By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Baby, it's cold inside: Indiana on Brokeback insularity
In the VOICE, Gary Indiana scores a few points about the isolated lives of the characters in Brokeback Mountain: “No one ever refers to the large events of the day, or to places outside his or her immediate ken. Between 1963 and somewhere in the early 1980s, the only evidence of a realm beyond the rodeo circuit and the ranch is the cathode eye in the living room, the slowly mutating look of motor vehicles and supermarket wares, and an occasional reference to the state of the economy.
“In effect, two decades of history produce no important effects in the communities and individuals under scrutiny. Attitudes and opinions remain obstinately immobile… Even TV, which replaced verbalization in so many American homes during the period spanned, can only emit meaningless images to people who have nothing to say to each other in the first place. This is depressingly credible. Tight-knit communities, like tight-knit families, manage to stay tight by deflecting any strong sense of connection with larger social configurations—”America,” to this mindset, is, or ought to be, a country whose norms are indistinguishable from their own, ergo not such a big place after all. The insular quality of American life reinforces a stubborn naïveté about sexual matters that’s been part of our national character from the outset… The deviant, whether religious, political, or sexual, has always needed to be identified from among the existing population, then exterminated or expelled. The expunged have tended to found their own little territories, which in turn establish their identities by driving out the unorthodox—who have to be invented if they don’t already exist… In this respect, Brokeback Mountain is a pungent slice of an essentially unchanging reality.”