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One of the most contested and risible issues surrounding Brokeback Mountain was its generic status as a Western. In part, this was because the Western has close ties with American history and national mythology as well as links with certain forms of normative and hegemonic masculinity, often idealised as stoic, conservative and, most of all, ‘straight’. With the film questioning directly all these staples of masculinity, this chapter explores and validates Brokeback Mountain as a Western and utilises queer theory to demonstrate how the Western film genre can be rethought in alternative ways. It also positions Brokeback Mountain within a wider historical net concerning the links between the Western and homosexuality, a net that dates back to classical Westerns such as Red River (1948) and extends to underground films such as Andy Warhol's Horse (1965). The chapter considers a wider set of questions and issues that allows sexual politics and queerness to be articulated in relation to one of American cinema's most precious and enduring film genres.

This chapter counters universal readings of Brokeback Mountain (2005) as either a simplistic pastoral that romanticizes the American West, or a universal love story in service of gay normalization by highlighting how the film accounts for its historical setting and by focusing on how it frames its protagonists in relation to the natural world. It also brings new attention to the 1964 film Surf Party, which Brokeback Mountain briefly excerpts. Through a comparative reading, the chapter shows this seemingly frivolous beach romp to be a crucial intertext: like Brokeback, it depicts the policing of illicit desire in a natural context. The chapter concludes with an exploration of how, through its commentary on access to natural public space, Brokeback Mountain critiques the contemporary state of Western and, especially, U.S. gay politics.

This chapter analyses Brokeback Mountain's relationship to melodrama. Melodrama would seem to respond well to queer theory's recent turn to a politics of negative feeling. As this chapter argues, Brokeback Mountain's real power stems from the way it mobilises melodrama and queer negative feeling, which together produce an affective and emotionally queer film experience. Brokeback Mountain is all about pathos and the feelings of pity and powerlessness it cultivates for the spectator. Powerlessness, emotional vulnerability and a constant waiting are relentlessly underscored by the melodramatic structures of storytelling and create an experience of passivity and helplessness that tends to be overwhelming. The importance of Brokeback Mountain is that it refuses to portray homosexuality as anything but a difficult and emotive subject and melodrama is one means through which to do this. The politicisation of emotion and affect in relation to the closet and homophobia, disproportionate relations between past and present, character and spectator, are what make Brokeback Mountain meaningful as a queer melodrama.

This book situates Brokeback Mountain, a queer film based on the short story by Annie Proulx and directed by Ang Lee, in relation to specific frameworks and debates: indie cinema; the Western; the melodrama; gay spectatorship and cruising. The chapters can be read in a linear fashion but also read in isolation. What links them together, other than the film itself, is Brokeback Mountain's status as a key indie feature and the way that fosters a dialogue between film studies and queer theory and the myriad ways Brokeback Mountain seems to circulate as both a mainstream (must see cultural phenomenon) and an alternative (independent, queer) film. Brokeback Mountain's reception, whether it was the first reports from film festivals, coverage in gay lifestyle magazines and national newspapers, the forums dedicated to the film, the way it was received at the 2006 Oscars, all these contributed to an incredibly rich source of zeitgeist buzz.

This chapter explores the industrial location of Brokeback Mountain. Specifically, it examines the film as one of the key productions in the short history of Universal's specialty division, Focus Features. It charts the often convoluted history of Focus Features, discusses its links and connections with a number of other key players in the sector of the time (especially USA Films and Good Machine), and argues that its success has been largely due to its association with a particular brand of quality independent filmmaking that has been well-received by public and critics alike, including Far from Heaven (2002), Lost in Translation (2003), Brick (2005), Broken Flowers (2005) and of course Brokeback Mountain. The chapter also looks at Focus Features and Brokeback Mountain as quintessential examples of a shift in American independent cinema that produced a new mode of filmmaking known controversially as ‘indie cinema’.

This chapter examines how the “gay cowboy movie” tag condensed the slippages in thinking required to sustain this dualism, which structured accounts of the reception to Brokeback Mountain (2005). Because the tag's indelible attachment to the film carried with it implications of mockery and scorn, the tag became the banner cry of those most offended by the film's supposed repudiation of John Wayne and the Marlboro Man. Likewise, the tag was indirectly referenced by assertions from the other side of the gender divide that, as a universal love story, Brokeback Mountain was much more than a gay movie. Nevertheless, the tag's omnipresence in the public discourse about Brokeback interrupted this dominant account of its reception by refocusing attention on the film's homoerotic specificity, which is, after all, what audiences were responding to in one way or another. It is in this context, that Brokeback Mountain worked most effectively as a “gay cowboy movie.”

This chapter analyzes Brokeback Mountain (2005). Based on the 1997 short story by Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain is about the romance between two uneducated farmhands. Throughout 2006, the “gay cowboy story” was both hailed as a vehicle for gay activism and vilified by American conservatives. An initial reading of the narrative through the lens of modern gender theory demonstrates, however, that the story is not overtly political, but rather seeks universality in the experience of human longing for affection and acceptance. This chapter first reviews the history of the representation of homosexuality in mainstream American film before discussing the true-to-life language and idioms used in Brokeback Mountain. It then considers how Brokeback Mountain conjures bittersweet yearning for lost love and lost opportunity, transcending any narrow issues of sexuality or gender, and becomes a more universal love story between two men.

This chapter provides a historical overview of Ang Lee's career as a Hollywood filmmaker. Lee has been dubbed an auteur—he is an artist with his actors, and seems to draw amazing work out of his cast, from the smallest to the greatest, while continuing to reiterate common themes of family, culture, and identity in an astonishing variety of genres. He has drawn performances of the highest quality out of actors as diverse as Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Chow Yun-fat, Tony Leung, Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, Katie Holmes, Kate Winslet, and Zhang Ziyi. Ang Lee was thirty-seven years old when he directed his first film, Pushing Hands (1991). His impressive ouvre includes Brokeback Mountain (2005), Life of Pi (2012), The Wedding Banquet (1993), Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), Sense and Sensibility (1995), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Hulk (2003), Ride with the Devil (1999), Lust/Caution (2007), The Ice Storm (1997), and Taking Woodstock (2007). Lee won the Academy Award for Best Director twice: the first for Brokeback Mountain and the second for Life of Pi.

This chapter focuses on a sequence of shots in Brokeback Mountain and their relationship to gay spectatorship. It examines interrelationships between gay male cruising, spectatorship and editing, and presents an argument based around a shot/reverse shot structure. These shots refer to Jack and Ennis's first encounter and the way they are presented may strike a chord of recognition with the gay spectator because it resembles cruising. This opening scene privileges the knowledge of the gay spectator as a cultural viewer who identifies the silent codes of exchange between two homosexual men. As a formal system, editing is different from narrative yet it contributes to the overall meanings generated by the film in terms of how shot relations position us to see narrative events and understand Jack and Ennis's relationship. This is most evident in how their desire for one another and the history of their relationship is, this chapter claims, in part told through shot relations. This chapter also discusses suture to help explain how cruising and spectatorship relate to one another through a chain of shots.

This chapter is an exposing comparison of two recent films in the queer canon—Brokeback Mountain (2005) and By Hook or By Crook (2001). Brokeback Mountain was heralded as the watershed entry of queer material into the cowboy movie genre, with the result of revealing that genre's homoerotic roots against the backdrop of the expansive but harsh world of the American West. By Hook or By Crook on the other hand tells a contemporary story of butch friendship against the odds in the day-at-a-time world of poor, queer San Francisco. The comparison is intended to provoke questions of border crossing and boundary change in both dominant and nondominant spheres of cultural production, to better describe how queer cultural producers and citizens actually live and work, and thus to better imagine a cultural future at least partly unbound by political habit in the present.

This chapter considers Taiwanese-born Hollywood director Ang Lee's position in Asian and world cinema. It first examines the characteristics of Lee's cinema, from globalization and cultural identity to homosexuality, patriarchy, feminism, and family. It then reviews the history of transnational Chinese cinema and Taiwan cinema, along with the characteristics of Taiwan New Cinema. It also evaluates Lee's position in Taiwan New Cinema; the historical context of his Academy Awards for Best Director that he won for Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi; his influences as a director; his collaboration with American independent film producer James Schamus; and his miscellaneous projects. The chapter concludes by discussing Lee's place in the deepening relationship between American and Asian cinema.

This concluding chapter assesses Taiwanese-born Hollywood director Ang Lee's place in the history of world cinema. After winning two Best Director Academy Awards for Brokeback Mountain in 2006 and Life of Pi in 2013, Lee has become one of the world's leading directors. From the beginning, his career has been one of surprises. Since his earliest beginnings, with the Chinese trilogy of Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, and Eat Drink Man Woman, he has explored the themes of cultural identity and globalization with unabashed honesty. In these films, Lee probes the dilemma of the “father figure” with unflinching intensity that foreshadows his sensitive handling of future controversial topics. His other notable films include Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, and Ride with the Devil. To date, however, Brokeback Mountain was unquestionably the most stunning reversal of Lee's career. In his book “A Ten-year Dream of Cinema,” Lee says: “I would like to live inside the film and observe the world from the other side of the screen—perhaps it is even more beautiful”.

This introduction establishes the book’s primary emphases: using theoretical frameworks that can deepen our understanding of why sound tracks resonate, challenging the hegemony of the visual, emphasizing the most heard and the less perceptible elements of film sound, considering how all aural elements work interdependently, assuming that all non-musical elements (sound effects, dialogue, and silences) are as carefully “orchestrated” as film scores, and demonstrating that there is still much more work to do in analyzing sound tracks, even when it comes to the best-known or most canonized films. All these emphases are established through a close reading of the first few minutes of Brokeback Mountain (2005). This introduction also situates this book in relation to other recent scholarship in the area, and establishes its focus on providing the reader with transferable skills of close analysis.

This chapter investigates how white homonormative narratives perform tyrannous acts that distort understandings of queerness for people of color. As white queerness romanticizes and celebrates “coming out”—becoming the universal marker of liberation—these fascinations forge a space where other, discrete ways of being in the world appear anachronistic, backwards, or rare. McCune re-opens the case of “white men on the Down Low (DL),” if you will—to elucidate how the larger discourse of the queer triumphant, or queer progress, activates an erasure of all queers (white included) who do not fit the mold of the “out and proud” gay subject. This elision constructs a cultural amnesia around other ways of knowing sexuality outside of coming out—which enables a mis-remembering of a white queer past and present, devoid of discretion. Secondly, these constructions of a white queer past sanitize white queerness and enable a discourse that not only impacts how white queers perpetually privilege progress narratives, but potentially demonizes or distorts queers of color who perform often more illegible enactments of queerness. Bringing back the film Brokeback Mountain as a shape-shifting cultural text—globalizing an understanding of the foregone closet—the chapter forces an interracial non-romance between discretion in whiteface and blackface. Brokeback Mountain and other resonant texts perform a popular queer historiography, which misreads or under-reads the broader histories and social realities of queer people within and outside of the U.S.