(The Texas-Wyoming pairing may be a joke: in the Rough Guide to Westerns, Paul Simpson cleverly points out that Ennis and Jack are, respectively, from the homelands of No.s 1 and 2 in the Bush Jr. Jack Twist works for a middle-class Texas business owned by his small-minded redneck father. Ennis del Mar exists in a rural, lower-class Wyoming - an undeveloped area where his family resides in a rather squalid apartment house, in essence rural and impoverished, less bucolic than it is a wasteland. While the idyllic unions between Jack and Ennis occur away from their homes, the men live in two versions of social repression. The Crying Game, in comparison, avoided the vulnerability of a non-hetero romance by burying its love story within a thriller.īrokeback is also an outright indictment of conservatism. At its roots, the story/film is a classic romance, albeit one that highlights love most forbidden. Thankfully, unlike those simpler films of lesser quality, many dynamics to Brokeback are still unchartered. Its merits and importance aside, Brokeback's prominence in the 2005 awards season could make it a thing of the past: think of other "issue-based" films, like A Beautiful Mind and Million Dollar Baby now in the $5.99 digital dustbins at SprawlMart. Yet, Brokeback could easily side into cultural amnesia, as did The Crying Game. After more discussion, another student came to my aid: "It was like their Brokeback Mountain." I replied that, though the films are different in many ways - lumping gays and transsexuals/-vestites together is always shifty - The Crying Game's influence on the mainstream was quite similar. (It was highlighted in Susan Bordo's text The Male Body, required reading for my class and, I'd say, for anyone who may be reading this.) One student asked how popular Neil Jordan's film was the year of its release, and I replied - flatly, I now realize - that it became a surprise hit, thanks to controversy. Two years ago, while teaching a freshman college writing seminar on gender issues, I discussed The Crying Game with my students.
0 kommentar(er)
