Therapy Writing pt2

RESPOSTA A PERGUNTA NENHUMA

(um dia alguém disse)
na busca do buraco último da inteligência humana
não há ninguém que abra a cortina a janela a porta
nem nada derrota a espiral que enrola os homens
nem há dualismo para aqueles fora de órbita

(ao que lhe responderam)
não caias nesse último abismo que devora
não tem de haver um palco uma casa uma saída
porque é tudo uma linha recta com cortes
não há oposições sem coisas que se lhe oponham

o universo é

Amo todo um delete no msn

"Só p'ra ti, yo! Adoro-te!"

"*mwat* Amo-te!"

Revisiting the past

Um sincero obrigado a esta banda e música, que tanto me ajudaram num passado não tão distante quanto me possa parecer. 

R.I.P. Layne Staley (August 22, 1967 - April 5, 2002)

round-house kick

Foda-se, foda-se, foda-se.

Assim não, caralho.

Puta que pariu esta treta.

Bicho de merda.

Isto tem de mudar, caralho ma foda.

Foda-se, foda-se, foda-se.

E vai mudar.

lost in myself

walking through my own private hell.

Therapy writing

Faudastenia Road

THE oldest still standing alliance in the world was between Portugal and England. These countries were not geographically too far from each other and yet their differences proved to be of a different kind. A kind that was too immense, too overwhelming for them to bear. They had met in the US, where the two went for interviewing the writer of a book that could be the story of their lives. In Wyoming, they both visited Annie Proulx and had a cup of tea altogether. What they felt at first sight wasn’t love, let us not be mistaken. Physical attraction was more the case and, if the chance had been given, they would’ve jumped at each other in no time. Over tea, they conversed about what it meant to be a foreigner, to live in a close minded place and to be different from the status quo. The last two topics were particularly applicable to one of them – the Portuguese. The English did not have the problem of living restricted by other people, for he lived in Manchester. Nevertheless, he himself was restricting his being, letting his fears take control over his life. Fear of life, that’s what he had. Soon after they said goodbye to the woman writer, they swapped telephone numbers and made plans for a drink the day after. A drink led to another, the looks were unmistakable, the signs were obvious – they were meant to be together.
When they went back to Europe, they were already lovers. In Portugal, the dark skinned longed for the next time he would see the blond one. He told his parents about him when they were already in three months of dating. A meeting was arranged and everything seemed perfect – everyone got along instantly. But still he wanted more from the other. “Christ, he lives in Manchester, what’s the problem with holding hands with me anywhere? Or a kiss?”
He had always said to him that he had told his parents there in England about their relationship but wouldn’t mention any get-to-know-each-other dinner. The psychological distance was far bigger than the geographical one, indeed, since they had already talked about moving to Lisbon anyway. But why the fear of a simple phone call? Was that all that their love could offer to both? Would it only exist in privacy and secrecy?
The phone rang while they were on vacations. It was from England. “Hi, mom! Yeah, I’m having a great time in Portugal. No, no, she’s in the shower. Right now I’m with a friend. Yeah. Alright, bye, love you too!”
A friend? Was that all he was? Or was he a she then? At that moment, he felt like part of the Wheel of Fortune – he had risen, yes, but that was only the beginning of his fall. And did he fall out of love for the other one. No more prisons than the ones his tiny little country on the Westernmost part of Europe had built for him.
The mountain created in their imagination, which was once a safe and perfect place for their love, was now standing between them. It was much too suffocating.

***

As he drove the car at high speed down Faudastenia Road, he was somewhat at ease and peace with the world. Bad thoughts had been driven away from his mind and love had cured his despair – for a long time he had forgotten the last day he had been truly happy. It was as if life had become bleak and dark all of a sudden. Sleep didn’t bring him the peace he so desperately needed and night trauma had settled in his brain – emptiness filled his heart and soul from the moment he woke up to the moment he went to bed. Even when he fell asleep he didn’t rest, for nightmares haunted his mind. He woke up countless times during the night. Once, it got so bad that he drove his car off a cliff. He didn’t die but was scarred forever. Nevertheless, love came to restore his debris back to shape and changed his life.
He took a fast turn on the road, saw the animal lying dead there and stepped on the brake as quickly as he could. The car hit the rails and burst into flames. The sun was setting.

I still don’t know how it all happened. I remember Faudastenia Road and I remember thinking about him. All of a sudden, I saw fire and was surrounded by it. This light I see now is bright but at the same time pale – it makes me think that despite this accident I still have him in my life, and that is enough. I am not alone. Wait. Someone’s coming. It’s him! What’s look on his face?

I have to do this for both our sakes, and he will understand. I simply fell out of love with him, that’s all. I can’t keep on blaming myself for that, can I? And I can’t keep on lying, that’s a sure thing. Sometimes this consumes my mind in such a way that my thoughts run at an uncontrollable speed I can’t do this I can do this I should do it I can’t be blamed I feel so guilty it’s not fair I hate myself I’d rather die than do this to him it was such a beautiful relationship why do I spoil it like this it’s just a phase but why do I feel like it ain’t just a phase I really should tell him and if we’re meant to be together then we will right oh god I can’t even sleep I have to do this for both our sakes I’m evil but I can’t help it anymore I’m an asshole I feel like shit I have to I must I ought to I HATE MYSELF AND I WANT TO DIE.

He had brought flowers with him, the last he would give to him. They were his personal favourites: violets. He knew how much he loved those. He was preparing himself to leave him. This would be the perfect timing; he would grieve enough lying in the hospital bed, unable to move. He was also afraid that he would kill himself and thus in the hospital that would be impossible.
The flowers were handed with a vague, blank stare. They both knew it. He made a sign for him to put the flowers by the window. They kissed. He couldn’t speak because a shard had pierced his throat and damaged the vocal cords. A song was playing on the radio: “I lost my face and now it can’t be found”, it went. Outside there was heavy rain and as the afternoon advanced the silence became denser. He got up, went to the window and put his hand on the glass, as if looking for something, some kind of freedom, some sort of peace. When he turned to the one lying in bed he knocked down the flowers. He picked his things, stopped beside the bed and they looked at each other for a long moment. There was no goodbye. There was the sound of the door shutting. The pale light in the ceiling. A sigh. It was his last one.

I want to be washed away with the rain, he thought. No tears were falling down his face, or they were mixed with the water. We’ll never know. As he entered the car he remembered all the good moments of his now ex-relationship. He couldn’t deal with the feeling of guilt. He turned the key and started driving. Faudastenia Road was still witness to the accident and the rails now left an open escape from life and suffering. He had nothing attaching him to this world as he drove off the cliff.
He was already broken beyond repair.

And then it happened – with no explanation and no previous warning. Seas, lakes and rivers dried up as blood is drawn from a vein. Diseases turned all animal life nonexistent. First came the rage, then the end of rational thought and lastly the wars. The peoples of the earth slaughtered their own children just because they were born the offspring of the collective hatred for that which is not the rule. Babies stopped being born. Humanity was blind to all the culture that had been constructed throughout the centuries of its existence. All that had been written, composed, built, painted and filmed was destroyed to shreds and forgotten. Beauty and Truth were lost as famine brought cannibalism into the world. Mountains came crumbling down and flowers withered and died. The Earth had come to an end.
The sign still said Faudastenia Road.

Dialogue nr.2

- “O meu coração está em pedra. Não vive…sobrevive…”

- “Tens mais em ti do que julgas. As pedras nem histórias contam.”

Adão decide ir para Oeste

Ironicamente, ando a ler o The Grapes of Wrath. Será que inconscientemente estou a comparar o meu futuro ao da família Joad? Estou a preparar a minha ida para Oeste, isso é verdade, mas não sei até que ponto ler todas as dificuldades daquela gente é benéfico para a minha decisão de ir apanhar laranjas e uvas dos campos dourados do sonho americano. Ah, mas como sabe bem imaginar o próximo ano como uma viagem de uma dezena de horas. Até chegar às montanhas a Este e a praia brilhante a cinco minutos de onde eu vou apanhar a fruta.

"The Western land, nervous under the beginning change. The Western States, nervous as horses before a thunder storm." The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

Song of the moment

So impressed with all you do
Tried so hard to be like you
Flew too high and burnt the wing
Lost my faith in everything

Lick around divine debris
Taste the wealth of hate in me
Shedding skin succumb defeat
This machine is obsolete

Made the choice to go away
Drink the fountain of decay
Tear a hole exquisite red
Fuck the rest and stab it dead

Broken bruised forgotten sore
Too fucked up to care anymore
Poisoned to my rotten core
Too fucked up to care anymore

In the back off the side far away is a place where I hide where i
Stay tried to stay tried to ask I needed to all alone by myself where were you?
How could I ever think its funny how everything that swore it wouldnt change is different now just like you
Would always say we'll make it through then my head fell apart
And where were you? How could I ever think its funny how everything you swore would never change is different now
like you said you and me make it through
Didnt quite fall apart
Where the fuck where you?

Nine Inch Nails - Somewhat Damaged

da visão

E o horizonte expande-se como uma prostituta afasta as pernas.

o que eu já fiz

já levitei num supermercado e por cima de um sofá

já estive com alemães num supermercado e não os ajudei

já vi uma foca a morrer num mergulho

já andei de montanha-russa sem querer

já saltei de um arranha-céus, transformei-me em areia e entrei no sistema eléctrico de uma cidade

já estive no Japão e vi um titânico poste de betão ser balançado por um vizinho enfurecido com o outro

já comi a comida vegetariana de uma amiga minha

já estive em guerras brutais e de proporções épicas

já bati em dois miúdos que me queriam roubar a bicicleta

já entrei por uma porta que era um urinol

já fui para uma ponte que se inundou

já estive numa festa e perdi a vez de tirar a foto com o aniversariante

uncertainty excites me

ando a tentar guardar os corações do jogo que tenho andado a jogar.

ai, futuro, futuro. queria-te no outro lado do atlântico. e já estiveste mais longe de mim.

The Dialogue

"I just wish this thing would leave me alone!"

"It won't leave you alone so soon, just learn how to live with
it."

"I can't, I even feel it in my neck, for fuck's sake!"

"It's all in your head, dear"

"I feel like dying."

"It's your call. I would say that dying is the easiest way out."

"Sometimes I think it's the only one."

"Look at yourself and the others around you. There's the exit. Kill the
thing by opening the door and breaking the circle."

"How do I break the circle?"

"Concentrate on it, find the center, destroy it and erase it from your
body."

"But there are so many fears, so many grey clouds..."

"Look to the recent past."

"What for?"

"For living purposes."

"What do you mean?"

"Take a good look."

"Stop with the riddles!"

"These are no riddles, these are boulders that you have removed from
your path."

"Still the riddles...give me answers..."

"You have them in you, just make sure you're asking the right
questions."

"I'm fucked!"

"No, you're just suffering in vain. There's nothing wrong. The thing is
almost dead. Endure its presence for a bit longer. All of it will go
away."

"Promise?"

"I hate promises."

"Then what?"

"Nothing. Nothing."

"What?"

"Nothing."

A mid-summer's pic-nic

OF SAILS AND PIRATES

To Becky, an inspiration

We travel endlessly
And from heart to heart.

We meet those who might be coy of speech
but who carve themselves in our minds.

And though we’d like to stand by them,
We can’t shake the feeling that festers in us,

that we must keep going and sail from shore to shore.
The feeling that we always need something more.

And we hoist our sails with power,
For the wind dries the tears in our eyes.

And we know that what we don’t know
Is what keeps us trying and fighting.

A family on the dead man’s chest
And a bottle of rum full of friends.

We are pirates, corsairs on our way to
The greener lands on the other side.

With nothing to hide, nothing to regret, nothing to fear.
And in our hearts there is no blue but that of the sky above and the sea below.

Se eu pudesse engolir o mundo todo de uma vez.

Se eu pudesse ascender aos céus e apreender a lei num grito de fogo.

Se eu pudesse ser a espada que fura o céu e o martelo que cai sobre a Terra.

Se eu pudesse furar-me todo e explodir de luz, e receber receber receber.

Se eu pudesse dar-me todo, em partes cortadas a sangue frio e alimentar.

Se eu pudesse.

Tempus fugit

Samuel Beckett - Ohio Impromptu

Há sempre um livro que conta histórias. Essas histórias são aquelas nas quais tomamos conforto, que nos impedem de seguir em frente, talvez porque o futuro seja uma incógnita que muitas vezes nos assusta demasiado. É essa a tosse que comanda os nossos olhos e os projecta apenas num raio em sentido contrário ao Tempo. Constantemente e insistememente batemos nós com os punhos nas mesas. Mas anda, tudo. O que acontece é que somos nós mesmos que por vezes nos achamos presos entre as rodas e os ponteiros. E há sempre o maternal, o sítio perfeito a que pretendemos concomitantemente recuar. Voltar para trás, ouvir as histórias, vivê-las talvez de novo.

Incapacidade de andar para a frente, de deixar tudo para trás, principalmente o que foi perfeito - não é esse o sintoma do universo? Não é essa a síndroma pós-traumática criada após o primeiro berro?

Afinal, somos cinza, eclipse, incêndio, estrago.

Frailty, thy name is Time.

apó mechanés theós

Tenho aprendido que eu sou o meu próprio deus ex machina. E tenho também reparado que as coisas mais pequenas são todas mecanismos que rodam em círculos que ascendem e descendem, com engrenagens que precisam de ser oleadas constantemente.

Somos todos braços de um corpo maior e temos todos braços que são partes menores da nossa grandeza.

Máxima

A vida são dois dias e eu só quero viver um e meio.

(resposta a Kurt Cobain)

E Adão existia sem Eva

Pressures to create ‘positive representations’ of same-sex desire in cinema – Brokeback Mountain - Ricardo Fonseca

It is not an easy task to analyse Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain in the context of positive representations of same-sex desire. To begin with, the fact that the movie is set in 1963, pre-Stonewall, and in a rural area of the Wyoming State in the US are key elements that need to be taken into consideration, and nobody is really sure if the movie is political or not. The movie is also not a product of the mainstream backlash of the ‘gay lib’ movement.


(…) gay life before Stonewall was characterized by silence, invisibility, and isolation. Before Stonewall, there was no history of lesbians and gay men struggling for freedom; indeed, before Stonewall, there was no gay history other than a chronicle of unrelieved oppression. But mass movements for social change do not spring full-blown into existence (…) Movements have roots

(D’Emilio, 1992: 235)

Although the story in the movie might relate to the last part of the quotation, confirming that indeed homosexuality is and has always been everywhere, it would be wrong to say that the movement after Stonewall gave an impulse to the characters of Jack and Ennis, that it helped them to be free. It was predominantly an urban movement, and perhaps Brokeback Mountain is there to tell us that such cases do happen in rural areas and that the so-called “revolution” after Stonewall didn’t after all change every gay man and woman’s mind and situation – it failed to reach those more remote places. Therefore, the movie gives us a positive account of that fact by making use of a “negative” narrative (a sad, love story), in which tragedy portrays and is a product of the kind of lifestyle they led. If anything, the movie makes us feel sympathetic towards the main characters, which makes Brokeback go far beyond sexuality. It’s about lives that can be destroyed by a society whose petty morality shapes small minds. This social commentary constitutes a positive representation of homosexuality, because even though some may see the movie as a universal story (which nevertheless also constitutes a positive image), it does relate far more to homosexuals, and it contributes to create a positive portrait of same-sex relationships.
In order to understand the strict morality of the society depicted in Brokeback, we need only to go back in time in American history to find that

Biblical condemnations of homosexual behaviour suffused American culture from its origin (…) Colonial ministers railed against sodomy in their sermons. Although the world view of most twentieth-century Americans had ceased to be as biblically centred as that of their colonial predecessors, (…) religious teachings still shaped their views of sexuality and their sexual behaviour to a large degree.

(D’Emilio, 1983 : 13)

Therefore, it is an unavoidable fact that there is a strong religious influence in the society the movie depicts. Jack’s mother, as he says, believed in the Pentecost and Ennis’ parents were Methodists. It is curious indeed that Jack is not exactly sure what the Pentecost is but does think that it is about when the world ends and people like him and Ennis go to hell. For me this scene symbolises what rural America thinks of homosexuals – sinners, evil creatures, sick human beings. We can also say that Ennis was a part of that America, that he was raised to agree with this terrible view. In fact, in the scene after they have sex for the first time, Jack says that “it’s nobody’s business but ours”, to which Ennis responds “I ain’t queer”. Jack ends the short dialogue by saying that he isn’t a “queer” either. I believe that Jack expressed what most gay people feel it should be like, that it is nothing that other people should be concerned with, but at the same time this conversation does show the narrowness of mind of that society. And both characters are trapped in it. Another curious religious reference takes place when Ennis is getting married to Alma, and repeats with the priest: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”. Moreover, the growing social intolerance for homosexuality helped create an atmosphere of fear which might have contributed to the writing of tragic stories like that of Brokeback Mountain. Maybe not directly, but through a series of events (during the fifties, in the USA, the police and media started a “campaign” against homosexuality, promoting anti-gay values and repression throughout the whole country), American mentality, especially the uneducated, rural one, was again influenced into thinking that homosexuals were evil and sick, much like when it was being constructed as a nation.

Speaking of identities, in his book, The Matter of Images, Richard Dyer says that “representations construct and influence the way we see other, are seen, treat others and are treated by them” (Dyer, 1992: 1) and that

It is true that such identities are never really as comprehensive as they claim – that many lesbians and gay men, for instance, do not recognize themselves in the identities claimed either within lesbian/gay cultures or by the lesbian/gay movement – but it is also the case that one cannot live outside the society, the network of representations, in which one finds oneself.

(ibidem: 3)

The problem voiced in the film is that these characters had no idea what a gay identity was, let alone a gay movement. Therefore, they couldn’t recognise themselves in them. Moreover, their public image of cowboys, strong men brought up rather roughly, would never allow them to escape their own image of the society in which they lived: as Ennis says, “two men living together, it ain’t right”. Nevertheless, Jack does seem willing to challenge all that for their relationship, which in my opinion contributes to the positive representation of homosexuals in the movies – his courage could have changed the whole story. But coming out is difficult. The groups that access more power are heterosexuals and, as mentioned previously, their surrounding environment didn’t permit them to pursue such bold acts. Therefore, the characters’ background surprisingly constitutes a positive representation – they are both from poor, harsh, uneducated backgrounds, two ‘American losers’ as some may call them. That may help erase the preconceived idea that some people, perhaps even a few homosexuals, have that all gay men and women come from wealthy families. They were not rich at all.

As far as the movie being political or not is concerned, it is a fact that it was shot after the Matthew Shephard incident, and that Wyoming, where Brokeback Mountain takes place is the same State where Shephard was brutally left to die. Wyoming is also the State in which G. W. Bush was born. In this way the movie is not only subtly remembering gay hate crimes, but it is also commenting on Bush’s anti-gay marriage politics (let’s not forget that Ennis’ daughter gets married at the same age as he was when he first met Jack, which makes him realise how mistaken he had been for having lost his chance with him).

Stereotypes can also present a positive image of gay men in the media. Nevertheless, one of the aspects in Brokeback that helped the movie to be seen and analysed differently than others which also depict same-sex desire is that the characters are not the stereotypical image of what the “social mind” thinks of homosexuals, particularly when hearing words like “gay”. Their ways and attitudes are not effeminate and they don’t obey the rules and common images of gay men. This fact may change some preconceptions, but it could also be thought of as being restrictive and not very positive at all because if the viewers are able to feel the character’s pain and restrictiveness they will think of it as undeserved. Therefore, they are types represented through fiction:

The type is any character constructed through the use of a few immediately recognizable and defining traits, which do not change or ‘develop’ through the course of the narrative and which point to general, recurrent features of the human world.

(Dyer, 1993: 13)

Identities are a key element to Brokeback Mountain. The main characters’ fake straight identities, the married lives they arranged for themselves, which caused unhappiness to everyone including themselves, could be seen as a negative element that wouldn’t help promote the movie’s “good” image. In fact, many people probably felt anger for what they both did to their wives because betrayal and secrecy were a great part of their lives throughout the years they met each other on the mountains. But then again, in my opinion, I do believe that this unfortunate side of the story just helps us realise what happens in these cases, and how changing minds can help prevent them from ever taking. If their society were more open-minded, and their upbringing wasn’t as restrictive as it was, then perhaps they wouldn’t have chosen to live a life that was contrary to their feelings. But the fact is that Ennis, for instance, was too torn and tattered due to his childhood to ever embrace his relationship with Jack openly. When Jack tells him that “it could be like this, just like this, always”, Ennis remembers an event he witnessed as a child: his father took him to see an old man that was brutally tortured and killed because he was living with another man. They were “a joke in town, though they were pretty tough old birds”, Ennis recalls, and then goes on to express his own fear: “if this thing gets hold of us again, in the wrong time, in the wrong place, then we’re dead”. And by the time Jack gets killed, Ennis realises he let his life pass him by. Jack’s mother probably knows what her son was, and we get the feeling that she had come to terms with it, but she was rendered helpless because of her tough, castrating husband. This is all understandable if we realise that “homophobia is usually the last oppression to be mentioned, the last to be taken seriously, the last to go. But it is extremely serious, sometimes to the point of being fatal” (Abelove et al., 1993: 99).

So identity is part of what makes these characters men trapped in time and space: “‘Homosexual’ and ‘Lesbian’ have been negative sexual categories, at best to be viewed pathologically, at worst as moral degeneracy” (Dyer, 1993: 20-21). Let us not forget, again, that the gay movement of the sixties happened in big cities and it wasn’t heard of in rural America until much later, if at all. People in those areas were more concerned with economic matters, as we can also see in the movie, than anything else. Therefore, they couldn’t organise themselves, feel part of a group – they were alone.
Four types of homosexuals are considered in Dyer’s The Matter of Images, one of them being the “Macho”. Neither Jack nor Ennis fall into this category, simply because they are not even exaggeratedly masculine and they certainly don’t possess a “consciously erotic look” (idem 40). Ennis’ ways are rough and contain nothing of the erotic. Not even their clothes can be seen as contributing to that image – they are not trying hard to look masculine and express an erotic look. Moreover, they definitely don’t correspond to the image of the “sad, young man”. Jack, for instance, destroys the possibility of one looking at him and identifying him with that type when he stands up to his father-in-law.

If one went to see the movie without having heard a single world about it previously, one would immediately recognise them as tough, strong men of the American West (which they are, anyway) and maybe think that the movie was just another old-fashioned cowboy movie. I believe that it is by making these characters, types, that we can subvert the stereotypes and re-interpret them. In a sense, a meaningful analysis might show that what could be viewed as negative in Ang Lee’s stoic drama can actually construct a positive image as mentioned before: despite being social characters that represent their imprisoning and socially repressive time and age, they still own a unique individuality, which shows how their “manacles” were not only forged by the world but also by themselves. This is important because restricting yourself usually derives from being imprisoned by what surrounds you, and, although a lot of people didn’t think of Brokeback Mountain as a political movie, one can consider their restrictiveness as being so, in the way that people might be affected by it and identify with some of its characteristics, thus reinforcing its positive representation of homosexuality. It is not a question of a man having sex with another man, it is about freedom, something that people cherish and take for granted nowadays. Ang Lee’s discrete way of shooting the sex scenes also contrasts to a large degree to what happens in the book by Annie Proulx. This is also a very clear sign that there was a pressure or a desire to make it represent homosexuality positively. The movie has in fact been called a love story rather than just a gay love story, which would be a negative statement and would again isolate it in a specific category. It is nonetheless a gay movie, or a movie about a gay love relationship, but it speaks to everyone, in my opinion.

Sexual essentialism is “the idea that sex is a natural force that exists prior to social life (…) Sexual essentialism is embedded in the folk wisdoms of Western societies (…) “ (Abelove, et al., 1993: 9). Brokeback Mountain is a good example of this idea – the two men couldn’t control their desires and only when they found themselves living in society did they repress their feelings. The social life shapes their lives; they live according to their society’s model of thinking. Nevertheless, Foucault denies this theory in his book The History of Sexuality refusing “the traditional understanding of sexuality as a natural libido yearning to break free of social constraint” (apud Abelove, et al.,1993: 416). I venture myself to say that that is exactly what goes on in Brokeback Mountain, despite the fact that those desires might have been socially constructed – Western culture has always considered sex to be negative, specifically homosexual sex.

The characters are then forced to play the game of visibility/invisibility, of that which is lived and that which is kept secret – the mountain is both freedom and prison. Because they live in a narrow-minded society, they end up, as previously mentioned, involving everyone in their helpless, destructive love affair. But this “game” is deeper than that. The characters’ shirts inside Jack’s closet portray the secrecy of homosexuality and what misfortunes that might bring. Nevertheless, the main characters are still heroic in their failure – in the end Ennis still closes his closet door with the shirts inside, but a promise is made not to accept things as they still are. And this can be linked to the “coming out” step that is a part of any homosexual’s life. Brokeback Mountain does help “make visible the invisible” (Dyer, 1993: p.16), but they couldn’t finally really come out and make themselves be seen, as has been analysed throughout my essay. But the point proven by that game, in my view, is that it shows that, yes, cowboys in rural states can in fact be homosexuals, and I believe that this is one of the main elements in the movie. If we look at the scene in which Jack goes to Mexico to find a male prostitute, we may take it as negative aspect, which would make sense considering he “betrayed” Ennis, but being in the closet in the society in which he lived probably made him feel too shut down not to find consolation in those places where he could at least be himself sexually. So Mexico is visibility whereas Wyoming and Texas (which symbolise their marriages in which they were tangled) are invisibility, or the impossibility of being real.
Therefore, Mexico is also an example of reality, because if “families play a crucial role in enforcing sexual conformity” (Abelove, et al.,: 22), then Mexico is what proves that the conformity of being married is what is most fake in the whole story. They both had castrating fathers, they both embraced a straight married life, but they both knew and felt that it wasn’t real.

In the media, a battle for positive representations of same-sex desire has always been active:

Attempts to counter negative propaganda with more realistic information generally meet with censorship, and there are continuous ideological struggles over which representations of sexual communities make it into the popular media

(ibidem: p.23)


Therefore, it is my belief that Brokeback Mountain is a movie that struggles to represent homosexuality positively by depicting an isolated case, thus portraying the whole community and those who are still trapped in a restrictive society like Ennis and Jack. In my opinion this movie is about reality and what it can do to people. The fact that it didn’t fail to reach the mainstream consumers proves that it is a movie with social significance, and it is my belief that much more can be said and written about it and more specifically on certain aspects, like the difficulty of coming out of the closet.



Bibliography

Primary sources:

. Lee, Ang (2005), Brokeback Mountain. United States of America: Focus Features

Secondary sources:

. Abelove, Henry, Barale, Michèle Aina, Halperin, David M. (1993), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. United States of America: Routledge, Inc.

. D’Emilio, John (1983), Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: the making of a homosexual minority in the United States, 1940-1970. United States of America: The University of Chicago Press

. D’Emilio, John (1992), Making Trouble: essays on gay history, politics, and the university. United States of America: Poutledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc.

. Dyer, Richard (1993), The Matter of Images: essays on representations. Great Britain: Butler & Tanner, Ltd.

A Estrada

A estrada parecia-me cada vez mais longa à medida que a ia percorrendo, sob o calor abrasador de um Verão húmido e sufocante. O corpo que levava não era o meu, era como se estivesse a ver o mundo através dos olhos de uma velha que já não podia com a carcaça. Cada vez mais me sentia a morrer, sentia a velha a morrer, mas o meu olhar mantinha-se alerta, lúcido e objectivo. Todas as pessoas com quem me cruzava me olhavam aterrorizadas e sentia-me a tropeçar em mim mesmo, no corpo da velha que se esmorecia. E foi então. Prodígio da gravidade, prodígio do calor, prodígio de uma doença, prodígio de todos os prodígios aqui mencionados juntos, caí. Encostado a um canto no meio da calçada, sabia que ia morrer. E estava preparado, sentia o meu olhar preparado para pôr termo à vida do corpo da velha e deixar a minha consciência continuar a viver e analisar o ambiente à volta. Saber como seria. Saber o que se iria passar depois.
Dentro de mim, eu conseguia ver as pessoas fixadas no meu corpo. Umas abananavam-me, outras esbofeteavam-me, outras gritavam com as mãos nas respectivas bocas, outras faziam menção de chamar alguém que me acudisse, outras chamavam mesmo, outras simplesmente passavam. E foi destas de que particularmente gostei mais. Porque a morte devia ter tanta importância como ver um homem a mijar na rua, era olhar e continuar a andar, fazendo a cara e comentário que nos bem apetecesse. Sabia que a minha respiração iria parar mais cedo ou mais tarde e o último suspiro estaria por perto. Sabia tudo isto e no entanto estava sóbrio, com um olhar limpo e objectivo, como um samurai japonês que sabe que vai morrer mas que mantém a sua honra intacta. Era isso mesmo, sentia-me intacto na minha consciência. Lembro-me de ter pensado na invalidez e leviandade da carne em relação ao poder e persistência do espírito. E assim morri.