Love and Sweat at the Movies

Last night, Chrystal and I went to see Brokeback Mountain. We were wiry and heated, hypothesizing about the effect watching the film would have on us. We wondered how graphic it would be. My mother had said it didn't have all that much sex in it, but that it was a visually beautiful movie. Ha! The mountains must have blocked her view.

This week's New Yorker cover has a cartoon parody of Brokeback Mountain, along with virtually every other mainstream print and web media piece since its release, and subsequent innumerable recognitions. Many of the jokes are funny, but the movie itself is stunning. And Mom was right. It is visually beautiful. Not only the scenery and the silvery sheen of the sheep's backs, but the fine movements in Heath Ledger's sparse expressions. As Ennis, he transforms externally from a 20-year-old to a middle-aged man, but he maintains the same restraint, the fear of being exposed, in every line of his face. I searched his skin for movie make-up and his eyes for some giveaway, but he was undeniably Ennis Del Mar, and his wife a very pained ex. Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist is all revved up, and I was with him, but he was emotional, expressive, and so a familiar character. I dunno what happened with Jack's wife, Anne Hathaway, of Princess Diaries fame, but her make-up was absurd, and I didn't believe her for a minute.

When Ennis and Jack push each other away and then get to each other when they can, it's a deceptively easy metaphor for any relationship. But it's also all about sex: the movie strengthens my original lust theory, the one I have held onto for years. No lust? Fuggetaboutit. When a friend tells me she's met someone and they have fun, but there's no chemistry, my response - if she wants it, okay, even if she doesn't want it - is give it up. You are wasting your time. One cannot maintain any sort of long-term, going-through-shit, hating-each-other, meeting-related-people-and-friends (some of whom you inevitably will not be crazy about), without a fundamental, biological I-wanna-rip-something-offa-you, or suck something, or get carnal somehow, that strings you together. Those urges may fade or hibernate, but if they're never ever there, I maintain that they will not show up, regardless of how much you care about each other.

This is why the movie is, yes, about love and passion and how fucked up it is that two men cannot love one another, but it is also about how integral the fucking and the physical and the taste is to the relationship. They can be best friends, and that's all sweet, but they need to be closer than that: they crave the skin-to-skin, the biological and natural urge to get under and into and around, to surpass the superficial and reach for the visceral.

So in the final analysis of what I guess is a movie review, I recommend you go see it so you can remember that true love is rare and it isn't all about a good fuck but it isn't all about a fucking table and chairs and a casserole, either.