Brokeback Truth
When I reach out and touch Facebook recently, I’m attempting to touch and be touched by everyone at this time of hope and unity. I’m fully aware that I’m perceived among some to be touching people inappropriately, but it can’t hurt to attempt communicating that my intentions are pure:
Right now I’m realizing the potential of Facebook to connect people, and not just in a “hi, how’ve you been?!” kind of way, either. It’s not lost on me that many of you have already realized this, and so I hope none of you take this note as anything more than my compulsive drive to merge these thoughts onto y’all’s information freeway.
Most of us live in Suburbia. We drive home to our bubbles inside of our bubbles after punching out of bubbles. From low orbit, these behaviors resemble insect commerce. Even though we do these things in unison, we’re isolated; in mind, body, and spirit.
Ani Di-friggin-Franco wrote this of her home city, Buffalo, NY:
“White people are so scared of black people.
They bulldoze out to the country, and put up houses on little loop-d-loop streets.
And while America gets its heart cut right out of its chest
the Berlin wall still runs down main street separating east side from west.
And nothing is stirring, not even a mouse, in the boarded up stores
and the broken down houses
So they hang colorful banners off all the street lamps
just to prove they got no manners, no mercy, and no sense.
And I wonder then what it will take for my city to rise.
First we admit our mistakes and then we open our eyes.
The ghosts of old buildings are haunting parking lots
in the city of good neighbors that history forgot.
I remember the first time I saw someone lying on the cold street
I thought, “I can’t just walk past you, this can’t just be true.”
But I learned by example to just keep moving my feet.
It’s amazing the things that we all learn to do.
So we’re led by denial like lambs to the slaughter
serving empires of style and carbonated sugar water
And the old farmroad’s a four-lane
that leads to the mall and my dreams are all guillotines waiting to fall
And I wonder then what it will take for my country to rise.
First we admit our mistakes and then we open our eyes.
‘til nation’s last taker succumbs to one last dumb decision
And America the beautiful is just one big subdivision.”
I used these lyrics as an inspiration for one of my senior projects at the U. At the time I was torn, since I couldn’t seem to put to paper, graphically or otherwise, just why her sentiment trumped all other causes I might have alternatively dissertated. While I trembled to quote the passages, I shamed myself at what inadvertently seemed trivial to escape my lips in class discussions (they should have sent a poet—Sagan). I realize now I was touching a nerve within myself that runs to the very heart of what drives me creatively: my desire to connect to my species.
I watched a good part of Brokeback Mountain tonight, realizing the messages in it for me are the root of all that is wrong with the world as we know it: we’re all guilty of shirking love in favor of hatred, war, corruption, and isolationism. The film celebrates a few things about humanity that I’ve been able to pinpoint (Brokeback lovers, feel free to add to my list):
1. The beauty of men.
People who don’t take the time to know me might think I simply fetishize men. What I’ve come to know personally is that real, beautiful men find themselves mentally and physically neutered by a system that attempts to entwine male worth with social and economic power. People who don’t know me might also think my statement here somehow diminishes my feminist beliefs. I believe strongly that the two ideas are not only intimately connected, but are positively essential to each other if we humans are ever to achieve true equality.
In the film we see two men falling in love on a secluded mountain, painfully hesitant, but in their best moments without regard for what culturally suppresses their desires. So, that is, without the system that would quash that very union, but even more innovatively, without women. Again, I’m not diminishing women (I reiterate, as a former Women’s Studies student, I am and always will be a feminist–nay, a humanist). There may be some earlier examples of cinema, possibly French, that illustrate this, but I speak to this point as an American, and like many fellow Americans I was witness to the cultural attempt to brand this film “controversial”. It is to me, partly, a celebration of male beauty. Because the men I love are not the “yes men” I see in the marketplace, beating a capitalist drum, suppressing creativity, brown-nosing other men in a sad attempt to get in on some imagined ego fraternity. Mine (I say “mine” less as an attempt at ownership, and more in the sense of pride that I feel to have known them better and, in some cases, longer than most) are unapologetically themselves. Unapologetically creative.
2. The unfortunate predicament of the nuclear family.
Betty Friedan called it “The Problem Without a Name”, wherein isolated individuals—in Friedan’s case they were women, or more specifically, housewives—denied of social or sexual expression. The idea behind the problem is that as Americans flee cities in favor of suburbs; communities in favor of domestic microcosms, we’re doing so in concert with the rise of a capitalistic system whose very existence depends on us losing touch with one another. The extreme conclusion of these situations ensures the crumbling of not only the American family, but of entire communities. In Brokeback Mountain, both men feel compelled by this system to enter into these hetero-monogamous social contracts, at the demise not only of their own love affair, but of the non-sexual but true love for their wives, let alone families/children. No one wins in that scenario.
3. Lies.
We need to realize now just how much our daily lives are governed by lies: of a “free market”, of the anglo-christian notion of family, of an un-winnable war on drugs, of un-winnable wars, period, of the economy that places the worth of things above the worth of humans, ummmm…I could go on. But as this point relates to Brokeback Mountain: because of the shame we as individuals feel when we throw off the chains of these lies (i.e. engage in sex, drugs, and rock and roll), we lie to each other in order not to disturb the perceived “order” and “stability” this web of lies provides us. The characters in the film lie to their wives, who, in turn, lie to their families and their social networks. Lies spread and there you have it: corruption as is evident in every corner of our society. We accept the lies because we believe very deeply that they are necessary evils if we are to carry on living a lie.
I feel strongly now that, as I write this internetty bloggedy blog, I am humbly participating, however miniscule-like, in the revolutionary rise of a Knowledge Society. According to Wikipedia, “Knowledge Society refers to any society where knowledge is the primary production resource instead of capital and labour.” This new thing is unprecedented on this global level as we are witnessing with social networks such as Facebook, and I’m realizing, as are many others, the potential in said networks to give rise to this revolution. It’s in blogs, shared articles and ideas, shared art and music. Shared EVERYTHING. I, therefore, refuse to censor my ideas, not out of some flippant sentiment, but more broadly out of a civic duty to add my voice to the people’s chorus such that this Knowledge bubble can rise from the masses and above the lies in the populist manner in which it is destined to come to pass.
Anyhoo. Bottom line: Brokeback Mountain is hawtt, and therefore Ang Lee is hawtt. Ani Difranco is hawtt. Hell, Karl Marx is hawtt (though I regret I’m slow at reading him). Oh, and Christian informed me tonight that Rosa Luxemburg is über-hawtt. I feel privileged to have walked the earth among such Greats.