Brokeback Mountain

153 Pages·2010·0.88 MB·English

by  Gary Needham

AMERICAN INDIES
Series Editors: Gary Needham and Yannis Tzioumakis AMERICAN INDIES
This series of books discusses contemporary American films that have found
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commercial success but which have not been constrained by the formal and
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ideological parameters of mainstream Hollywood cinema. Each volume
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explores a specific film and combines original research with clearly defined
classroom-orientated frameworks of film analysis. K
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BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
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A
GARY NEEDHAM
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Upon its release in 2005, Brokeback Mountain became a major cultural K
event and a milestone in independent American filmmaking. Based
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on the short story by Annie Proulx and directed by Ang Lee, Brokeback
Mountain situated a love story between two closeted cowboys at the heart O
of American mythology, film spectatorship and genre. Brokeback Mountain U
offered an independent and queer revision of the conventions and clichés
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of the western and the melodrama through a studied exploration of
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homophobia and the closet. This book examines Brokeback Mountain in
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relation to indie cinema, genre, spectatorship, editing, and homosexuality.
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In doing so, it brings film studies and queer theory into dialogue with one N
another and explains the importance of Brokeback Mountain as both a

contemporary independent and queer film.

Key Features
• Provides an overview of Focus Features as a hybrid company operating
across both the mainstream and independent cinema sectors

• Analyses Brokeback Mountain as a western and places it within
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an enduring historical and cultural context of relations between
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homosexuality and the genre R
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• Analyses Brokeback Mountain as a melodrama examining the film’s
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relationship to concepts of pathos, backward feeling and passivity E
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• Proposes a new way of thinking about gay spectatorship that takes into D
account how editing and cruising relate to one another H BROKEBACK
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Gary Needham is Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Nottingham

Trent University. MOUNTAIN

isbn: 978 0 7486 3383 8

Edinburgh University Press
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22 George Square, Edinburgh eh8 9lf d
in GARY NEEDHAM
www.euppublishing.com b
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Cover image: scene still from Brokeback Mountain, 2005. © Focus Features/The Kobal Collection h
Brokeback Mountain
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American Indies
Series Editors: Gary Needham and Yannis Tzioumakis
Titles in the series include:
The Spanish Prisoner
Yannis Tzioumakis
978 0 7486 3368 5 (hbk)
978 0 7486 3369 2 (pbk)
Brokeback Mountain
Gary Needham
978 0 7486 3382 1 (hbk)
978 0 7486 3383 8 (pbk)
Memento
Claire Molloy
978 0 7486 3771 3 (hbk)
978 0 7486 3772 0 (pbk)
Lost in Translation
Geoff King
978 0 7486 3745 4 (hbk)
978 0 7486 3746 1 (pbk)
Forthcoming titles include:
Far From Heaven
Glyn Davis
978 0 7486 3778 2 (hbk)
978 0 7486 3779 9 (pbk)
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Brokeback Mountain
Gary Needham
Edinburgh University Press
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© Gary Needham, 2010
Illustrations appear courtesy of the following copyright holders:
Focus Features (Figures 1, 2, 6–11); United Artists/MGM (Figure 3);
AMG (Figure 4); Kino Video (Figure 5)
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in 11/13pt Monotype Baskerville by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham
and Eastbourne
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 3382 1 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 3383 8 (paperback)
The right of Gary Needham
to be identifi ed as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Series Preface vi
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction: Brokaholics Anonymous 1
1 The Indie in Focus 8
2 Queering the Western 31
3 A Pathetic State of Affairs: Brokeback Mountain and Melodrama 79
4 When Jack and Ennis Meet: Cruising as a Mode of Gay
Spectatorship 94
Notes 121
Bibliography 131
Index 139
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Series Preface
In recent years American independent cinema has not only become
the focus of signifi cant scholarly attention but as a category of fi lm
it has shifted from a marginal to a central position within American
cinema – a shift that can be also detected in the emergence of the label
‘indie’ cinema as opposed to independent cinema. The popularisation
of this ‘indie’ brand of fi lmmaking began in the 1990s with the com-
mercial success of the Sundance Film Festival and of specialty distribu-
tor Miramax Films, as well as the introduction of DVD, which made
independent fi lms more readily available as well as profi table for the
fi rst time. At the same time, fi lm studies started developing courses
that distinguished American independent cinema from mainstream
Hollywood, treating it as a separate object of study and a distinct dis-
cursive category.
Despite the surge in interest in independent cinema, a surge that
involved the publication of at least twenty books and edited collections
alongside a much larger number of articles on various aspects of inde-
pendent cinema, especially about the post-1 980 era, the fi eld – as it has
developed – still remains greatly under- researched in relation to the
changes of the past twenty years that defi ne the shift from independent
to ‘indie’ cinema. This is partly because a multifaceted phenomenon
such as American independent cinema, the history of which is as long
and complex as the history of mainstream Hollywood, has yet to be
adequately and satisfactorily documented. In this respect, academic fi lm
criticism is still in great need to account for the plethora of shapes, forms
and guises that American independent cinema has manifested itself
in. This is certainly not an easy task given that independent fi lm has,
indeed, taken a wide variety of forms at different historical trajectories
and has been infl uenced by a hugely diverse range of factors.
It is with this problem in mind that ‘American Indies’ was conceived
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Series Preface vii
by its editors. While the history of American independent cinema is still
being written with more studies already set to be published in the forth-
coming years, and while journal articles are enhancing our understand-
ing of more focused aspects of independent fi lmmaking, the ‘American
Indies’ series has been created to provide the necessary space to explore
and engage with specifi c examples of American ‘indie’ fi lms in a great
depth. Through this format, ‘American Indies’ aims to encourage an
examination of both the ‘indie’ text and its contexts, of understanding
how ‘indie’ fi lms operate within a particular fi lmmaking practice but also
how ‘indies’ have been shaping a new formation of American cinema. In
this respect, ‘American Indies’ provides the space for a detailed exami-
nation of industrial, economic and institutional concerns alongside
the more usual formal and aesthetic considerations that have histori-
cally characterised critical approaches of independent fi lms. ‘American
Indies’ is a series of comprehensive studies of carefully selected examples
of recent fi lms that reveal in great detail the many sides of the phenom-
enon of the recently emerged American ‘indie’ cinema.
As the fi rst book series to explore and defi ne this aspect of American
cinema, ‘American Indies’ has had the extremely diffi cult task of pro-
ducing a comprehensive set of criteria that informs its selection of titles.
Given the vastness of the fi eld, we have made several editorial decisions
in order to produce a coherent defi nition of this new phase of American
independent cinema. The fi rst such choice was to concentrate on recent
examples of independent cinema. Although the word ‘recent’ has often
been used to include fi lms made in the post-1 980 period, as editors we
decided that the cut-o ff point for fi lms to be included in this series would
be the year 1996. This was an extremely signifi cant year in the inde-
pendent fi lm sector, ‘the year of the independents’ as was triumphantly
proclaimed by the Los Angeles Business Journal in February 1997, for a
number of reasons. Arguably, the most signifi cant of these reasons was
the dynamic entrance in the fi lm market of Fox Searchlight, a new type
of a specialty fi lm division created by 20th Century Fox in 1995 with
the explicit intention of claiming a piece of the increasingly large inde-
pendent fi lm market pie. Fox Searchlight would achieve this objective
through the production and distribution of fi lms that followed many of
the conventions of independent fi lm as those were established after the
success of sex, lies and videotape in 1989. These conventions had since then
started being popularised by a number of fi lms produced and distributed
by Miramax Films, an independent company that was taken over by
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viii Series Preface
Disney after the phenomenal box offi ce success of several of its fi lms at
approximately the same time as 20th Century Fox was establishing its
specialty division.
The now direct involvement of entertainment conglomerates like
Disney and Fox in the independent fi lm sector had far- reaching effects.
Arguably, the most important of these was that the label ‘independ-
ent’, which for critics and the cinema going public (wrongly) signifi ed
economic independence from major fi lm companies like Disney, Fox,
Paramount, Universal, etc., obviously ceased to convey this meaning.
Instead, critics and public alike started using increasingly the label
‘indie’ which suggested a particular type of fi lm that adhered to a set of
conventions as well as a transformed independent cinema sector that
was now driven by specialty companies, most of them subsidiaries of
major entertainment conglomerates. It is this form of ‘independent’
cinema that has produced some of the most interesting fi lms to come out
of American cinema in recent years that ‘American Indies’ has set out
to explore in great depth and which explains our selection of the label
‘indies’ instead of independents.
We hope readers will enjoy the series
Gary Needham and Yannis Tzioumakis
American Indies Series Editors
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Acknowledgements
There are many people to thank who supported, discussed and put
up with my obsession with Brokeback Mountain. They are Karen Boyle,
Kay Dickinson, Dimitris Eleftheriotis, Amelie Hastie, Joanne Hollows,
Chris Holmlund, Sian Lincoln, Claire Molloy, Liz Morrish, Martin
O’Shaughnessy, Lydia Papadimtriou, Denis Provencher, Christopher
Pullen, Amy Villarejo, Dave Woods and Greg Woods. A special thanks
to Glyn Davis, co-c onspirator in all things queer, and Belen Vidal, both
of whom read chapter drafts and were able to make many useful sug-
gestions. Jackie Jones, thanks for your patience. This book would not
be what it is without the support and friendship of Yannis Tzioumakis.
We conceived of the series together and few will ever know how much
of this particular book was made possible by him. I can’t thank him
enough. And fi nally, to David Oswald, for love and support, thanks for
not quitting.
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