Cowboys Don’t Cry: Reality Exposes Brokeback Propaganda

With the broadcast of the Oscars Sunday evening, the swirl of publicity for Brokeback Mountain is churning once again. Brokeback Mountain is known popularly as “the gay cowboy movie”, and though the press would like to portray it as a ‘love story’, it is little more than a propaganda piece.

If the film was truly about love, then marriages that the cowboys were in would not be thrown aside, but worked at and cherished. Instead, marriage was jettisioned in favor of adultery (not a new Hollywood theme, but neither is it a happy situation for the person left behind). Just as in all adultery, the issue isn’t love, but lust. Of course our pop culture has equated the two, but they are not equivalent. Love is self-sacrificing and dependable. Lust is self-satisfying and libertine.

Even if the movie didn’t have a gay agenda to it, the nihilism of lust it promotes only leaves a trail of pained broken lives. Ask any child of divorce. Ask any spouse left for another. Ask any person sexually exploited.

Many commentators have noted the use of the cowboy as a striking icon to be placed in such a ‘cutting edge’ position. But a nihilistic homosexual advocacy film about cowboys betrays its very propagandist agenda. The reason is that, as the saying goes, “Cowboys don’t cry.” It is not that cowboys never shed a tear, but that the cowboy is epitomized by self-sacrifice and dependability. They seek to be strong for the sake of others. They don’t wallow in self-pity or whine about not getting their way. The cowboy, out of love and duty, does the right thing, even if it kills him.

That Larry McMurtry is involved in the screenplay adds to the cowboy element of the film since he is viewed as the premier Western author of our time, and has real credibility with actual cowboys. But even McMurtry’s constructions in this film would be at best fantasy. Does he know of many cowboys who engaged in ongoing, ‘consensual’ adult gay sex, yet stayed working on a ranch? It just doesn’t fit reality at all. If the Brokeback scenario was real, the two guys would have jumped in the pickup truck and left for the San Francisco.
In reality, if there is any near construct that could be plausible, it would be of a pedophile living alone on a ranch. But pedophilia doesn’t win Oscars (yet). And pedophilia still has difficulties being spun onto suburban screens in wide-release. But if McMurtry wanted to depict the nihilism realistically, he would have made Brokeback a study in sexual exploitation of a child.

So the plausibility of the film as it stands shows the marks of special pleading and spin-doctoring of the first order. I’m sure the cinematography is outstanding, with Alberta’s landscape shown prominently. But all of the beauty of the Rockies and the moral capital of the cowboy icon, do not mask the gaping emptiness of a story about self-satisfaction, self-interest, and self-centredness. It couldn’t be more un-cowboy.