Whats Broken in Brokeback Mt.

[Christina]

New Yorker Review Any attempt to promote this as an issue movie, gripped by an agenda, feels badly misplaced; the only issue here is the oldest and most sorrowful one of all. -- Anthony Lane, 12/05/05. The scenery is gripping--the setting in Wyoming 1963 is not culturally very far from my own growing-up years in Idaho. I know what cowboys are like. Many people I grew up among endured bad marriages, their kids grow up alone having been told that little children are "to be seen but not heard." Life was tough and could be incredibly boring. Idaho culture as I remember it as a boy was flat. Right near the end of the film it suddenly occurred to me that this film was not about love in any legitimate form. It was about a total absence of real love in a culture--from start to finish. Could this movie have inadvertently portrayed our current American society more closely than I had dared to imagine? I was overcome with pain and sadness before the movie ended--and soon in tears. Everyone in this film was lost--hopelessly so. I knew what the answer was. All the characters in the film, not just the lead cowboys, need massive doses of the love that comes only from Jesus. Agape is the kind of self-giving compassionate love God designed societies to operate on. But no one in this film had any real connection to God, apparently. I got the feeling the tacit assumption that lovelessness was the normal state of affairs--the way things have always been and always will be. Ennis and Ledger had grown up without fathers and had never known a real friendship. Had raw eros not seized them and taken them captive--surely it was a strong demon--they could have become life-long friends and the whole movie would have been a different story. As it was, Ennis and Jack did not know how to love each other as brothers, they knew nothing about loving their wives nor their children. Having never really felt acceptance and unconditional love, how could they be expected to know how to love anyone? My movie companion, Matt, counted six subtle messages to Jesus during the film, surely not intended by the producers, but nevertheless the answer was there for those with ears to hear. I immediately knew that Jesus was in this film but not in the way anyone intended. My greatest pain in the movie was seeing Ennis' and Jack's children growing up on their own, unguided and unloved, just the same way their parents had grown up, only worse. Obviously the wives had suffered the devastating loss of husbands who should have been responsible fathers and husbands--rooted enough in God to love their own wives as their own selves--the ground rules for marriage as spelled out in Ephesians. I can not imagine anyone using this film to legitimize the acting out of homosexual desires. God's abiding anger--commonly called His wrath--"rests" on all who do not know Him. God hates hypocrisy. He hates divorce. Homosexual acts are personally unspeakably repugnant to Him. Yet, our Lord Jesus is kind and patient and merciful hoping that a few will be willing to receive His love and be made whole. "Do you not know that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?" Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans.I could see that life's consequence engine was running full tilt through this all too real film of our great American tragedy. Sexual sin devastates individuals and families and wrecks a society. With regard to sex, love, marriage, and friendship I think our American society is just about Dead Broke right now. I wish someone would prove me wrong.