After the announcement that Brokeback Mountain would return to theaters for its 20th anniversary, a viral tweet nailed the movie’s status as a rite of passage for many queer millennials. “Watching Brokeback Mountain in a theater doesn’t sit right with me,” wrote @dinosaur_info. “You’re meant to watch that movie from 1am to 3am on a laptop in your bedroom in high school.”
As the first big-budget gay romance to arrive in the age of digital piracy, Brokeback was a watershed moment for closeted teens. Unlike gay-centered box-office hits of the past, it didn’t matter if you were too young, or too afraid of awkward run-ins, to see the film on one of the 2,089 U.S. screens that Ang Lee’s film played on at its peak. The AVI file was accessible to anyone with a dial-up modem and a working knowledge of LimeWire. In these bedrooms, under low lights and with blinds firmly drawn, Brokeback Mountain taught a generation of gay men how to yearn.
Focus Features’ new poster for the film is a wink to anyone who fell for Jack and Ennis’s romance the first time around, with a tagline reading “Love Will Bring You Back.” It’s a lure to have your heart broken all over again, that may as well come with a stack of tissues and a box of strawberry crèmes on the armrest. Based on Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story of the same name, Brokeback has become a totemic feel-bad movie, sharing space with Stepmom and The Notebook in the movies-to-cry-to Hall of Fame. Its heartache now has a sizable fandom of its own, and a new generation prone to picking their emotional scabs have made it a SadTok fixture, setting clips of wrenching scenes to Mitski, Lana Del Rey, and, somewhat more implausibly, Charli XCX.
Two decades ago, incessant jokes trailed Brokeback all the way to its three wins at the 2006 Oscars, as well as its infamous Best Picture snub (what was Crash?). Late-night hosts like Letterman were helpfully on hand to offer “ten signs that your husband is a gay cowboy” lists, and spit-for-lube quips referencing Jack and Ennis’s un-Astroglided intercourse were the “what bottoms eat for dinner” wisecracks of their day, and about as funny. When I went into my local arthouse cinema to see Brokeback Mountain, I was 18, out, and initially skeptical. My then-crushes — the shoegazing waifs of Gregg Araki films — seemed far more intellectual than the corn-fed likes of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. But after the lights came up in the theater, I turned to my female friend, noticed that we were both puddles of snot and tears, and realized that maybe I was a romantic after all.
Watching Brokeback Mountain again today, I understood that my memory had been clouded by those gags of the mid-aughts. From their first flirtation, where Gyllenhaal’s Labubu eyes pierce from under a cowboy hat, there’s a delicate intimacy that unfurls as Jack and Ennis allow the shells they have constructed against the world to crack open for one too-short summer romance. As the film sweeps through decades and the pair’s orbits continue to cross despite their separate lives and lavender marriages, what was once a goddamned bitch of an unsatisfactory situation builds to the scale of capital-T tragedy. At one point, Ennis, gruffly resigned to a life of mandated secrecy, snarls at Jack, “If you can’t fix it, you’ve got to stand it.” The most wrenching thing about Brokeback is just how effectively Ennis learns to wear that mask, and how, decades later, he is a husk behind it.
In interviews around the film’s release, Ledger encouraged audiences to find a broader story in Brokeback than its gay themes. “It transcends a label — it’s human,” as he put it at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2005. “It’s the story of two human beings, two souls that are in love.” But on my recent viewing, his performance didn’t feel universal at all, and I mean that as a compliment. In a subtle yet utterly committed performance, Ledger deeply embodies the specific pain of closeted life, and how gay shame can stick to you despite two decades of trying to scrub it from your skin. In playing Ennis, he seems to understand that life in the closet is defined by a fear that someone will see you for who you are, and also the fear that no one ever will.
Twenty years later, Brokeback is still somewhat of an anomaly in mainstream LGBTQ+ cinema. In its confidence to radiate the barren truth of heartache, Lee’s film is a kind of grown-up sibling to the rangy depictions of queer loneliness that threads through outstanding left-of-center films like the recent I Saw The TV Glow, Queer, and All of Us Strangers. Even so, Paul Mescal, who starred in the latter, bristled at comparisons to Brokeback while promoting his new upcoming gay romance. He called the analysis “lazy and frustrating” seeing as The History of Sound focuses on “a celebration of these men’s love” rather than “the repression of their sexuality.”
Yet Brokeback’s understanding of the human cost of repression, particularly as embodied in Ledger’s performance, makes it so unforgettable. It’s a fine-tuned portrait of the damage that repression can inflict on a person’s psyche. Ennis’s bottled-up feelings create a pressure cooker inside him that threatens to blow at any time, and that he can only express in physical fights with other men (and, in one disturbing scene, threatened violence toward his wife). The film’s focus on the closet might not be particularly fashionable in a post-Heartstopper culture, but it endures because it’s not afraid to show how its characters are permanently wounded by a cruel world. During my rewatch, I knew that Ennis was hurtling toward the crushing discovery of his and Jack’s shirts intertwined like “two skins,” as Proulx put it in her story. But this time, I found the film’s closing moment even more affecting in its depiction of Ennis in his trailer, utterly alone and on a dirt road to nowhere. For me, it’s this final knife-twist that lifts the film above melodrama and grounds it in brutal reality: Even Douglas Sirk’s ultimate weepie, All That Heaven Allows, ends with a bereft Jane Wyman being offered some comfort by a wandering deer.
Brokeback has your heart in a half hitch knot from the jump, and it never untangles it throughout. One of the film’s most indelible scenes depicts Ennis breaking down after his idyllic summer with Jack up on Brokeback. As the morning sun rises in the sky, Ennis turns off the road and walks gingerly to a nearby alley, as if using his final reserves of energy before his legs give out. In the shadows, he falls to his knees and releases everything that he couldn’t put into words. He punches the wall, heaves with sobs, and lets out animal moans that are barely muffled by the Stetson pulled over his face. There is barely any light here, but poetry in the dark.