Men on the range

AH, the Old West, that rugged, perilous place where the natives were restless, the women were strong and the men were ... secretly in love?

Bet your six-shooter, Hoss.

This weekend, Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain” is introducing movie audiences to what some Hollywood wags are calling a new genre: the gay cowboy flick. That glib shorthand is far too crude to encompass the emotional sweep of the E. Annie Proulx short story from which Lee’s film is derived. Judging by the critical huzzahs that have greeted the movie (which I haven’t seen), the phrase also hardly does justice to the heart-wrenching emotional layering that actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger bring to their roles as Wyoming ranch hands in the early 1960s, two love-struck, star-crossed hunks in big hats.

But while “Brokeback Mountain” may be the first Hollywood western-set film to deal with homoerotic love in such explicit terms, it’s hardly the first to hint at the thorny emotional entanglements that the cowboy way has engendered among some men. From the sagebrush classics of John Ford and Howard Hawks to the blood-drenched sentimentality of Sam Peckinpah and the revisionist westerns of the Vietnam War era, many Hollywood versions of the Old (and New) West have probed men’s most ambivalent and closely guarded feelings about each other: envy and hero worship; rivalry and comradeship; hate and, on occasion, love, or something close to it.

The Wild West of the popular imagination -- along with prisons, locker rooms, submarines and certain Wall Street brokerages and Silicon Valley start-ups -- endures as a masculine crucible of dangerously intensified fears and desires. Particularly in its early untamed phase, the West was mainly a society of men, where guys spent much of their time in the company of other guys (not to mention horses and steers). Sometimes, they were forced to entrust each other with their lives. Like it or not, they had to bond.

The classic Hollywood western, like the West itself, celebrated the idealized manly virtues of courage, loyalty, honor, grace under duress and a quick draw. But Hollywood filmmakers also understood that the Old West was an emotional battlefield and spiritual proving ground like no other in American popular culture. In all but a handful of the greatest westerns, the most passionate relationships are between men.

And while the Hays movie production code forbade overt references to homosexuality, great directors like Ford and Hawks grasped and exploited the inherent psychosexual tensions of cowboy life.

In Hawks’ “Red River” (1948), the brutal oedipal rivalry between a tyrannical cattle driver (John Wayne) and his rebellious adopted son (Montgomery Clift) gradually morphs into something more ambivalent and electric. The smoldering presence of the young Clift, who was gay but closeted, coupled with Wayne’s brilliant, booming performance, gives “Red River” a backdrop as charged with repressed sexual sadism as a British boys’ boarding school.

(Clift is one of several Hollywood leading men, both gay and straight, whose alluring physical beauty could be both heightened and partly camouflaged by a dusty Stetson and a pair of chaps, allowing male as well as female fans to worship him safely in the protective darkness of the movie house. Western matinee idols of this ilk include Randolph Scott, Alan Ladd and Robert Redford -- soon to be augmented, no doubt, by Ledger and Gyllenhaal.)

Women as odd men out

BY and large, the heroes (and antiheroes) of westerns are undomesticated men who haven’t known the gentling effects of a “woman’s touch” or the burdens of settling down. Westerns were highly popular in the years between the end of World War II and the Korean conflict, when hundreds of thousands of returning GIs had to settle back into dull domesticity, becoming company men and “good providers.” That may explain the Hollywood convention of “one last roundup” or “one last bank robbery” before the veteran rancher or outlaw hangs up his holster for good, sort of like a stag party with spurs and Colt .45s.

Women, in fact, are often treated as superfluous, if not downright dangerous, in the male-centered western worldview. For every hellion like Mercedes McCambridge or laconic saloon girl like Marlene Dietrich, westerns are rife with forgettable, often literally nameless females.

So whom do the male characters turn to for solace, understanding and a shared bedroll? To other men, of course, Kemosabe. Visions of the Old West as an extended brotherhood have been realized in such movies as Walter Hill’s “The Long Riders” (1980), which cast real actor brothers as famous Western gangster siblings. Andy Warhol spoofed mannered macho behavior while suggesting that those strong, silent dudes on the frontier weren’t always as butch as they pretended to be in “Lonesome Cowboys” (1969), a typically Warholian grab bag of social satire and erotic fabulousness.

So where does that leave the Side-Saddle Sex? Pretty much alone on the range. Though Katharine Ross plays the shared love interest in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969), the real, if subliminal, flirtation in that film occurs between Paul Newman’s Butch and Redford’s Sundance, with their constant teasing competitiveness and affectionate ribbing.

Male bonding and female irrelevancy, western style, reach their gory apotheosis in Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” (1969). In Peckinpah’s profound meditation on violence, loyalty and what one might call situational ethics, a faithless woman is casually shot dead to a chorus of drunken male laughter. And in the movie’s still-shocking climax, the outlaws spend their last night on Earth with anonymous Mexican whores before staging a bloodbath to avenge their murdered comrade.

Though Peckinpah’s fiercest critics branded him a misogynist, the director was simply more interested in the feelings men bury deep in their hearts than in the ones women blurt out in chick flicks. A pivotal scene in “The Wild Bunch” has the aging desperadoes Pike Bishop (William Holden) and Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine) confess to each other around the campfire that, despite the travails of the outlaw life, they wouldn’t have had it any other way. In truth, the enforced mutual dependence of the trail turned many cowboys into each other’s surrogate spouses.

It’s interesting to note that among the reported cinematic suitors of “Brokeback Mountain” was director Gus Van Sant, the iconoclastic, openly gay artist who has artfully woven themes of male-male love into such movies as “My Own Private Idaho.” Though Van Sant didn’t get the nod to make “Brokeback Mountain,” he did insert a homoerotic subtext into his movie “Elephant” (2003), inspired by the Columbine High School shootings. In Van Sant’s take, the two profoundly alienated young men who commit the mass murders are essentially playing a lethal game of “cowboy” in the sterile modern suburban American West. As if unable to express the emotional and sexual torments raging inside them, the teens resort to the time-honored cowboy way: Shoot first, question yourself later.

Today, most Hollywood westerns play like elegies to a vanished ideal of male behavior that was never quite as straightforward as it seemed. “Brokeback Mountain” occurs many decades after the closing of the Western frontier and as the western film genre itself was fading from the big screen. What the story offers, in the absence of clear, unambiguous male role models, is a nuanced, sympathetic view of conditioned male behavior, of the forces that keep men from revealing their true selves -- even to themselves -- and the terrible price they pay for doing so.

Perhaps it’s not coincidental that “Brokeback Mountain” begins in 1963, the year John F. Kennedy was felled by a lonely gunman, an outlaw at war both with society and himself. Proulx’s tragic, beautifully told tale and Lee’s film may leave you feeling that now is as good a time as any for men to put down their flashy emotional hardware and their myths and make peace with their complex feelings -- all of them -- toward other men.