Try as they might, conservatives just can't quit Brokeback Mountain. Weeks after its release, Ang Lee's critically acclaimed hit continues to be the object of fixation among conservative pundits. The grumbling has been relentless. The movie advances Hollywood's “radical agenda,” says MSNBC's Joe Scarborough. Syndicated conservative radio host Janet Parshall calls it part of the “homosexualizing of America.” Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, talking about the film's critical success, says the rapturous response is “about mainstreaming certain conduct.”
That the right would reflexively reject a film romance involving gay men is no surprise. But what makes the conservative assault on Brokeback Mountain truly pernicious is not the strained squeamishness of insecure anchors. Rather, the campaign against the movie aims to accomplish a larger goal: turning liberal-leaning art into nothing more than propaganda, and enthusiasm for such art into a cause. Dismissing the praise for Brokeback Mountain as a political response from radicals is too easy.
Last year, conservative commentators pounced on Clint Eastwood's Academy Award-winning Million Dollar Baby, claiming the film was a pro-euthanasia message movie. The same tactics seem to be in play this year. The right-wing assault on Brokeback Mountain rests on two claims: One, that the movie is nothing more than shrill agitprop; and two, that the ecstatic media reception is evidence of the leftist conspiracy to shove progressive values down mainstream America's throat. Neither of these claims holds up to scrutiny.
Among other things, Ang Lee's film should be credited for inspiring a searching and lively discussion that renders meaningless the pigeon-holing of the movie as culture-war weapon. While it's undeniable that the filmmakers and actors hold progressive views about homosexuality, the movie is no pamphlet, as critics on both sides have found out. Indeed, it has encountered resistance from some critics on the left, who consider the movie a capitulation to bourgeois aesthetics and values. Instead of a recruiting film for gays, they see a tragedy in which one man is killed, the other left old and alone, and families are broken -- a punitive, rather than celebratory, vision of homosexuality.
Meanwhile, some conservative critics -- notably ones who've actually seen the movie -- have offered similarly complicated responses. Victor Morton, who writes the excellent film blog “Right-Wing Film Geek,” lavished praise on the film and chastised fellow conservatives for judging it on its purported agenda rather than its actual merits. “[T]he film deserves better than to be reacted to, positively OR negatively, as an exercise in gay-lifestyle validation,” he writes. Morton points out that Brokeback Mountain fits in the same category as movies like The Age of Innocence and Brief Encounter -- romantic tragedies that, in their time, certainly weren't flagged as endorsements of adultery. Brokeback's subtlety and richness are so self-evident that two film critics on opposite sides of the political spectrum -- The New Yorker's Anthony Lane and right-wing loon Michael Medved -- agree on its merits. “Any attempt to promote this as an issue movie, gripped by an agenda, feels badly misplaced; the only issue here is the oldest and most sorrowful one of all,” Lane writes. “The movie is better than the agenda, because the movie is a complex film, and it's extremely well acted and extremely well done,” echoes Medved.
But if the movie itself transcends the culture-war ghetto, its selling has not. There's that word: “agenda.” Lane's line shows that even ostensibly liberal critics have internalized the right-wing claim that the movie is being pushed as part of a larger progressive conspiracy. It's a notion that right-wing punditry has done an effective job of peddling. MSNBC'S Tucker Carlson, while acknowledging the movie might be good as art, assailed it anyway: “I am merely saying it is used by people with a political agenda -- in this case, its own director -- to make a political point.” (Someone should send him a copy of Lee's The Ice Storm, a lacerating, neocon-ish critique of the sexual revolution, hardly the work of a radical polemicist.) Reliably, Bill O'Reilly lashed out at the media for pushing the movie solely because it “want[s] to mainstream homosexual conduct.”
In defending his claims, O'Reilly touts the gotcha fact that the New York Times had published six articles on Brokeback in the weeks leading up to its release, a level of attention that he says he had not seen in years. O'Reilly doesn't seem to read the papers much. During the same span when those Brokeback pieces were written, the Times also wrote about Peter Jackson's King Kong the same number of times. (Considering Kong has been seen as a disappointment, you can argue it did not merit the coverage.) At the time of O'Reilly's rant, Brokeback had just come off a week in which it won the top prizes from the Los Angeles and New York City film critics and opened to stupendous per-screen averages in theaters. Too busy beating back the liberal conspiracy, O'Reilly seems to have missed those facts. But, even if he were right, we don't have to go too far back to find the last movie to command this much free publicity from the allegedly far-left New York Times. In early 2004, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was written about more than 20 times in the weeks leading up to its release. Going by O'Reilly's logic, the Times was one of the biggest cheerleaders for Gibson's film.
Perhaps what grates conservatives is Brokeback's unexpected box-office success. O'Reilly's fellow blowhard John Gibson called Brokeback a movie made “in defiance of its audience” and predicted box-office disaster. Charles Krauthammer quipped that only “18 people” would see the movie. Made for a mere $14 million, a pittance by Hollywood standards, the movie has already made $60 million. And it hasn't been just the blue states. The Wall Street Journal's John Lippman, in a recent report, found that the movie has performed surprisingly well in the heartland as well, even trumping big-budget Hollywood fare. Prognosticators say the movie is on its way to passing the $100 million mark.
But what is the point, really, of using facts and reason to respond to the O'Reillys and the Scarboroughs? When it comes to pop culture, the right's template is set. If a liberal movie comes out, wait for the critical reception. If the reviews are bad and the movie flops, ignore safely. If it gains traction, however, spread the word: The liberals are at it again! Ignoring the scores of gay-themed movies that have not received attention from the so-called liberal media, conservatives stay on message with Brokeback Mountain and sell the myth of the radical Hollywood agenda. It's a fiction as fanciful as anything the movies have given us.
Elbert Ventura is a research fellow at Media Matters for America.
