Brokeback Mountain

Dear Son,

To understand this movie, you have to understand the cultural background in which it was released. And then, if you ever see it, you will realize the depth of its banality.

First of all, the image of the Gay Cowboy Movie as the ultimate in ridiculousness in independent film was firmly implanted in popular culture in 1998 by an episode of South Park. You know you've experienced brilliant satire when the target of the zing didn't even exist yet.

But fast forward. During the Bush Administration, Hollywood has become increasingly hostile to all things conservative. One of the big culture war issues was gay marriage, which a number of states soundly rejected in the 2004 election. But Hollywood was out to convince all of us that gay people are perfectly normal and perfectly healthy, and to do it, they needed a vehicle. And what better than a rousing and moving love story to show that gay relationships are just like any other relationship.

Of course, that's problem number one. Any time you're trying to "teach society a lesson" from a movie, the quality of the movie is going to take a hit. Who wants to be beaten over the head, after all?

The irony is that every time there's a show out there that purports to mainstream and normalize gay relationships, they show it in such a way that reinforces the stereotype that all gays are highly dysfunctional, promiscuous, have terrible relationships with their fathers, etc. The big TV "outing" was a show called Will & Grace, which finally ends this season. It was a good show (before it jumped the shark), but it didn't exactly do wonders for the dignity of gay America. Brokeback works in almost exactly the same way.

Knowing that this was the likely outcome, I had no desire to see it in the theaters. I read a lot about it, though, and it was nominated for Best Picture for 2005. There was a bunch of controversy surrounding allegations that despite its brilliance as a movie, voting members of the Academy weren't watching it because they were all closet homophobes. (Yes. The hordes of closet homophobes in Hollywood. Yawn.) Despite all this, it was favored to win that year, but was upset by another preachy although much better movie called Crash (which at that point was the only one of the contenders I'd actually seen). Then there was much harrumphing about how Brokeback got robbed.

Your mom wanted to see it, and I must confess that I wanted to see it just so I could ridicule it in good faith. So we Netflixed it.

First of all, I have to get out there that the visuals were fantastic. The composition of the images on the screen were artfully done, and achieved the emotional expression that they meant to capture. The landscape was able to capture simple beauty along with a sense of isolation and loneliness that was perfect for what the movie was trying to do. Unfortunately, that's where the quality of the movie ends.

One of the first rules of literature is that you have to have characters people care about. That doesn't mean necessarily that you have to like them, but you have to give a damn what happens to them. This movie broke this rule.

These two guys were pathetic. They cheated on each other, cheated on their wives, made no attempt to get better jobs, were distant and even downright mean to their spouses (yes, they were married, too), and whined a whole hell of a lot. I mean a LOT. And they kept doing it to themselves. Jack (Gyllenhall) visited male prostitutes with abandon in Mexico. They never once learned a lesson. And that equals a flat character arc that makes them uninteresting.

The other problem is that they just weren't believable. When they had their first sex scene - a pretty graphic one - Heath Ledger's character Ennis supposedly was new to the whole gay sex thing. But he didn't look new at it. He went at it like a guy that knew what he was doing - improvised lube and all. And worse, up until then their relationship hadn't gotten to that point. There just wasn't that much sexual tension. Or any tension. If two heterosexual characters had the same kind of interactions, it wouldn't have made any sense either. (Of course, that was the only time the action went too fast - the rest of the time it was slow and incredibly boring.)

But it was more than that. Jake Gyllenhall's hick accent was over the top and contrived. Their interactions with people made no sense. They were supposedly gay (which we're told is immutable), but neither of them had any problem being with women and fathering children. Ennis' wife knew he had a boyfriend, and did nothing for years. Jack is apparently killed at the end for being gay, but by then his character is so selfish, repulsive, disloyal, and slimy, that there's no sense of loss, no emotional impact.

At the end of the day, the tragedy was supposed to be that, "If only society were more accepting, then maybe they could have been happy." But these guys were so incredibly stupid and self destructive that, society's blessing or not, they would have somehow made sure to make themselves miserable.

I'm pretty ambivalent about homosexuality. What grown adults want to do and how they want to conduct themselves is up to them. I think gays should be allowed to get married, but I don't think it's a Constitutional requirement, and I think society should be able to make that decision at the ballot box. I don't think it's a sin, but I don't think it's normal or healthy behavior. I don't think it's a healthy environment in which to raise kids. Whatever you may learn in school, gays are hardly oppressed in our society today - they earn more on average than other people, hold political office, and are completely unafraid to speak out about it without shame or humility. The thought of laws against gay people sitting in the front of a boss or sitting at a lunchcounter is so utterly ridiculous that it defies all logic when they try to paint their "struggle" as no different than the 60's civil rights struggles. I'm glad for this, but I don't know if they are - being a victim can be very gratifying to people with an agenda.

When I was in college, there was a great night club called the Gay '90s. It was so good that straight women who didn't want to be harassed by guys started going there. Then guys who had gotten over any homophobia they might have had realized that the club was not only fun, but that there was a lot of hot girls there with their guards down. The result was that it was completely mainstreamed without losing any of the gay theme. A core group of the local gay community actually wrote editorials being angry because they had achieved what they had demanded all along, and no one really cared about their "struggle" any more. That's when I learned that their real motivation was to get people to feel sorry for them. How sad and pathetic. Once again, the stereotypes were on full display, and any sympathy I might have once had for their "plight" evaporated pretty much forever.

Someday maybe I'll change my mind about all of this. But if I had never considered the issue before, and Brokeback Mountain was my first exposure to what it meant to be gay, it certainly wouldn't engender any sympathy or desire to see it accepted as healthy behavior. And that's the ultimate irony of this already bad movie. It had two objectives, to be a good movie and to teach us knuckle-draggers all a lesson about how we should accept gay lifestyles. But it fails to be a good movie, and teaches shows gay lifestyles as destructive. Tragedy indeed.

It will be interesting to know if you'll even have heard of this movie by the time you read this. And how with 20 years or so of hindsight, what you will think of it, and the issue with which it grapples.

Love, Dad

The Wider Audience

Dear Son,

The other day I was talking to someone who'd happened across this blog while looking for the Federalist Society one. She told me she enjoyed it, and that it was well written, and even that she had pointed someone else to it who thought all conservatives were terrible human beings with no soul. (That made me laugh, honestly - nothing like the tolerant, non-judgmental, and understanding liberals who value diversity and respect for all...)

It was an odd kind of sense of exposure, and kind of unexpected, weirdly enough. I'd heard it a couple times before, and every time it was always with that odd kind of jolt. This, however, was thus far the most distant person I knew who'd read it (even though she's still a good friend).

Not that I mind, mind you. If I did, I wouldn't have (a) made it easy to find, (b) used my real name, (c) let it show up on my profile on the FedSoc page, etc. If part of me didn't want people to read it, it wouldn't be on a blog.

The first time I had that feeling was when I worked up the courage to tell your mom about it. The funny thing is that she'd already read it, but didn't want to tell me about it because she didn't know if I wanted her to know about it. The truth was, I didn't think it was good enough for her to see yet, or maybe that I hadn't said enough nice things about her (not that years of blog entries would be enough for that). But I was glad that she had seen it, and that she'd enjoyed it.

After I knew she knew about it, I even linked it on my MySpace page. I figured after that, I didn't really care who read it.

I imagine other people will read it eventually. One of these days I'll get around to putting a hit counter on the thing. I don't know if I'll be scared at how many people are looking over our shoulders, in a way, or disappointed that it isn't more of them. I suspect it'll be a little of both.

So there it is. For whatever it's worth, you won't be the first person to have read this. But honestly, I still think almost exclusively of you as my audience when I'm writing this - the other readers are a background I'm only faintly conscious of as I type. (Your mom is the only exception to this - she's the better writer, and I fear her disappointment with every grammatical error that I let seep through - and, after all, I want her to think I'll be a good Dad!) And at the end of the day, you will be the only reader I really care about impressing, and the only blog audience that really matters.

Love, Dad.

Arguing in the Special Olympics

Dear Son,

Last Thursday I had a Law & Economics class where someone really got to me. We share the class with the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Policy, which sounds impressive and important, but is, in fact, a bunch of people for whom either four years of political science wasn't enough, or who want to legitimize their empty-headed political ideas by getting a degree in them. But I digress.

Anyway, one of the Evans School dudes was really needling me. He was sooooo smug, and nothing sets me off like smug. Arrogance, jerkiness, rudeness - all those things I can deal with, but smugness, especially from someone who has no right to be smug, really gets my goat.

I had stayed home that morning to work on a paper, and drank a whole pot of coffee. Then on my way in, some promoters were giving out free Monster Energy Drinks on the Ave. (I'm pretty much assuming those types of drinks will be illegal in your time.) I was FLYING in class, and particularly strident. And the dude was needling, eye rolling, interjecting bumper sticker wisdom... And partly because of the lack of sleep the night before and the over caffeination, I left madder than hell.

I don't think it's that the smug dude was extraordinary, especially by Seattle standards. In fact, I think it was that he is completely typical for this place. I think the fact that he was the norm all around me was what got me.

The next day, it came out that the National Security Administration had been collecting telephone data for years, and had been using it to construct calling patterns to locate terrorists. This isn't the first time such a secret program has been outed by reporters with misplaced priorities, but the wailing and gnashing of teeth was audible all over the city. Perusing the local fishwrap (is it still fishwrap if it's on line, even if that's still all it's good for?), I came across a forum full of smug and self righteous fools who were convinced the Great Orwellian Nightmare was finally upon us.

Now, I know that arguing on the internet is pretty much useless - ESPECIALLY when you do it anonymously. But I pretty much wanted to vent. So I went on, raged about hippies, and explained to them how dumb they all were. Which they were. I even threw in some facts, which were ignored haughtily by the elitists. So I raged some more, got one of them to rage back about how rich and successful he was in between his complaints about "The Corporations", had another explain I was covering up the 9/11 conspiracies, and had yet others take a break from calling all Republicans fascists and Nazis to explain how I was unpersuasive because I threw the word "hippy" around a lot. I kept going back, because for some reason I really, really needed to expend the rage and energy. It's frustrating to be a conservative in this town and in a huge university, where common sense is an uncommon virtue. So basically I was just taking the opportunity to shout at every stupid thing I'd ever heard or seen since I moved here, with the Prince of Smug from class foremost in my mind. And for awhile it felt really good. I'm not gonna lie.

But, of course, that kind of emotion takes a lot of energy to sustain. I let it run its course, and while I didn't change any minds (although one guy offered to vote for me), it felt good for me, until it tuckered me out. Now I just think it's funny.

There's a couple of lessons in this. First, anonymous debate on the internet rarely has anything to do with debate. Mostly it's just repeating platitudes and shouting at each other, ignoring things that don't fit into your point of view already, and looking for the dumbest things your opponents say so you can feel smarter than them. This is true even if you actually ARE smarter than them. Which is why it's also true that arguing on the internet is like running in the Special Olympics...

(Hopefully, you will be horrified that I would ever have thought that was funny. But it's just too apt.)

That's not always bad, sometimes it's cathartic. But it's not a process by which you inspect and attack ideas to test their veracity. It's just chest thumping.

It's also hate-feeding. Fortunately, I just got exhausted with it. But I can see how scholars turn personally bitter over scientific disagreements, and why people can't let go of it. Self-righteous indignation - ESPECIALLY when you're actually both right and justifiably indignant - feels so, so good. It also feels good when you're wrong, though, leading to a false sense of being right. And chasing that feeling is really what those message boards are all about.

It's funny, as I sit here and type this, how this makes me feel just the opposite as I did when furiously pounding away on my keyboard spewing unfettered and well deserved bile at hippies everywhere, past, present, and future. I could almost feel my soul twist when I was doing that. But this? This makes me happy - I'm calmer, feel full of joy, and have regained the sense that things are actually pretty much right in the universe. So thanks for that. It's a benefit of writing this blog to you that I didn't anticipate. So I guess the other thing is that it's a good reminder how poisonous argument (instead of debate) can really be, and to know when to do what. And why debate is best done with your real name attached, so you still feel like a human being who can be held accountable later - which is why I do it that way on the Federalist Society blog.

So as I was about to type this rambling story, I saw a good capper for it. Senator John McCain, whom you will have either never heard of or will be President when you are born, gave a graduation speech at a notoriously fundamentalist Christian university. The founder of the University is a man named Jerry Falwell, who is pretty much a complete jackass, and has said some things that make most Christians just shake their heads. McCain himself called him an "agent of intolerance" a few years back, and so everyone was wondering how and if that was going to come up - especially now that McCain is running for President and has to reach out to the Christian conservatives.

What he said was brilliant, and so apt to what was on my mind, that I just had to share it. Here's Byron York's telling of it:

When McCain rose to speak, he did not return the tribute. In fact, he mentioned Falwell's name exactly once, when he said, "Thank you, Dr. Falwell." Then McCain began what seemed to be a boilerplate graduation-address introduction, talking about what a know-it-all he had been when he was young and how he became much less certain of his rightness as he grew older. But he was in fact laying the premise for everything to come. He loved to argue back then, McCain said, and arguing is still a good thing. In fact, we owe it to ourselves to argue. "We have our disagreements, we Americans," McCain told the students. "It is more than appropriate, it is necessary that even in times of crisis, especially in times of crisis, we fight among ourselves for the things we believe in."

That led McCain to the most disagreed-upon issue in American politics today, the war in Iraq. He supported the decision to go to war, he said, and he still does. But he respects those who disagree and believes Americans "should argue about this war." "If an American feels the decision was unwise, then they should state their opposition, and argue for another course," McCain said. "It is your right and your obligation. I respect you for it." And then, with a Lincolnesque touch, he added, "But I ask that you consider the possibility that I, too, am trying to meet my responsibilities, to follow my conscience, to do my duty as best as I can, as God has given me light to see that duty."

With that, McCain moved on to that third way of dealing with his clashes with Falwell, and, by extension, with millions of Christian conservatives who might not necessarily follow Falwell but who were put off by McCain's attacks in 2000. "Let us argue with each other then," he said:

By all means, let us argue. Our differences are not petty, they often involve cherished beliefs, and represent our best judgment about what is right for our country and humanity. Let us defend those beliefs. But let us remember, we are not enemies. We are compatriots defending ourselves from a real enemy. We have nothing to fear from each other. We are arguing over the means to better secure our freedom, promote the general welfare and defend our ideals. It should remain an argument among friends; each of us struggling to hear our conscience, and heed its demands; each of us, despite our differences, united in our great cause, and respectful of the goodness in each other. I have not always heeded this injunction myself, and I regret it very much.

Brilliant. It wasn't the standard drivel about how we should all get along, or about how at the end of the day, our differences don't matter. Because they do matter. But giving people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their motives and intentions will make you a batter person, more able to communicate with people and to move them your way.

I hope he winds up being a guy you've heard of.

Love, Dad.