Brokeback Mountain the Western "Brokeback Term Paper

Roger Ebert notes that the inarticulate male hero is another Western trope which he read about in: "McMurtry's Lonesome Dove trilogy, and as I saw the movie I was reminded of Gus and Woodrow, the two cowboys who spend a lifetime together. They aren't gay; one of them is a womanizer and the other spends his whole life regretting the loss of the one woman he loved. They're straight, but just as crippled by a society that tells them how a man must behave and what he must feel" (Ebert, 2005). In a Western, the most heroic characters in the spare, lawless landscape of the Old West, often feel the deepest, and in "Brokeback Mountain" the characters who feel forbidden love, feel the most pain and joy in love. The two characters share a love that is greater than the love they feel for any feminine element of society, including women.This is also typical of non-homosexual male friendships in Westerns, Lee's film merely takes the celebrated Western values of masculinity, silence, stalwartness, and a defiance of societal convention and takes them to their logical conclusion -- a homosexual relationship.

Works Cited

Ebert, Roger. "Brokeback Mountain." The Chicago-Sun Times. 16 Dec 2005.

28 Oct 2007. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051215/REVIEWS/51019006/1023

Holden, Stephen. "Brokeback Mountain." The New York Times. 12 May 2005.

28 Oct 2007. http://movies.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/movies/09brok.html?_r=1&oref=slogin.....