3Both conservatives and progressives can read the film in the allegorical terms Kitses suggests. But they will likely be at odds over which national ideals allegorized by the film have been tarnished and what promise has been betrayed. The film’s principal characters Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) can be seen, in Kitses’ phrase, as « authentic American heroes, self-reliant and brave, honorable and loyal » but reviews of the film reveal that the homophobia inscribed in the narrative remained a largely unexamined category.

4The film commemorates the end of an era – the end of a broad range of interrelated ideological imperatives underpinning the American patriarchal hegemony – even as it depicts the death-throes of that era and the beginnings of a conservative backlash, which was most vividly on display in the ghastly spectacle of the collapse of the traditional Republican Party and the rise of what has come to be called « Trumpism, » a variation of neoliberalism described by Greil Marcus in early January 2017, thus :

[Donald] Trump has created a government that on paper is only steps away from realizing the dream of generations … the repeal of any notion of the Federal government playing an affirmative role in national life, « to protect the general welfare » : the repeal, in essence, of 20^th century democracy. That means Social Security, the FAA, the Food and Drug Administration, the Center for Disease Control, the National Weather Service, and countless other institutions of American life. It means the dismantling of laws and institutions against discrimination of any and all kinds, to the point, perhaps, of allowing states and municipalities to re-institute de jure racial segregation along with the abolition of abortion rights, the abrogation of rights of women to legal equality with men, and the criminalization of homosexuality (none of that sounds that far away for me; that was the America I grew up in).

Cowboy Politicians and the Neoliberal Turn

7On 15 September (« Black Monday » – so-called because on this day the global financial services firms Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch collapsed), McCain declared that the « fundamentals of the economy are strong ». Vanity Fair invited its readers to decide whether McCain’s response demonstrated « a heartening faith in the American people » or rather, « how little he understands the worst economic crisis of our time ». A few days later, on 18 September, McCain stated that, if he were president, he would fire S.E.C. chairman Chris Cox. Vanity Fair asked rhetorically – indeed derisively – whether, in the opinion of its readers, this showed « how his maverick-y qualities could help bring accountability back to Wall Street » or whether it revealed that McCain appeared not to realize this « is something a president doesn’t really have the power to do ». The Vanity Fair piece continues in this vein of suggesting that the candidate who traffics in the iconography and symbolism of the Western hero is unequal to the task of managing a twenty-first-century, national/global, financial/economic crisis. Observing wryly that ten hours before the scheduled debate McCain quietly announced the resumption of his campaign, the magazine wonders if he did so, « because the sheriff can’t ride off into the sunset when the world needs him » or because he was « hoping his suspension bluff [would] catch Obama off guard ».

10In an essay about Dorothy M. Johnson’s short story « The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, » Daryl W. Palmer goes so far as to suggest that the very term « cowboy », when used to describe a man who draws on the language and iconography of the Western in his pursuit of « power or money or fame », suggests « slipperiness » :

From Buffalo Bill to John Wayne to George W. Bush, men have swaggered theatrically while claiming to speak for the Americas. Although their messages differ in many particulars, these men find their popular support by appealing to their audience’s identification with the Old West. Masters of the utterance, they may be angling for power or money or fame, but they always claim to speak the simple truth and back up their talk with the threat of violence. They often (to appropriate a bit of contemporary slang useful for its suggestion of slipperiness) come off as cowboys. As a rule, people either worship or despise these bold men(Palmer, 2009)

11During the 2016 presidential elections, Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, « Make America Great Again » would express the nostalgia of the billionaire real-estate developer and reality-show celebrity’s message of a promise of a return to a lost era – not of cowboys, those « authentic American heroes, self-reliant and brave, honorable and loyal » (for this was the fantasy peddled by Presidents George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan before him), but of white, patriarchal privilege. Indeed, as Elad Nehorai wrote on 11 January 2017 in « How Trump’s Primitive Masculinity Tempted and Confused American Conservatives »:

• 9 Elad Nehorai (2017), « How Trump’s Primitive Masculinity Tempted and Confused American Conservative (...)

You, the traditional, the conservatives, the religious, you voted for Trump because he promised to make America manly again. But you voted for a primitivism that betrays your own beliefs… He represents a masculinity you feel has been missing from the White House. You are angry at the weak-kneed policies of the last eight years. You want to get back to the basics of what it means to be a real leader: manliness.9

12If George W. Bush, John McCain and others in the Republican Party had bankrupted the image of the cowboy for a generation of politicians to come, Donald Trump would successfully tap into another great American myth : the United States as a « Land of Opportunity ». He campaigned on the notion that « America » was a damaged nation of tarnished ideals and betrayed promise, and he insinuated that a revitalized America under his leadership would be, first and foremost, one of and for white men, whose proper place used to be (and ought to be again) at the top of the societal pyramid – with his campaign slogan implying that the proof that this « America » used to be « great » was the fact that it had made him a billionaire.

13It is in this neoliberal socioeconomic and political climate – already well formed by 2005 when Brokeback Mountain was released, and resulting in unprecedented levels of inequality in the United States – that the contradictions surrounding the struggles for ownership of the cowboy as symbol of traditional, heterosexual, American masculinity became dire. The « cowboy » ethos of movie Westerns and of Republican politicians who identify with the romance of the Western hero is echoed in the neoliberalism of our contemporary moment. For our purposes, the « neoliberal period, » as Noam Chomsky calls it, dates at least from Ronald Reagan’s presidency (1981 – 1989) to the present, although more properly, as Susan George said in « A Short History of Neoliberalism », a speech she gave in Bangkok in 1999 at the Conference on Economic Sovereignty in a Globalizing World: « [For the term] to make any sense, [one has] to start even further back, some 50 years ago, just after the end of World War II ». Briefly, as George puts it : « The whole point of neo-liberalism is that the market mechanism should be allowed to direct the fate of human beings. The economy should dictate its rules to society, not the other way around. And just as [Karl] Polanyi foresaw [in 1944, in his « masterwork, The Great Transformation… a fierce critique of 19th-century industrial, market-based society »], this doctrine is leading us directly towards the ‘demolition of society’«  (George, 2015).

14Christopher Sharrett, in a tour de force essay about Brokeback Mountain, draws a link between the cowboy as emblem of the Western genre and the end of white patriarchy’s murderous drive always to dominate the « other » :

The American ideal of the strong, silent male depends upon the acceptance and even idealization of repression, of concealing the deepest need behind a façade of denial (which is the stony-faced visage of the archetypal cowboy). This may be seen as a gender code adjacent to a national program of annihilation and conquest, whose coming-home-to-roost is the terrain explored by Brokeback Mountain. (Sharrett, 2009: 17-18)

15From what we might call the progressive point of view, the crude (and cruel) philosophy of neoliberal economics that has overtaken the United States in recent decades is responsible for the « hardscrabble world » in which Jack and Ennis find it so hard to survive (the film’s action takes place between 1963 and the mid-1980s) ; and the homophobia underpinning the dominant style of masculinity in their conservative society is responsible for their emotional impoverishment and, in Jack’s case, death.

Coming Out of the Closet

17The notion that the worldview of most cowboys resembles that of the average Republican is perhaps counterintuitive, given the historically close convergence of white hetero-patriarchal cowboy masculinity and Republican ideals, for the cowboy has traditionally been an itinerant farm worker, closer to Mexican immigrants than white settlers, and he is often romanticized for precisely the qualities that set him apart from settlers: his mobility, his love of uncomplicated homosociality (and discomfort with women), his hatred of fences and property, and his subordinate position in relation to landowners. The latter are the ones who in Westerns are often portrayed as proto-Republicans.

18For liberals and progressives, Brokeback Mountain can be seen as nostalgic for the dignity of the cowboy who has not yet been compromised by the neoliberal values of cynical politicians like George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, who played the cowboy, with blue jeans and boots and swagger, or been sold out to corporate power by New Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. As the 2016 U.S. presidential elections revealed, however, lower-class whites – the cowboy classes – are angry. And it should not surprise us, Chris Hedges argues, that – feeling « politically disempowered and disengaged, » and having been for so long « ignored and reviled by the establishment » – some of them should « discover a voice and a sense of empowerment » in fascism :

• 12 Chris Hedges (2016), « The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism », Truthdi (...)

There are tens of millions of Americans, especially lower-class whites, rightfully enraged at what has been done to them, their families and their communities. They have risen up to reject the neoliberal policies and political correctness imposed on them by college-educated elites from both political parties: lower-class whites are embracing an American fascism. These Americans want a kind of freedom – a freedom to hate… They want the freedom to idealize violence and the gun culture. They want the freedom to have enemies, to physically assault Muslims, undocumented workers, African-Americans, homosexuals and anyone who dares criticize their cryptofascism. They want the freedom to celebrate historical movements and figures that the college-educated elites condemn, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Confederacy. They want the freedom to ridicule and dismiss intellectuals, ideas, science and culture. They want the freedom to silence those who have been telling them how to behave. And they want the freedom to revel in hypermasculinity, racism, sexism and white patriarchy. These are the core sentiments of fascism. These sentiments are engendered by the collapse of the liberal state12.

• 18 Subsequent page numbers will be cited in the text.

Brokeback Mountain is frightening to heteronormative patriarchy not so much because it is a gay cowboy movie, but because it looks so much like a straight cowboy movie. It must be labeled « THE gay cowboy movie » to particularize it, to let everyone know that it is indeed very different from all the other Westerns it so closely resembles both in terms of its mise-en-scène as well as its thematic concerns : civilization versus the wilderness, conformity versus freedom, and ultimately the preference for male-male bonding over heterosexual romance (Benshoff, 2009 : 229) 18.

Anxious Masculinity, Homophobia and the Hidden Injuries of Class

26Brokeback Mountain, made more than sixty years later and set in the second half of the twentieth century, in which two itinerant ranch-hands who are in thrall to the image of the cowboy fall in love with each other, echoes the love story between Doc Holliday (Walter Huston) and Billy the Kid (Jack Beutel) in The Outlaw. If Hughes’s film is unintentionally awkward about depicting the male-male intimacy that is central to the film’s meanings, we see that Lee’s film is entirely intentional in its depiction of the initial awkwardness between Jack and Ennis. It is not always easy to judge what is intentional and what is not in The Outlaw. The film is very knowing about its homosexual subtext, but the viewer cannot be certain whether the characters themselves (Doc, Billy, Pat) have ever allowed themselves to think about genital sexuality between men as something that « might be pleasant », or whether they have not dared to think about it at all. Doc and Billy do spend the entire movie trying to judge if they can trust one another – and the viewer understands that this trust revolves around each man daring to acknowledge that he recognizes the other’s desire. One can very easily imagine Doc or Billy, if they were to sleep with each other, saying– as Ennis and Jack do after they have had sex together for the first time – « You know I ain’t queer », and the other replying : « Me neither. It’s nobody’s business but ours ».

28In an emailed interview for « Brokeback Mountain Ten Years On, » Proulx writes :

• 27 Proulx, in Hicklin, « Brokeback Mountain Ten Years On, », Out, p. 100.

Of course there were and are gay men in the world of cattle and horses since the first cow spent the winter on the plains west of Laramie, but the great fiction that evolved in the 19th century and lay over the ranching West is that all cowboy horsemen and ranch hands were heterosexual, strong and fearless, brave and handsome, and though tough and daring, they were shy, sparing of words, always kind to orphaned doggies and children, extravagantly polite to women, etc. All this made up an irresistible masculine ideal that had/has political value. For many, the cowboy image became a potent symbol of American men. It was this confrontation with unreality that the story wanted to show through a look at two characters living in the real world of homophobic closeting.27

Clearly, men in America have grown up learning to be scared of gayness. But not only for the reasons we typically think – not only, in the end, because of religion, insecurity about their own sexuality, or a visceral aversion to other men’s penises. The truth is, they’re afraid because heterosexuality is so fragile.

30Howe’s article is not scholarly – and it is a pop-psychology cliché to think of heterosexuality as « fragile » – but his journalist’s turn of phrase is useful for us as a place to begin asking, as he does, « why homophobia is such an easy bulwark against masculine insecurity ». His conclusions about the persistence of homophobia are confirmed by Arlene Stein in a research article about « anxious masculinity and emergent homophobias in neopatriarchal politics », which appeared in Gender and Society the same year Brokeback Mountain was released. « While polls suggest that the vast majority of Americans are wary of extreme efforts to legislate sexual morality », she writes, « the popularity of homophobic rhetoric among large sectors of the American public indicates continuing ambivalence about the normalization of homosexuality » :

• 29 (Subsequent page numbers will be cited in the text.) Stein provides ample bibliographic citation in (...)

During the past three decades, the percentage of Americans who think homosexuality is « wrong » declined significantly, and Americans are much more willing to condone private homosexual behaviors, view openly lesbian and gay characters in popular entertainment, and provide some limited benefits to the spouses and children of lesbians and gay men. Still, in terms of public discourse, as a nation we remain divided over whether lesbians and gay men are the moral equivalent of heterosexuals29. (Stein, 2005 : 601-602)

32Stein’s research into how the issue of homosexuality has « engaged the passions of men, particularly white working-class men », reveals that men’s antipathy toward homosexuality has been reformulated in « unprecedented ways » by the changing forms of American masculinity since the 1950s. She acknowledges that traditional psychoanalytic theory, which suggests that homophobia serves the purpose of allowing men who are anxious about their masculinity to affirm themselves through the repudiation of femaleness – « Heterosexual men are troubled by male homosexuality because it represents feminized masculinity » – still « provides a compelling explanation for one type of male homophobia, but as a description of the multiplicity of different homophobias now circulating, it is somewhat less useful » (602). (She offers the brutal killing of the 21-year-old gay college student, Matthew Shepherd – who was beaten, tortured, and left to die on the night of 6 October 1998, near Laramie, Wyoming – as an example of this type of homophobia as the convergence of internalized self-hatred and patriarchal threat : the same-sex desiring subject in conflict with his straight consciousness).

34Jack and Ennis are not represented in Brokeback Mountain as « having it all ». Far from being culturally and economically privileged and freely indulging in the sexual promiscuity that anti-gay rights activists since the 1990s imagine gay men to be (illegitimately) enjoying at their expense, Jack and Ennis are both made to suffer. The film’s success with a broad public is perhaps not unrelated to the fact that the two lovers are punished by the narrative. Married life for the more middle-class Jack, though not the material struggle it is for Ennis, is a form of daily humiliation and emotional deprivation, with his manhood defined by his boorish father-in-law and his homosexual desire given only occasional and furtive expression, away from the homophobic gaze of the community in which he lives and works. (We are given to understand that his death – which we see imagined by Ennis – is a homophobic murder.) Ennis ends up living alone and lonely in a small trailer, cut off from all family and community.

35In « A Straight Cowboy Movie », Benshoff discusses the cruel costs to Ennis and Jack (and to their wives) of their heroic struggles to perform – to be – the straight men they feel they ought to be. As Benshoff argues, the film depicts heterosexual life – at least, in the American Midwest during the 1960s and 1970s – as being caught up in the imperatives of capitalism, which « traps men and women into narrowly defined social roles derived from their biological sex » (230). Jack and Ennis « unthinkingly » inscribe themselves within the punishing and dreary structures of « traditional heteronormative patriarchal capitalism ». They marry, for example, « not so much out of desire or love for their spouses, but because it is what is expected of them », and they work in fields that depend on « the exploitation of young male bodies » – their bodies being the only commodities Jack and Ennis, as poor and uneducated men, have to offer (230-31).

37For male anti-gay rights activists, not surprisingly, same-sex marriage « called into question the father-headed household and placed children at risk » (Stein, 2005 : 603). (Maternal lesbians also came under attack, for essentially the same reasons.) Following from the definition of homophobia as a term coined in 1972 by the psychologist George Weinberg to describe the « irrational fear or hatred of homosexuals » (i.e., as an antigay prejudice or pathology rooted in an individual’s psychological makeup), Stein argues that : « Weinberg’s definition failed to account for why certain groups of individuals are more homophobic than others – and in particular why men, by most accounts, tend to be more homophobic than do women. Missing, in part, was an analysis of the link between gender and sexual prejudice » (603).

39What Stein has discovered, however, as we have said, is that – far from failing, or not trying, to provide for their families – (antigay-activist) neopatriarchs in the United States « struggle to define a role that maintains male authority without sounding overly authoritarian, [such that] new forms of homophobia have emerged that are compatible with conservatives’ quest to be seen as compassionate protectors of the family » (601). Neopatriarchal rhetoric does not call for the subordination of women, nor does it explicitly support practices and arrangements that buttress gender inequality. Rather, it speaks of the importance of gender differentiation in the family, as we saw it enacted on 21 September 1996 in the Defense of Marriage Act (« An Act to define and protect the institution of marriage »), which defined marriage for federal purposes as the union of one man and one woman. Neopatriarchal antipathy toward the granting of legal rights to lesbian and gay men and their families is, for the most part, not expressed as open opposition, but rather as « concern » (604).

Capitalist Imperatives

40In Brokeback Mountain, we see that Jack and Ennis both attempt to integrate themselves as « straight » men into the neopatriarchal structure of their society. But they are in constant danger of being outed – even before they are out to themselves. Indeed, during their very first meeting with Joe Aguirre, the surly ranch manager who hires them to tend his sheep, the atmosphere is thick with something like distrust and hostility, or homophobia. The viewer senses that Aguirre’s homophobia is excited by these two young men. He is a type that has always been distrusted in American cinema. As a ranch manager – like a factory foreman – Aguirre is still an employee (of, possibly, a large and exploitative corporation), and very likely was himself once a ranch hand. His move up the corporate ladder has perhaps not given him quite the (financial/social/psychological) freedom it promised: hence his aura of resentment.

41A title superimposed on an image of a desolate, Western outpost tells us we are in Signal, Wyoming and it is 1963. Aguirre arrives at his office trailer, brushes past the two men without greeting them, and enters. A few moments later, he comes to the door and barks at them : « You pair of deuces lookin’ for work, I suggest you get your scrawny asses in here pronto ! »

42As soon as they enter the trailer, Aguirre lays out their responsibilities :

The Forest Service has got designated campsites on the allotments. Them camps can be three, four miles from where we pasture the woollies. Bad predator loss if there’s nobody lookin’ after ‘em at night. Now, what I want is a camp tender to stay in the main camp, where the Forest Service says. But the herder, he’s gonna pitch a pup tent on the Q.T. with the sheep and he’s gonna sleep there. You eat your supper and breakfast at camp, but you sleep with the sheep one hundred percent. No fire, don’t leave no sign. You roll up that tent every mornin’ in case the Forest Service snoops around.

Ennis and Jack’s position undercuts a capitalist imperative, in that sheepherding is a form of livestock farming, which is threatened by their sexual communion. Here, homosexuality is placed in direct opposition to capitalist profit : Aguirre’s interdiction is one made on behalf of unregulated capitalism. Keeping the men straight reduces the risk of a loss of profits, and Aguirre’s demand that one of them illegally « pitch a pup tent on the Q.T. with the sheep » identifies him as an anti-government proto-Reaganite, or a proto-Trump capitalist who thinks a « winner » is someone who knows how to avoid paying taxes and how to avoid getting caught deceiving the government. Aguirre is positioned at the intersection of American capitalist self-governance (a cherished shibboleth of the Republican Party) and responsible government oversight (considered by Democrats to be a necessity of successful, equitable, complex, modern economies). His character is smartly conceived this way—but the very negativity of his profile also makes him a darkly ironic inversion of the paternal shepherd of the mythical space of Arcadia, where the young are tutored by older shepherds in an idealist ethos of personal freedom and the responsibilities of human beings toward one another.

44When Jack and Ennis exit the trailer after their brusque « interview » (during which Aguirre seems pointedly to ignore Jack – which becomes even more curious, when the viewer discovers later that this is Jack’s second year herding sheep for the rancher), we notice that there is a sign on the door of Aguirre’s trailer: trespassers will be shot, survivors will be shot again.

45In their first (for Westerners, conventionally laconic) conversation with each other, Jack and Ennis reveal a great deal about themselves as men who are, in Kitses’ phrase, « lonely and needy, the products of broken families and absent fathers » :

jack. My second year here. Last year, one storm, the lightnin’ killed forty-two sheep. Thought I’d asphyxiate from the smell. Aguirre got all over my ass, like I was supposed to control the weather ! But beats workin’ for my old man. Can’t please my old man no way. That’s why I took to rodeoin’. You ever rodeo ?
ennis. You know, I mean, once in a while. When I got the entry fee in my pocket.
jack. (Smiles knowingly.) Yeah. Are you from ranch people ?
ennis. Yeah, I was.
jack. Your folks run you off ?
ennis. (He gives a small smile.) No, they run themselves off… There was one curve in the road in forty-three miles, and they miss it. (He shakes his head incredulously.) So the bank took the ranch... and my brother and sister, they raised me, mostly.
jack. Shit, that’s hard.

The Paradoxes of Nostalgia and fantasy, or : Moving Forward, Looking Backward

47The social, political and legal climate for gay people in the period in which Brokeback Mountain is set, especially for those who live in small towns or rural areas, both is and is not a world away from the United States in which the film was released. It is a period that has seen vertiginous change, and it is one in which the film itself participates as both mirror of that past and agent of change in the present. On the one hand, the fundamentalist turn by conservatives in recent years toward willed ignorance and obscurantism, and on the other, the growing acceptance by the mainstream of homosexuality as « normal » – reflected in the slow but forward-moving legalization of homosexuality in its various permutations and ramifications (the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2015 in favor of same-sex marriage ; the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010 allowing gays, lesbians, and bisexuals to serve openly in the U.S. Armed Forces, and so on) – make our present moment feel contradictory. The film is a melodrama, but it is a tragic one, for the happy ending would be posthumous, and in 2005 it was still far from certain that the traditional ending of melodrama – an image of the couple united in a happy embrace – would appear anytime soon on the horizon as a legal reality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people.

49Jack and Ennis are very much victims of their time and place. But today, in Heather Love’s inimitable turn of phrase (writing in the spring of 2008), we see that LGBTQ people have options. Indeed, « happiness » for queer people, she jokes, is « compulsory » :

If you are homosexual, there’s a lot to keep you busy these days. It can be hard to keep up with the ever-expanding menu of rights, privileges, and lifestyle options being made available. These new opportunities include not only the right to enjoy legal sodomy in the comfort of your own home and to be protected from discrimination on the job but also widening access to niche goods and services: lesbian cruises, gay cake toppers, queer prime time. Apart from all the A-list entertainment, there are also weddings and commitment ceremonies to plan. Being in the life has never looked so good or cost so much. (Love, 2008)

50Love in effect observes that the moment in which homosexuality becomes widely accepted in American society is the same moment in which it is coopted by consumerist and neoliberal imperatives seeking to monetize it and inscribe it safely within the familiar patterns of heteronormative narratives.

52The story of Jack and Ennis is also one of class bonding and, ultimately, of class division. The seductive (romantic/desiring) register appears to be the only one in which the two men can bridge the class divide that ultimately keeps them apart. Jack, the more middle-class character of the two, proposes that he and Ennis live together – a notion that is inconceivable to Ennis – and in this sense, the film and its ending may be seen as a parable rather than as allegory. The very fact that they fail as a couple is juxtaposed to the potential they may have had as a couple. It is one of the most powerful fantasies embedded in the film that two men of somewhat different class formation can make it together and thus offer a model of how to counteract some of the deleterious effects of neoliberalism on the (small-town, rural) West. That the film clads this utopian potential in an implicit plea for marriage is unfortunate, but since the term « marriage » is nowhere really mentioned, the viewer can perform a revisionist reading of the film in terms of male bonding, male romance and partnership, without necessarily having to consider marriage as the telos of the narrative, which, after all, in the Western and road movie genres signifies the end of desire and romance.

« Bromance » has come to denote an emotionally intense bond between presumably straight males who demonstrate an openness to intimacy that they neither regard, acknowledge, avow, nor express sexually, and this definition already begins to point to some of the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the phenomenon : bromance involves something that must happen (the demonstration of intimacy itself) on the condition that other things not happen (the avowal or expression of sexual desire between straight males). (DeAngelis, 2014 : 1)

55Ten years on, with other films exploring what Henning Bech enigmatically called, « the interest between men in what men can do with one another » (Bech, 1997 : 47), we realize what we probably always knew : that the intensity of desire between two people is most intense in the fantasy of seduction. The « Brokeback-ness » of Brokeback Mountain, then, like the bromance genre to which the film belongs, manages to do two, contradictory things at once: it both avows and disavows « what men can do with one another ». It both celebrates and mourns the twilight of nominally heterosexual, lonely, homophobic, twentieth-century cowboy masculinity. While offering the uneducated, working-class, white male something new – a glimpse of the sexual and subjective freedom that has never been available to him before, and which indeed had been all but unimaginable until now – the film is nevertheless a cautionary tale. It is inscribed in the paradoxes of nostalgia and fantasy, in the impossible, liminal zone from which desire springs: in the nostalgic fantasy of cowboys as « authentic American heroes, self-reliant and brave, honorable and loyal », but also as « lonely and needy, the products of [real or metaphorical] broken families and absent fathers ». The film both animates a fantasy of ideal and erotic love and offers an allegory of « a damaged nation of tarnished ideals and betrayed promise », which in its most retrograde variation, we have said, would be expressed by the campaign slogan of the Republican nominee in the 2016 presidential election : « Make America Great Again ».

56Note : The author would like to express his gratitude to Roy Grundmann for his encouragement and for his exceptionally helpful critique of an earlier draft of this essay.