get laid that night.
Does the thrill of watching more than two hours of “emotional pornography” and all the accompanying opportunities to feel sad, lonely, depressed, happy and empathetic blind the women in the audience to the fact that it’s about two handsome, masculine guys who for 20 years find a respite from the demands of their unsatisfying relationships with women in each other’s arms?
Personally, I don’t get it.
Not that there’s anything wrong with it.
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