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Where is the love?

Within a couple months of its release, Brokeback Mountain went from being simply a well-made, serious film to a widely recognized, highly satirized cultural artifact. Ang Lee’s “gay cowboy” movie has been deluged with more than 90 nominations and awards — including eight Oscar nominations — but it has also become joke fodder, not only for the likes of Leno, Letterman, and Stewart but for the advertising geniuses at National Car Rental. Its iconic two-men-in-cowboy-hats poster has been used to parody everything from George Bush’s relationship with Jack Abramoff (KickBack Mountain) to Star Wars’s Mandalorian warriors. There is an online video parody — Broke Back to the Future— with Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox as lovers, and last week’s New Yorker cover featured sharpshooting Dick Cheney and Squint-eyed bush in that now iconic Brokeback pose. Why has America been so discomfited yet so gripped by Brokeback fever?

It’s not as though we haven’t seen this before. For years, Hollywood has been churning out “buddy movies,” from Red River (1948) to the more-recent Lethal Weapon series, whose homoeroticism is barely concealed. As Stephen Holden pointed out in his New York Times review, Brokeback Mountain belongs in a tradition identified by Leslie Fiedler nearly 60 years ago in an influential Partisan Review essay titled “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!”, which argued that homoeroticism — from Moby-Dick and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Batman and Robin — is the primal American romance.

Nor are we unfamiliar with mold-breaking portrayals of gay love. While Hollywood has had its fair share of movies about flamboyant boys-in-the-band homos living gay lives — from 1969’s Staircase, featuring Rex Harrison and Richard Burton as bickering boyfriends, to 1996’s Birdcage, featuring Robin Williams and Nathan Lane as, well, bickering boyfriends — it has also produced a wealth of serious, critically appraised, and award-winning films that explored gay male relationships in a variety of settings (see “We Are Everywhere”). Brokeback Mountain is just the latest addition to a well-established Hollywood tradition.

So why has this particular film so gripped the moviegoing psyche? Brokeback Mountain can be read many ways, of course — as a Romeo and Juliet on the open range, say, or a cautionary tale of violent homophobia. But it also captures the deep emotional ambivalence many heterosexual Americans feel not only about same-sex marriage and homosexuality, but about marriage itself. Polls show that a majority of straight Americans are against same-sex couples having access to civil marriage. But polls also show an unprecedented degree of general tolerance and acceptance. Straight people don’t hate homosexuals — they just don’t want to have to think much about them “doing it,” and certainly not “doing it” with full legal approval. Brokeback Mountain allows them to have it both ways, while also expressing uncertainty about their own romantic relationships.