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...
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