The Philosophy of Ang Lee

East Meets Western: The Eastern Philosophy of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain

77 east Meets Western The Eastern Philosophy of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain Jeff Bush Introducing the Cowboy Ang Lee’s 2005 film, Brokeback Mountain, is an adaptation of Annie Proulx’s 1997 novella about the intense connection between two cowboys who first meet while sheepherding on a mountain in Wyoming in 1963. Both the film and the novella emphasize the anfractuous nature of the cowboys’ emotional and sexual relationship over the next twenty years as they struggle against society’s disapproval and strive to maintain the intensity of their initial meeting . Here, I argue that Lee’s film connects the genre of the western with Eastern philosophy, which helps us to view homosexuality in a new way. First, I discuss the representation of the hero in the western as a heterosexual archetype . This leads to a discussion of the implicit homosexuality in the western as illuminated by queer theory, that area of critical theory that investigates issues surrounding gender, sexuality, and sexual acts.1 Second, I argue that, rather than replicating western archetypes or queer theory, Lee’s Brokeback Mountain parallels both the Eastern philosophy of Mencius (372–289 BCE) and the contemporary philosophy of John Corvino.2 Third, I explain how Lee takes the western in a new and different direction and that his representations of the main characters in Brokeback Mountain, Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), help us to see connections between Mencius and Corvino. Finally, I suggest that Brokeback Mountain captures, in cinematic form, the symbiosis of the cardinal relationship of friendship and the moral concept of rén, which furthermore helps us to view homosexuality in moral, rather than sexual, terms. Since the birth of cinema—and indeed modern visual media itself— the cowboy has exemplified an American heterosexual archetype that still 78 Jeff Bush resonates today in its attempted synthesis of masculine iconography and a post-Enlightenment ideology that promotes the cause of the individual. The cinematic template for this archetype was first sketched out in the silent era by Tom Mix, who represented the very essence of a cowboy—be-Stetsoned, athletic, and straight acting. This template was given color (if not shade) by John Wayne, who not only had similar physical attributes to Mix (with the addition of a suitably manly Midwestern drawl), but also managed to elevate the western hero to icon status, symbolizing American values and ideals. Wayne came to embody the personal qualities of independence and stoicism, as well as the value systems of duty and courage, that we now associate with the western hero. Subsequently, the western hero, as an all-American heterosexual archetype, became a simple and powerful image easily utilized by advertisers and presidents alike. Queer Theory With its provocative and easily marketable forms (Stetsons, plains, sunsets, horses, rifles) and its powerful belief system of independence (duty and courage), the western has always been ripe for cashing in on not only by advertisers and politicians, but also by groups who have traditionally felt marginalized by the values held up to be ideal in the western. There was something inevitable about the deconstruction of the western by queer theory in the 1980s and 1990s, given that queer theory’s objects of interest include heterosexual iconography, fantasy, and masculinity. Queer theory makes it seem that there was always already something queer about the western, and it gives us a way of talking about the western divorced from political ideology or advertising messages. It has provided us with a way of looking at the western as always already containing disruptive spaces that threaten to destabilize the genre itself. However, there is something disappointing about the emphasis on campy dialogue and phallic imagery that too often preoccupies queer theory. Indeed, we only have to watch Destry Rides Again (George Marshall, 1939) or My Little Chickadee (Edward F. Cline, 1940) to see a representation of the western with its tongue already firmly in cheek. In the middle of the twentieth century, the western genre was exploited in advertising and in politics for its style rather than its substance. Similarly, queer theory places as much emphasis on form rather than meaning in its deconstruction of the western. We never truly get to the meaning of the western via readings informed by East Meets Western 79 either classic western theory or queer theory; often, we are merely served an advertisement for consumerism. Queer theory did introduce...