Thanks to Mental Meanderings, I came across this piece of American political correctness about Brokeback Mountain. Apparently, veteran NBC film critic Gene Shalit got into hot water for referring to Jake Gyllenhaal’s character Jack Twist as a “sexual predator” who “tracks Ennis down and coaxes him into sporadic trysts”. Shalit has been forced to apologise for causing offence, in the face of fierce criticism from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.I despair. Has no one in GLAAD ever cruised? Has American sexual politics reached the stage where the realities of hot sex cannot be portrayed on film, nor discussed in anything but saccharine-sweet romantic (ie domesticated, normative) terms? When can art finally be released from the PC yoke of representation and let loose over the reality of human experience, when it comes to (queer/sexual) men’s lives?

I saw Brokeback Mountain on Saturday and it shattered me. I loved it, as did my friends. It is a beautifully made film, and so much has been said about it before I’ll only add that I found the performances of each of the supporting actors luminous, however short a time they appeared, with Roberta Maxwell, Jack’s mother, especially, eating up the screen.

I was delighted that Jack and Ennis’ first sex was a hard fuck, not a romantic tryst. My only complaint about the film is that the sex wasn’t queer enough, tough enough, hot enough, predatory enough. Ledger was perfectly cast, and although Gyllenhaal is a stunning actor, and was magnificent in the role, especially in the seventies section of the film, I believe he was miscast in a way that is all-too-typical of Hollywood, and what I have to say is not a criticism of Gyllenhaal himself, but more about how real, flawed, human faces and bodies don’t get portrayed in Hollywood.

Annie Proulx herself says that she imagined Jack Twist being “jumpier, homely” when she wrote him. This makes sense on a sexual level. The power dynamic of two men fucking was only present in the first sex scene, when it becomes obvious who had to fuck who, and that it couldn’t really be any other way. This made me wonder about the horniness of dominance and submission, and how a nervier, more-in-need-of-protection Jack might certainly have queered the manly Ennis up by seducing him with his pretty little ass. It is congruent with the violence in their relationship, which was erotically charged. Jack did go searching for Ennis and certainly it was predatory, sexual. To deny that is to deny the sexual impulse. Sure, the story is about love as well, and loss and fear and beauty and compromise and hate, but let’s not ignore the psychologial truth of the voraciously sexual man who goes hunting for cock whenever he can. That’s how Proulx wrote Jack Twist, and that’s how a lot of men are.