A good man is impossible to find: Brokeback Mountain as heteronormative tragedy

Abstract

This paper analyzes the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain in the light of the heterosexual female viewers who responded so favorably to the film. It speculates that the contemporaneous media mainstreaming of the uncloseted homosexual resulted in a parallel need for a psychosocial reconfiguring of the heterosexual; and that it was in this odd and anxious space that, for these viewers, the film’s potency may have subconsciously resided. In effect, the film, which pivots on the power of lies that closetedness engenders, was indirectly — and safely — addressing anxieties regarding marital fidelity, which were potentially being stoked, so the author argues, by the recent emergence of cyberspace.