The Brokeback Project

4/29/06- Still battling the mouse, we're thinking about leaving the door to the deck open tonight because it seems to be too smart to enter the trap by itself. We're also trying to court all the homeless cats on our street to at least try to have the little thing scared out of its wits. But enough about that there was Brokeback today. Found this paragraph in the January 9th issue of the New Yorker, the 9th was my grandmother's birthday.

Yet there is humor in Heath Ledger’s performance. After his powerful work in “Brokeback Mountain,” in which he plays a man all tied up inside himself, it was fun to see him leaping out of bedroom windows and prancing around, sword in hand. His Casanova is seductive yet reserved, and Ledger’s extraordinary baritone voice, which registers clearly at the lowest volume, may be the best asset any actor has had in years. Assailed in court for dallying with a novice in a nunnery, he says, sotto voce, “She was hardly a novice,” a line of no great wit that Ledger turns into elegance by seeming to utter it as a form of self-amusement. The movie’s central conceit—that the world’s most famous lover loses his heart to a battling Venetian feminist—is a little hard to take, but the lady in question is played by Sienna Miller, who has a volatile, fast-moving body and genuine fire in her eyes. When the credits were over at last, I sighed, and took away a moviegoer’s fantasy of Ledger and Miller starting work again, far away from Venice and ball gowns, on something that might be worth seeing.-DAVID DENBY

I realize that's not really the best way to site but I'm not claiming it as my own work in any way, shape or form. I think this paragraph is interesting in light of how much Ledger's acting in Brokeback was mentioned again and highlight a higlight of the film. Hollywood is such an interesting beast. You could have never told me that the star of A Knight's Tale and Ten Things I Hate About You would become a respected actor.

4/28/06- Still no Brokeback update. The mouse is even more wiley then before. I just wish I could enter the mind of the beast and have him leave.

4/27/06- Still no Brokeback stuff and I'm at the point that I don't care. Another sleepless night with that mouse and I think I'm going to scream. I try not to disrespect other living things but I just can't understand why it just won't go away.

4/26/06- No new Brokeback material today. I'm at the point of not caring today because Susan and I have been battling a mouse over the last couple of days. I want to be as humane was possible but it has just infiltrated my pysche. I'm having trouble sleeping because I know that he's out there. We bought mothballs, have been placing chewing gum around the house and have a humane trap but all the mouse seems to be doing is eating the gum. They can't digest it. Susan says that we'll know when he's gone when they stop taking the gum. That's a good idea. I just hate the idea of having a died mouse somewhere in my house. I just want it over with. Several weeks ago Susan and I went and saw a very small art opening of an installation called the "Twenty Bunnies Project." I got a kernel of the idea for this project from it. The artist tried to draw twenty bunnies everyday for a year. By the beginning of February she didn't care anymore. Sometimes I feel the same way about this project there are just days when life gets in the way.

4/24/06- While doing through recipes that Susan and I had clipped from The Cincinnati Enquirer over the last couple of months I found one that had the Oscar annoucements on the back of it. Sure enough there was a picture of Heath Ledger in full Brokeback custom. It's amazing what you can find when you're not looking for it.

04/23/06- This cartoon from the December 26th/January 2nd issue of the New Yorker was part of my reading today. I also noticed that there have been 4 people looking at my profile. Maybe there are more people reading the Brokeback Project. If you have any questions I know that my e-mail address is not on my profile. It is heartofjas@gmail.com I also just wanted to mention that I know there is some people with the sequencing of today’s posts. I was having problem’s getting Friday’s post to go up and it is after Saturday’s and today’s. Sorry about that.

4/22/06- When it rains Brokeback, it pours Brokeback. Susan and I had a heart to heart about why I’m still doing this when I’ve decided once again that it is just getting too tedious. It comes down to the fact that I’ve started this project and I really want to finish it. And thank God I decided to because there were a lot of Brokeback references today. This weekend’s Saturday Night Live was a repeat from March 3rd (hosted by Natalie Portman) the day before the Oscars. There was a Brokeback reference during Weekend Update. I also finished the Oscar issue of Entertainment Weekly. The rest of the issue contained: pictures of Ang Lee at an after party and the above link which is Stephen King’s take on the Crash versus Brokeback controversy.

4/21/06- Yesterday was half-way-point for the Brokeback Project. It passed without much fanfare from Susan and I but yet I continue with it. After weeks of looking at it and keeping it in the bag that I carry to work everyday, I finally started reading the Oscar recap issue of Entertainment Weekly, (issue dated March 17, 2006) even though I knew that there would be Brokeback mentions through the issue. So far today I have come across the linked article about the Independent Spirit Awards, the cover article about how Brokeback’s lose to Crash was one of the biggest upsets in Oscars® history, a complete Oscar® stopwatch with minute by minute details of the evening, a list of Oscar® winner, an article that graded Jon Stewart’s hosting durties as well as the show in general, Burning Questions that you may have about the Oscar® telecast this year, the number of times that things happened during the telecast, as well as pictures of Michelle Williams and Jake Gyllenhaal as some the best dressed people at the Oscars®.

4/20/06- Yet, another day without any Brokeback references. I’m getting to the point where no one is reading and there is very little to write about. Susan and I keep having the same conversation about how I feel it’s going.

4/19/06- I had seen the Scary Movie Four promo a couple of weeks ago and had never thought of the heavy handed Brokeback parody as even being just that. So here it is. It is extremely moronic but everything counts right. I have a funny feeling that this project is going to be turning around a couple days. I feel interested in it again.

4/18/05- Still no new Brokeback information today. This is getting to the point were I don't want to force myself to read things about the movie that I know I haven't gotten to. We'll see what happens tomorrow.

4/17/06- I keep questioning why I'm doing this with Susan. It is not because I don't know why I'm working on this project but rather if it is still something that I think someone else would be interested in. Maybe it isn't. Does that even matter anymore? I am finding just how ingrained something can become in popular culture. I could have replaced Brokeback with a different movie and it wouldn't have been this experience. This film is being talked about rather people like it or not.

4/16/2006- Susan and I stayed up last night to catch one of Susan's favorite bands, Pearl Jam, on Saturday Night Live. There was a Brokeback reference in one of the recurring sketches. I don't want to talk too much about the sketch but it is interesting to point out that this sketch parodies electronica and house music, two musical genres that are stereotypically quite popular with male homosexuals.

This is the first real Brokeback reference that I've seen in a long time. This was an article in the April 10th edition of the Cincinnati Enquirer. Here is a most detailed version of the events from the Boston Globe. I know that I promised that I would provide that information about Time early this week but I keep forgetting. Sometimes that work a day world gets in the way of the other things that we have to do. I'm also getting a little burned out with this project. Not that I'm forgetting. It's just the dailiness of it. But I'm still fighting the good fight. I'd also like to say that this article is interesting in light of other things that I've read. I hear that there is more sexual content of a female nature (bare breasts, etc.) then anything that would be considered hardcore male.

No new Brokeback news but I'm happy to say that there have been at least two people that I looked at my profile. That doesn't mean that they read the whole blog but it's better then nothing. Makes me hope someone will pick up something interesting from what I'm doing.

While I was changing my wishlist on Amazon.com I added Walk the Line to it. One of my recommendations became Brokeback Mountain the full screen DVD, Brokeback Mountain the wide screen DVD and the soundtrack from Brokeback Mountain. Susan keeps saying that I need to make this blog more visible but I think that's beside the point I don't want people to be drawn to this project because I'm afraid they'll try to influence its outcome. Having said that The Brokeback Project is now on google. Maybe that will bring someone to read this blog.

4/12/06- I should have never posted two posts yesterday because now I'm really confused. Last night Susan went to the dentist and while I was nervous in the waiting room a looked through what seemed to be a million Time magazines from the last couple of months and found three references to Brokeback. The first one I'd like to bring up is from the March 27th issue which features information about a diatribe that Annie Proulx delivered regarding Brokeback losing best picture. Maybe she forgot there was still a race issue in the United States.

http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1161225,00.html This article from the February 27th issue is a run down of who time that was going to win. Since I can't read it now because I don't subscribe to Time I really have no idea what it said yesterday. I do remember that Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal were pictured in the article. I can't provide any information about the other article because there are too many articles to search through over the last couple months and the piece of paper on which I wrote the date is at home. More later I guess.

While looking for directions in the Cincinnati area I found a banner ad on Yahoo Maps that showed Heath Ledger as his character from Brokeback. I can't really find a way to find that again without looking at more Brokeback stuff so I suppose you're just going to have to trust me. I know that is hard.

Susan mentioned that yesterday one of her friends from the History department at UC said that she had cried at the end of Brokeback. There is more conversation between Susan and I now about rather or not anyone is reading the blog. The horrible thing is that I wasn't going to comment on anyone's interest in the blog until after the experiment was over. I feel that even if no one is reading this I am doing this project for me.

4/10/06- No new Brokeback news so far today. Last night I watched a clip show about the turgid history that was E!'s change cult series, Talk Soup. At the end of the special was a group of clips from E!'s spin off series The Soup. It had for many weeks featured the recurring parody of both King Kong and Brokeback Mountain called Brokeback Kong. Tasteless? Oh yes. Funny? I think so. What does that say about me?

4/9/2006- Brokeback references come in fits and starts. This morning I almost fell after slipping on a magazine clipping from the January 20th, 2006 issue of Entertainment Weekly. That issue contained a list of 25 films that a moviegoer needed to see before Oscar® night. Number 1 on the list was Brokeback Mountain. This is the only copy of the list I could find online: http://www.bobanddavid.com/doug.asp
Started reading the December 19th, 2005 issue of the New Yorker. That issue contains the capsule review Anthony Lane wrote for Brokeback. The capsule is a little bit different from the full review not just stressing the film as a vehicle for Heath Ledger but also praising Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams. Again, Lane brings up his critique of Brokeback being an “issues” movie (Lane’s phrase) saying it’s “just” (my word) a film about love. My mind wanders to the fact that Hathaway was the star of the Princess Diaries series and Williams was on Dawson’s Creek. Irony, when I found this page to cut and paste the link Jake Gyllenhaal was in a banner ad for Details magazine on the side of the page. This is not the first time that when finding links I have come across other Brokeback material but I have not looked at them because they are not directly connected to the project.
There was much conversation between Susan and I this afternoon about rather I should include seeing Sunday newspaper supplement ads in this account. No decision was come to. There was only one ad in this Sunday’s paper featuring Brokeback. I could try to make some attempt at profundity about the reasoning behind this but I think I’ll let the fact speak for itself. Susan also expected me to make a comment about whither or not Brokeback is an “issues” movie. I am trying to keep my opinion about the politics of the film out of my responses in fear of encapsulating half thought out ideas onto the screen. I will say that I think Brokeback is an issues movie but I don’t think that it was suppose to a hot button polemic that was contemporaneous with American society when it came out. I won’t say anything else until I have time to form more then a sound bite about this subject. I want to apologize for the way that this all appears on the blog in print it will be edited into a more concrete form. I also am I little worried that Susan and I may be the only people that are reading the blog.
What a day of happenstance. While cleaning our bedroom of recyclable material I found a magazine clipping from Entertainment Weekly’s Year-End Special for 2005. I had kept it as part of a running joke Susan and I have that stems out of a sketch from the January 21st, 2006 episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by actor Peter Sarsgaard. Like in the episode we like to say his name like pirates. His picture is on a page showing the style trend of 2005. Sarsgaard is bald with Jamie Foxx, Natalie Portman and Jake Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal’s Brokeback costar Heath Ledger is also pictured on this pages as Ennis del Mar. It talks about Ledger making cowboy style chic. There is also a reference to del Mar “…stealing spouses from stable accountants.” The sexual ambiguity of the phrase is wonderful but the reference is still lost on me.

4/8/2006- Pretty eventless day for Brokeback related news. No new material was found about the film today. But Susan and I both have new pairs of glasses, Susan got her hair cut and she has to go to the dentist next week because she may have chipped her tooth on cereal on Friday leaving a back tooth extremely pointed and bothering her tongue. Because of the day lapse with blogging both the day before and the current day are being posted around 6:00 PM. I wonder how this affects the project?

4/7/2006- Three notes before today’s interactions. Yesterday, Thursday April 6th, I picked up a stack of Rolling Stone that my neighbor was offering to anyone who wanted them on our street or if there was no one interested in the magazines then he was going to have them picked up by the recycling company. I took them. There just happened to be an interview with Heath Ledger in one. I picked up the whole stack and did not notice the covers until I brought them home. I will commit on the interview when I came to that magazine chronologically in my pile of back issues. As a member of the Western Literature Association I receive e-mails from colleagues about subjects relating to the literary West and the West’s portrayal in popular culture, if Brokeback Mountain is mentioned it will be catalogued in this review. Also, many of the magazines that I have around the house feature full-page reviews of a film the week it is released (or near its date of release), both on home video and in the theatre, as well as capsule reviews for the remainder of the films run in a theatre. Both the full-page review and the capsule will be included in this account but subsequent runnings of the capsule will not be included. Neither will repeat viewings of a television commercial or a print ad.
There was a small capsule review of Brokeback in the Cincinnati Enquirer’s Friday supplement entitled, Weekend. It provides information about new restaurants, art happenings, concerts and other events around town as well as new movies that just came out in theatres or at the video store. The review was taken from the Associated Press wire and bears much resemblance to the review from this week’s CinWeekly. It is just a sentence that boils the film down to being the genesis for the rash of gay cowboy jokes across pop culture over the last couple months. http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/AB/20060407/ENT02/604070302/1027/rssenq0501
Started and finished reading the Dec. 12th, 2005 issue of the New Yorker. In that issue there is a full-page ad, featuring the Brokeback (at places in this account I am just going to refer to the movie just by its first word) movie poster and sponsored by Bombay Sapphire gin. The film is featured in the gin company’s Inspired Visions series outlining the critical acclaim and preopening buzz of the film. The ad tries to combine the glamour of gin cocktails with the longing and suppression that the ad agency sees at the heart of the film.
Through after some talk Susan and I decided that it was most likely planned I did find it a little overkill that this ad for the film would appear in the same New Yorker issue that the movie’s review was in. After reading Anthony Lane’s brilliantly written review of Brokeback I am struck by his assertion at the end, that Brokeback Mountain is not a gay Western because it is neither gay nor a Western. This is interesting because it seems to contradict Mr. Lane’s implication that the subtext of all Westerns is homosexual. He calls to mind the image of the closeted gay icon Montgomery Cliff in the classic Red River but then says that the context of the homosexual relationship in Brokeback goes not make it “gay enough” (my phrase).

It started innocently enough. This article from USA Today, http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2006-03-30-bahamas-ban-brokeback_x.htm, was picked up by the NBC affiliate in Cincinnati, Ohio WLWT and I received the article in an e-mail that comes to me once a day giving interesting news stories from the region, the nation and the world. Having a passing interest in Brokeback Mountain because of my interest in the American West, my interest in the well being of the gay, lesbian, transsexual and transgendered community and because I was a big fan of director Ang Lee’s film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon I read the article with passing interest. Soon afterwards that same afternoon I received an e-mail from an acquiesce that I have known since my undergraduate days through both my undergraduate institution, my mentor at that university and from my continuing work with the Western Literature Association. In the e-mail was outlined the guidelines for a project that Texas A&M University is currently preparing in regards to Brokeback Mountain. From this kernel of information I decided to try to understand the Brokeback “fervor” or “phenomenon,” which ever you prefer in a different light. While trying not to be completely clinical I wanted to keep a journal of the ways that in my normal day-to-day life I was confronted with Brokeback Mountain over the course of one month starting April 6th of 2006. I have not read Annie Proulx’s short story, I do know Ms. Proulx’s work from my interest in Western American literature and from my subscription to the New Yorker, nor have I seen Lee’s film version of the story. In order to come to terms with Brokeback Mountain’s media saturation I started with the above article about the film being banned in the Bahamas and wanted to keep track of any conversation, article, e-mail or television commercial that I see in regards to the film and comment briefly on them. I must note that while not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination there is no type of media that I will be in placing myself into that will have me confront Brokeback directly on purpose. In concurrence with hoping to have portions of this journal published in Texas A&M’s project I will also be keeping The Brokeback Project as a blog on www.bloggers.com, starting April 7th. The blog will only be for formatting my thoughts daily I will not interact with any other bloggers until after project is completed. The blog will most likely be a day behind in updates because I do have a twenty-four hour period finding Brokeback related information.
A little about myself. My name is Jason Gallagher I am a 25-year-old independent scholar from Cincinnati, Ohio, originally from Saint Louis. Missouri and born and raised in Springfield, Illinois. I have a bachelor’s in English from Webster University in Saint Louis and am a credit and a thesis away from getting my master’s in English from another university. I have an academic interest in popular culture, especially film, as well as the literature of the 20th century American West, focusing on urban landscapes. My thesis is about the “golden age” of Los Angeles from 1930-1950. I live with my finance Susan in a 1890s row house that looks over the city of Cincinnati and onto the Ohio River and the Kentucky hills.
As a way of trying to prove that this is as scientific a process as a student of English can provide here is a list of media outlets that I have access to daily. I subscribe to an expanded service of cable television but aside from two days at the beginning of the experiment do not watch more then four hours of television a day, even on the weekends, mostly BookTV and the nightly news. I subscribe to the New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, and the Cincinnati Enquirer, and other then the fact that there are many months, from December to the present, worth of old copies of those magazines lying around the house they have been there before the idea of this project came to be. I pick up Cincinnati’s independent newspaper, CityBeat as while as its counterpart published by the Enquirer for young professionals CinWeekly every week. I write daily listening the public radio. I receive e-mail updates from WLWT and Cincinnati public radio daily. Other then checking my e-mail and reading the newspaper and the magazines that have been pilling up daily there is no other connection to the media other then television that I have outside of my 9 to 5 work week. I must omit that because of Cincinnati’s very conservative reputation I am coming into this project thinking their may be a little more coverage of Brokeback Mountain where then in other places but I am not excepting anything out of the ordinary. I also have to note that the week that I started the project was the same week that Brokeback came out on DVD for the first time. As a conclusion to this project I will not read Prouxl’s story nor see the film until the seventh of May to have the project come full circle.

4/6/2006- Today I came across a small review of The DVD release of Brokeback Mountain in CinWeekly. The review is fairly start forward its description of the artist controversy that surrounds Brokeback Mountain not receiving the best picture Oscar® at this years Oscars®. Next to the article is a capsule review of the re-release of Crash, which of course was the film that beat Brokeback Mountain for the best picture Oscar®. This version of Crash is a special edition; I’m sure released in connection with it being awarded the Oscar®. The interesting thing about this juxtaposition seems to be two fold. Given that both films insight controversy, I must note that I have not seen Crash, Crash cannot be spoken of now without having Brokeback Mountain mentioned in the text about it. Brokeback Mountain on the other hand is spoken of in higher tones and is seen as slighted in someway. I think this is built upon two different subconscious stereotypes at work in both Brokeback Mountain and Crash’s success. Should a work about racism be considered the highest type of art in its genre that year, while a film about something effeminate, the effeminate nature being the heart of art is not considered such.