Review: Brokeback Mountain

The plot is simple. It is 1963 in a remote area of rural Wyoming. Two young men, Ennis and Jack, are hired to take care of sheep during their seasonal grazing on Brokeback Mountain. By degrees, their casual and inarticulate friendship turns into attraction. Jack makes the first move, pulling Jack’s hand towards him as they share a rough bed in the bitterly cold night. What follows is a passionate love, never spoken, even in their thoughts, though their actions show deep caring.

On one occasion Ennis says, "I'm not no queer," and Jack responds - "Me neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody's business but ours."

But it’s not quite nobody’s business, as the ranch manager watches through binoculars, and sees them romping about, utterly unaware of the rest of the world. He challenges them; their first taste of the outside world’s fanatical loathing of same sex love.

However, they are already very aware of society’s demands, and at the end of the summer they part, both to make unsuccessful marriages. Over the years, they meet for occasional camping trips. At once point, Jack comes into a bit of money, and asks Ennis to go farming with him, but Ennis refuses - all too aware of what happens to gay men in rural America: when he was a boy his father took him to see a man slaughtered with tyre irons by his righteous Christian neighbours.

Twenty years after their first meeting, Jack is found dead beside his car on a remote road – apparently an accident; he was impaled on a tyre iron while fixing his ancient truck.

Ennis realises he has lost the only life that was real to him; grasping for the first time the depth of his love for Jack. But society is still all-powerful, and Jack’s family frustrate Ennis’s attempt to carry out Jack’s last wish: that his ashes should be scattered on Brokeback Mountain.

The story is a superb piece of writing. Proulx manages to catch the essence of both men without using the abstract concepts that would have been a foreign language to them. Her understatement also gives great power to the story’s condemnation of prejudice.