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Friday, January 20, 2006

Neurotic Jewish comedians seem to understand the straight male discomfort with Brokeback Mountain
Posted by Jill | 4:39 PM

First we had Larry David admit in the op-ed pages of the New York Times that he's afraid of what he might find out about himself if he sees Brokeback Mountain:

I just know if I saw that movie, the voice inside my head that delights in torturing me would have a field day. ''You like those cowboys, don't you? They're kind of cute. Go ahead, admit it, they're cute. You can't fool me, gay man. Go ahead, stop fighting it. You're gay! You're gay!''


-- thereby confirming the fears of the Christofascist Zombie Brigade that seeing this film will somehow magically turn men gay.

Then the other night on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, the far more intelligent Marc Maron discussed the same topic, stating that "Have you seen it yet?" has become tantamount to asking, "Are you gay?" He opined straight men are afraid to see this movie because if they cry, it means there's a little gay man inside them waving his arms and saying "Hello!". Unlike Larry David, however, Maron tells his straight brethren to embrace that little gay man -- embrace him, go out to eat with him, have sex with him once, and then agree to meet him on a mountaintop in Wyoming every year, but meanwhile you've got to do this thing with the wife.

Of course it's funnier when Marc Maron tells it than when I relate it second-hand -- and funnier than when Larry David talks about it. But they're on to something, just as Bob Goldthwait was over a decade ago when his standup bit routinely included a segment of a guy beating up a gay gay and amidst all the hateful words was the acknowledgment that part of the beating was because the perpetrator found his victim attractive.

In an article on the film's success, Newsweek's Susanna Schrobsdorff discusses how the film is resonating in the red states -- among women:

And in Mason City, Iowa, last week, 41 people petitioned an eight-screen commercial multiplex to get the movie shown. “It’s the first time I’ve seen that happen,” says the cinema’s assistant manager, Johnny Mattis, who explains that the film was scheduled to arrive on Jan. 27 anyway.

Mattis, 24, isn’t sure what all the fuss is about. “I don’t know why people really want it to come here,” he says. “I don’t like the drama-romances anyway, and I really don’t want to see one with two gay men.” But Mattis and the rest of the usually coveted audience of guys 18-34 years old aren’t the target this time. From early on, Focus said the film was aiming for the same female fans with upscale tastes who loved “Titanic.”

Ann Eichler, a 63-year-old grandmother in Scottsdale, Ariz., is smack in the middle of that demographic. She went to a 12:30 p.m. weekday showing without her husband and found the theater packed with women. “I think men are so uncomfortable with this kind of thing, even if they are very liberal-minded,” explains Eichler, who says she was enormously moved by the film. She admits she was “a little worried about a seeing a homosexual love scene, but I found I could handle it.” And she adds that her husband was kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” about her seeing the movie. “He knows it’s out there, he just doesn’t want to talk about it.”

Eichler’s husband is not alone. On personal blogs, around water coolers and even on Web sites like WebMD.com, women are talking about trying to get their husbands to go see it and debating whether not wanting to see it makes you a homophobe--“no” say many heterosexual men, they just don’t want to see chick flicks. “I didn’t even want to see ‘Cold Mountain',” protests one.


The mention of Titanic and Cold Mountain is instructive. Both of those films featured romantic plots involving androgynously attractive young men. While Cold Mountain was too ponderous and icy to engage even most women, Titanic was a phenomenon -- to the point that straight guys all over America felt compelled to brand Leonardo DiCaprio as gay, probably because that little gay man inside them thought he was cute and it scared the living daylights out of them.

It's no accident, then, that the Twin Towers of wingnut obsession these days have to do with the privacy rights of both women and gay people. Does the success of a film like Brokeback Mountain among straight women make them more like gay men in the eyes of the straight men they live with? And if so, doesn't that seem strange in a culture in which the ideal female form is the hairless, curveless body of an adolescent boy, only with Mommy's huge breasts slapped on the front of it?
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