Melodrama in Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain was directed by Ang Lee and released in 2005, receiving many award nominations including an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, unusual considering the content of the film. It is set in Wyoming, in America’s Mid-West region. The two main protagonists, Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) both apply to work on ‘Brokeback Mountain’ as sheep herders one summer, and during that time fall in love. They see each other occasionally over many years but both have their own families and cannot be together due to fears over how the society they live in would think or act.

Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin comment that:

It queers traditional concepts of American masculinity and the film genre most closely tied to its representation, the Western. The film powerfully dramatizes the processes and effects of both social and internalizes homophobia, and continually blurs the borders between straight and gay, homosocial and homosexual.

This ties in with Elsaesser’s statement as it names these historical tensions which he names as prominent features of the melodrama. Both Jack and Ennis are very masculine, and work in a masculine profession, which makes the film much more emotional as it is clear that they have a great love for one another, but cannot be together due to circumstances.

I think the use of bleak, minimal music; sparse dialogue and many scenes of characters crying all add to the sense of melodrama. They go well with the vast scenery of the Mid-West which accompanies them. Elsaesser also points out that “the difference of setting and milieu affects the dynamic of the action. In the Western especially, the assumption of ‘open’ spaces is virtually axiomatic.” The huge landscapes depicted in the movie emphasise the emptiness of the characters, highlighting how bleak their lives are as they cannot live the ones they want. Brokeback Mountain is slowly paced and contains many periods where nothing much seems to happen, but it is fair to say that the emotional impact is created through what is not said than that which is.