On Brokeback Mountain: Meditations about Masculinity, Fear, and Love in the Story and the Film

A brilliant, powerful investigation that makes sense of the sensational reception of the 2005 Ang Lee film and traces the beauty of it back to the Annie Proulx short story it was based on, this is a book for everyone who saw Brokeback Mountain or read about it. Eric Patterson’s writing will remind you of that one inspiring English teacher whose class you wish you could take again, dazzling you with funny and intriguing insights about the political and literary contexts of both the film and fiction. Companionable with current scholarship theorizing space, regionalism, and the rural homosexual, On Brokeback Mountain is also a timely contribution to significant discussions about how gay and lesbian studies and queer theory have myopically focused on urban identities. This book is as poignant as the movie it elucidates and will be just as gratefully embraced by freshmen and farmers alike.

Before reading this book, I thought I appreciated the achievements of Brokeback Mountain. I am grateful for Eric Patterson’s passionate and richly insightful illumination – of the story and film as artistic works, and of the cultural realities that informed their creation and fuel their potency.

Eric Patterson has created…[a] reader-friendly examination of the short story and the film adaptation….Brokeback fans will want to read this thorough analysis….Patterson’s book is a powerful tribute to the story and film.

Eric Patterson’s book is a success on three levels. It can be read as a companion to understanding the film and story; it can be used as a text in studying the social impact of the film and story at the university level; and whether you are a veteran of our forum discussions or newly struck by Brokeback fever, this book will add an extra dimension to your appreciation of Brokeback Mountain as a masterpiece of modern literature and film.

This reader-friendly and thorough study of Brokeback Mountain enhances our enjoyment of the film and the original story, and expands our awareness of crucial social justice issues. A personal essay as well as an enlightened volume of cultural criticism, this study moves, informs, and creates a community of readers. A groundbreaking inquiry in gender studies, Eric Patterson’s new work gives us language for what it means not only to be masculine, but to be human.

Well researched and nicely written … insightful not only into the Brokeback Mountain narrative but also into the troubling history of sexual prejudice.

When Owen Wister invented the Western in his best-selling 1902 novel, The Virginian, he placed at the heart of the genre the love that “dare not speak its name,” with an eastern narrator enamored of a stalwart ex-Virginian. A century later, Brokeback Mountain caused a critical eruption in its frank exploration of the passion that has always been a part of cowboy life. The triumph of Eric Patterson’s study of both Proulx’s story and Ang Lee’s film is to show how fully the narrative of Jack and Ennis is a part of our national romance. In nuanced chapters, Patterson explores a series of related issues-the elegy, histories of homosexuality, Whitman’s poetry, romantic love, ranging in the process from Virgil’s Eclogues to Kinsey’s studies of sexuality-all in an effort to understand at once the triumph of Brokeback Mountain as narrative and its separate stylistic achievements, as well as the torrent of slurs against its basic premise. Patterson is an impassioned reader, though never intemperate, and through a careful accumulation of readings of every aspect of both story and film, makes his case simply, successfully, elegantly, that this is not only a triumph of the genre, but a masterpiece in its own right.