“It is better to have love and have lost than never having loved at all.”

Last night, after teaching class, Chris Stevens and I went to see Brokeback Mountain. I had really not heard anything about it until a week ago when Chris mentioned it, and was somewhat hesitant to see it. Ironically, within a few days, several friends reported seeing it and suggested, even insisted that I should see it. I really don’t know that I can do this particular blog entry justice as I am still somewhat numb from the experience. When the credits had finished rolling, Chris and I were still sitting there staring at the screen. Since Chris and I had dinner plans afterwards, I held a tight reign on my emotions throughout the movie, not wanting to give in to the sadness that would have surely dominated my mood the remainder of the evening.

How does one describe Brokeback Mountain?

Star-crossed lovers. They’ve filled book pages and film frames for as long as those things have existed. Tristan and Isolde. Romeo and Juliet. Scarlett and Rhett. Superman and Lois Lane. And now Ennis and Jack. Take everything you know about how love works (or doesn’t work) when two people who are crazy about each other find themselves doomed to a life of separation by time, distance or culture—and remove the woman from the equation. What’s left is Brokeback Mountain.

Wyoming, 1963. Two young drifters turn up at a remote office and get hired to spend the summer together, herding sheep high up on Brokeback Mountain. Suspicious, laconic, stunned by cold and hardship, they don’t seem a natural pair – until, drunk one night, enforced intimacy turns to sexual contact. It’s a contact that is just as unexpected and unacceptable to them as it remains to some today, especially in the rural American west. In a stunning reversal, though, the drifters fall emotionally and physically in love. Up on idyllic Brokeback Mountain, far from social approbation, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) luxuriate in a rough-and-tumble idyll as Edenic in spirit as it is in setting. The mountain seems to bless their union, but inexorably the air begins to chill, they come down off the mountain, and they part.

Ennis moves to Riverton, Wyoming – where my friends Rev. Mike & Joy Johnson moved this summer – marries Alma and has two girls. Jack heads down to Texas on the rodeo circuit, marries Lureen and has a boy. But the men can’t get over each other, despite the fact that Ennis insists it’s a “one-shot thing.”

Five years later, they meet again – now married with children. As Brokeback Mountain moves the men’s story forward through the decades, they escape from their wives and pursue each other in an effort at recapturing the rural bliss of their primal scene, the isolation of setting and frozen emotional boundaries of the love preclude any intrusion of more modern accepting attitudes. Jack wants to shack up and settle down with Ennis. Ennis is too worried about what the neighbors might think. (It is the 1960s and ’70s, after all.) So they continue their separate lives, punctuating their painful existence with giddy sexual flings the pair dubs “fishing trips.” What follows is a slow disintegration of not only their own lives, but the lives of everyone they touch.

Ennis is the cool-as-a-cucumber type who wouldn’t hurt a fly… until you push him too far. Then he’ll crush you. The most emotional moment, when he appears in just such a rage, is when Alma confronts him about his relationship with Jack. This comes a number of years after their marriage has ended and she has remarried. As Alma tells him of the note she tied to his fishing pole before he left to meet Jack on one of their many “fishing trips,” she would find the same note, untouched, year after year. Ennis raises his fist to her but does not strike her. Instead he races out of the house and pummels the first guy he sees. That guy is no pushover, though, and the result is an intense exchange of blows. Earlier in the movie, at a Fourth of July picnic, Ennis socks a guy for swearing in front of his kids. The most heart wrenching moment is after parting ways with Jack that first summer on Brokeback Mountain… Ennis, crumples in tears and begins hitting a wall in anger and frustration.

The only reason Ennis’ marriage ends in divorce, teaches the film, is because he never should have been married… to a woman. The only reason Jack treks down to Mexico to enlist the services of a gay prostitute is because he doesn’t get enough face time with his true love, Ennis. And the only reason he doesn’t get that time with Ennis is because society won’t let them be together. That’s a powerful message far too many people are accepting, as evidenced by the emotion I could feel swelling around me when the credits began to roll.

Peering down through the years at the power of that Brokeback Mountain summer on the lives of Ennis and Jack, the movie delivers a virtually forensic vision of desire, denial and emotional cost. The depth of Ennis and Jack’s attachment to one another gives their lives meaning and drains all other meaning out of them, rendering the men both enriched and destitute emotionally. If Brokeback Mountain never shies away from the sexual truth of that attachment, it doesn’t settle for the merely explicit either. It’s a great love story, pure and simple. And simultaneously the story of a great love that’s broken and warped in the torture chamber of a society’s intolerance and threats, an individual’s fear and repression.

No American film before has portrayed love between two men as something this pure and sacred. As such, it has the potential to change the national conversation and to challenge people’s ideas about the value and validity of same-sex relationships. It will be moving for anyone who is open to seeing the challenges and difficulties of what, at that time and even for many today, is the self-imposed and society-imposed necessity to live dishonestly. And, to be trivial for a moment, the scenery is sensational. But in the words of Ennis, “Ain’t no reins on this one.” Woven into his artistically masterful tapestry is the message that homosexual relationships don’t work because society won’t leave them alone long enough for them to mature.

Personally speaking, words cannot express the grief one feels about lost love. Then again, wise words, music, movies or theatre can heal wounds and help us reflect on the tragedy. When two people love each other, they love each other. And people should hold on to it as hard as they can, whether it’s homosexual or heterosexual. In the end, Brokeback Mountain is a grand romantic tragedy, joining the ranks of great literature as much as great cinema.

He was a friend of mine
He was a friend of mine
Every time I think about him now
Lord I just can’t keep from cryin’
‘Cause he was a friend of mine

He died on th
e road
He died on the road
He never had enough money
To pay his room or board
And he was a friend of mine

I stole away and cried
I stole away and cried
‘Cause I never had too much money
And I never been quite satisfied
And he was a friend of mine

He never done no wrong
He never done no wrong
A thousand miles from home
And he never harmed no one
And he was a friend of mine

He was a friend of mine
He was a friend of mine
Every time I think about him now
Lord I just can’t keep from cryin’
‘Cause he was a friend of mine