The liberal blogger Mickey Kaus wrote around the same time: “I’m highly skeptical that a movie about gay cowhands, however good, will find a large mainstream audience. I’ll go see it, but I don’t want to go see it.… When the film’s national box office fails to live up to its hype and to the record attendance at a few early screenings, prepare to be subjected to a tedious round of guilt-tripping and chin-scratching.”
The Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer made a new year’s prediction about Oscar night: “Brokeback Mountain will have been seen in the theaters by 18 people—but the right 18—and will win the Academy Award.”
Something odd happened between the elite’s assessment of the heartland and the heartland’s assessment of Brokeback Mountain. No, it’s no The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But of all the Oscar nominees it has racked up by far the biggest domestic grosses so far: more than $70 million at the last count (compared with, say, $22 million for the superb Capote). And that’s before the potential Oscar boost. More interestingly, it’s done remarkably well in the middle of the red states.
O’Reilly’s Montana? In the eighty-five-year-old cinema in Missoula, Montana, the owner told the media: “It’s been super every night since we started showing it.” The movie did even better in Billings, a more conservative city in the state.
According to Variety magazine, some of the strongest audiences have been in Tulsa, Oklahoma; El Paso, Texas; Des Moines, Iowa; and Lubbock, Texas. Lubbock is the place George W. Bush calls his spiritual home and may well be the site for his presidential library. Greenwich Village it ain’t.
What happened? There are various theories. Brilliant marketing pitched the movie as a love story and a Western, two genres well ingrained in middle-American tastes. Women dragged nervous husbands and boyfriends to see a film where the women could enjoy long, languorous views of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal and the men could admire the scenery.
Blue-state liberals felt it some kind of social duty to see the film. Gays and lesbians flocked. The media hyped the “gay cowboy” movie and it generated more and more publicity, and thereby curiosity and thereby tickets.
The iconic phrase uttered by Gyllenhaal—“I wish I knew how to quit you”—has become part of the popular culture. The cover of last week’s New Yorker had a parody of the now-famous poster, with Bush and Dick Cheney as the cowboys and Cheney blowing some steam off the top of his rifle.
Everyone seems to have an opinion about the film, especially those who haven’t seen it. My own view is that Brokeback has done well primarily because it’s an excellent film. It has a compelling story, two astonishing performances from Ledger and Michelle Williams, and an elegant screenplay from the great Western writer Larry McMurtry.
I still don’t think the movie is in the same class as the brilliantly compressed short story by Annie Proulx on which it’s based. But it’s still way better than most films now offered by Hollywood, and it’s a little depressing that we have to ask why a decent number of people would not want to see a rare example of Hollywood excellence.
As for the gay sex, it’s barely in the movie, and the least convincing part of it.
Compared with the sex and violence usually served up by Hollywood films, Brokeback is Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. But there is something, perhaps, that explains the interest beyond mere artistic skill.
The past two decades have seen a huge shift in how homosexual people are viewed in the West. Where once they were identified entirely by sex, now more and more recognize that the central homosexual experience is the central heterosexual experience: love—maddening, humiliating, sustaining love.
That’s what the marriage debate has meant and why the marriage movement, even where it has failed to achieve its immediate goals, has already achieved its long-term ambition: to humanize gay people, to tell the full, human truth about them.
And that truth includes the red states. The one thing you can say about the homosexual minority is that, unlike any other, it is not geographically limited and never has been. Red states produce as many gay kids as blue ones, and yet the heartland gay experience has rarely been portrayed and explored.
In America this is particularly odd, since the greatest gay writer in its history, Walt Whitman, was a man of the heartland. And you only have to read about the early years of Abraham Lincoln’s life to see that same-sex love and friendship was integral to the making of America, especially in its wildernesses and frontiers.
You see that today even in the American gay vote, a third of which routinely backs Republicans. Brokeback, in other words, is not just a good movie, but a genuinely new one that tells a genuinely old story. It shows how gay men in America have families and have always had families. It shows them among themselves and among women. It shows them, above all, as men.
For the first time it reveals that homosexuality and masculinity are not necessarily in conflict, and that masculinity, even the suppressed, inarticulate masculinity of the American frontier, is not incompatible with love.
It provides a story to help people better understand the turbulent social change around them and the history they never previously recorded. That is what great art always does: it reveals the truth we are too scared to see and the future we already, beneath all our denial, understand.
When Not Seeing Is Believing
October 2, 2006 | TIME magazine
Something about the visit to the United Nations by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad refuses to leave my mind. It wasn’t his obvious intention to pursue nuclear technology and weaponry. It wasn’t his denial of the Holocaust or even his eager anticipation of Armageddon. It was something else entirely. It was his smile. In every interview, confronting every loaded question, his eyes seemed calm, his expression at ease, his face at peace. He seemed utterly serene.
What is the source of his extraordinary calm? Yes, he’s in a relatively good place right now, with his Hezbollah proxies basking in a military draw with Israel. Yes, the United States is bogged down in a brutal war in Iraq. But Ahmadinejad is still unpopular at home, the Iranian economy is battered, and his major foes, Israel and the United States, far outgun him—for now.
So let me submit that he is smiling and serene not because he is crazy. He is smiling gently because for him, the most perplexing and troubling questions we all face every day have already been answered. He has placed his trust in the arms of God. Just because it isn’t the God that many of us believe in does not detract from the sincerity or power of his faith. It is a faith that is real, all too real—gripping billions across the Muslim world in a new wave of fervor and fanaticism. All worries are past him, all anxiety, all stress. “Peoples, driven by their divine nature, intrinsically seek good, virtue, perfection, and beauty,” Ahmadinejad said at the United Nations. “Relying on our peoples, we can take giant steps towards reform and pave the road for human perfection. Whether we like it or not, justice, peace, and virtue will sooner or later prevail in the world with the will of Almighty God.”
Human perfection. Whether we like it or not. Justice, peace, and virtue. That concept of the beneficent, omnipotent will of God and the need to always submit to it, whether we like it or not, is not new. It has been present in varying degrees throughout history in all three great monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—from their very origins. And with it has come the utter certainty of those who say they have seen the face of God or have surrendered themselves to his power or have achieved the complete spiritual repose promised by the books of all three faiths: the Torah, the Gospels, the Koran. That is where the smile comes from.
Complete calm comes from complete certainty. In today’s unnerving, globalizing, sometimes-terrifying world, such religious certainty is a balm more in demand than ever. In the new millennium, Muslims are not alone in grasping the relief of submission to authority. The new pope, despite his criticism of extremist religion and religious violence, represents a return to a more authoritarian form of Catholicism. In the Cath
olic triad of how we know truth—an eternal dialogue between papal authority, scriptural guidance, and the experience of the faithful—Benedict XVI has tilted the balance decisively back toward his own unanswerable truth.
What was remarkable about his recent address on Islam is what most critics missed. The bulk of his message was directed at the West, at its disavowal of religious authority and its embrace of what Benedict called “the subjective ‘conscience.’ ” For Benedict, if your conscience tells you something that differs from his teaching, it is a false conscience, a sign not of personal integrity but of sin. And so he has silenced conscientious dissent within the Church and insisted on absolutism in matters like abortion, end-of-life decisions, priestly celibacy, the role of women, homosexuality, and interfaith dialogue.
In Protestant Christianity, especially in the United States, the loudest voices are the most certain and uncompromising. Many megachurches, which preach absolute adherence to inerrant Scripture, are thriving, while more moderate denominations are on the decline. That sense of certainty has even entered democratic politics in the United States. We have, after all, a proudly born-again president. And religious certainty surely cannot be disentangled from George W. Bush’s utter conviction that he has made no mistakes in Iraq. “My faith frees me,” the president once wrote. “Frees me to make the decisions that others might not like. Frees me to do the right thing, even though it may not poll well. Frees me to enjoy life and not worry about what comes next.” In every messy context, the president seeks succor in a simple certainty—good versus evil, terror versus freedom—without sensing that wars are also won in the folds of uncertainty and guile, of doubt and tactical adjustment that are alien to the fundamentalist psyche.
I remember in my own faith journey that in those moments when I felt most lost in the world, I moved toward the absolutist part of my faith and gripped it with the white knuckles of fear. I brooked no dissent and patrolled my own soul for any hint of doubt. I required a faith not of sandstone but of granite.
Many Western liberals and secular types look at the zealotry closing in on them and draw an obvious conclusion: religion is the problem. As our global politics become more enamored of religious certainty, the stakes have increased, they argue, and they have a point. The evil terrorists of Al Qaeda invoke God as the sanction for their mass murder. And many beleaguered Americans respond by invoking God’s certainty. And the cycle intensifies into something close to a religious war. When the presidents of the United States and Iran speak as much about God as about diplomacy, we have entered a newly dangerous era. The Islamist resurgence portends the worst. Imagine the fanaticism of sixteenth-century Christians, waging religious war and burning heretics at the stake. Now give them nukes. See the problem? Domestically, the resurgence of religious certainty has deepened our cultural divisions. And so our political discourse gets more polarized, and our global discourse gets close to impossible.
How, after all, can you engage in a rational dialogue with a man like Ahmadinejad, who believes that Armageddon is near and that it is his duty to accelerate it? How can Israel negotiate with people who are certain their instructions come from heaven and so decree that Israel must not exist in Muslim lands? Equally, of course, how can one negotiate with fundamentalist Jews who claim that the West Bank is theirs forever by biblical mandate? Or with fundamentalist Christians who believe that Israel’s expansion is a biblical necessity rather than a strategic judgment?
There is, however, a way out. And it will come from the only place it can come from—the minds and souls of people of faith. It will come from the much-derided moderate Muslims, tolerant Jews, and humble Christians. The alternative to the secular-fundamentalist death spiral is something called spiritual humility and sincere religious doubt. Fundamentalism is not the only valid form of faith, and to say it is, is the great lie of our time.
There is also the faith that is once born and never experiences a catharsis or “born-again” conversion. There is the faith that treats the Bible as a moral fable as well as history and tries to live its truths in the light of contemporary knowledge, history, science, and insight. There is a faith that draws important distinctions between core beliefs and less vital ones—that picks and chooses between doctrines under the guidance of individual conscience.
There is the faith that sees the message of Jesus or Muhammad as a broad indicator of how we should treat others, of what profound holiness requires, and not as an account literally true in all respects that includes an elaborate theology that explains everything. There is the dry Deism of many of America’s Founding Fathers. There is the cafeteria Christianity of, say, Thomas Jefferson, who composed a new, shortened gospel that contained only the sayings of Jesus that Jefferson inferred were the real words of the real rabbi. There is the open-minded treatment of Scripture of today’s Episcopalianism and the socially liberal but doctrinally wayward faith of most lay Catholics. There is the sacramental faith that regards God as present but ultimately unknowable, that looks into the abyss and hopes rather than sees. And there are many, many more varieties.
But all those alternative forms come back to the same root. Those kinds of faith recognize one thing, first of all, about the nature of God and humankind, and it is this: if God really is God, then God must, by definition, surpass our human understanding. Not entirely. We have Scripture; we have reason; we have religious authority; we have our own spiritual experiences of the divine. But there is still something we will never grasp, something we can never know—because God is beyond our human categories. And if God is beyond our categories, then God cannot be captured for certain. We cannot know with the kind of surety that allows us to proclaim truth with a capital T. There will always be something that eludes us. If there weren’t, it would not be God.
That kind of faith begins with the assumption that the human soul is fallible, that it can delude itself, make mistakes, and see only so far ahead. That, after all, is what it means to be human. No person has had the gift of omniscience. Yes, Christians may want to say that of Jesus. But even the Gospels tell us that Jesus doubted on the cross, asking why his own father seemed to have abandoned him. The mystery that Christians are asked to embrace is not that Jesus was God but that he was God-made-man, which is to say, prone to the feelings and doubts and joys and agonies of being human. Jesus himself seemed to make a point of that. He taught in parables rather than in abstract theories. He told stories. He had friends. He got to places late, he misread the actions of others, he wept, he felt disappointment, he asked as many questions as he gave answers, and he was often silent in self-doubt or elusive or afraid.
God-as-Omniscience, by definition, could do and be none of those things. Hence, the sacrifice entailed in God becoming man. So, at the core of the very Gospels on which fundamentalists rely for their passionate certainty is a definition of humanness that is marked by imperfection and uncertainty. Even in Jesus. Perhaps especially in Jesus.
As humans, we can merely sense the existence of a higher truth, a greater coherence than ourselves, but we cannot see it face-to-face. That is either funny or sad, and humans stagger from one option to the other. Neither beasts nor angels, we live in twilight, and we are unsure whether it is a prelude to morning or a prelude to night.
The sixteenth-century writer Michel de Montaigne lived in a world of religious war, just as we do. And he understood, as we must, that complete religious certainty is, in fact, the real blasphemy. As he put it, “We cannot worthily conceive the grandeur of those sublime and divine promises, if we can conceive them at all; to imagine them worthily, we must imagine them unimaginable, ineffable and incomprehensible, and completely different from those of our miserable experience. ‘Eye cannot see,’ says St. Paul, ‘neither can it have entered into the heart of man, the happiness which God hath prepared for them that love him.’ ”
In that type of faith, doubt is not a threat. If we have never doubted, how can we say we have really believed? True belief is not about blind submissi
on. It is about open-eyed acceptance, and acceptance requires persistent distance from the truth, and that distance is doubt. Doubt, in other words, can feed faith, rather than destroy it. And it forces us, even while believing, to recognize our fundamental duty with respect to God’s truth: humility. We do not know. Which is why we believe.
In this sense, our religion, our moral life, is simply what we do. A Christian is not a Christian simply because she agrees to conform her life to some set of external principles or dogmas, or because at a particular moment in her life she experienced a rupture and changed herself entirely. She is a Christian primarily because she acts like one. She loves and forgives; she listens and prays; she contemplates and befriends; her faith and her life fuse into an unselfconscious unity that affirms a tradition of moral life and yet also makes it her own. In that nonfundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important than theory, love is more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle.
And that is how that kind of faith interacts with politics. If we cannot know for sure at all times how to govern our own lives, what right or business do we have telling others how to live theirs? From a humble faith comes toleration of other faiths. And from that toleration comes the oxygen that liberal democracy desperately needs to survive. That applies to all faiths, from Islam to Christianity. In global politics, it translates into a willingness to recognize empirical reality, even when it disturbs our ideology and interests. From moderate religion comes pragmatic politics. From a deep understanding of human fallibility comes the political tradition we used to call conservatism.
I remember my grandmother’s faith. She was an Irish immigrant who worked as a servant for priests. In her later years she lived with us and we would go to Mass together. She was barely literate, the seventh of thirteen children. And she could rattle off the Hail Mary with the speed and subtlety of a NASCAR lap. There were times when she embarrassed me—with her broad Irish brogue and reflexive deference to clerical authority. Couldn’t she genuflect a little less deeply and pray a little less loudly? And then, as I winced at her volume in my quiet church, I saw that she was utterly oblivious to those around her. She was someplace else. And there were times when I caught her in the middle of saying the Rosary when she seemed to reach another level altogether—a higher, deeper place than I, with all my education and privilege, had yet reached.
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