![]() ![]() I thought I wanted the kiss between the two men in Brokeback Mountain to be long, sloppy and ravenous. ![]() How many such cinematic kisses have we seen? Before how many western sunsets? How many happy endings in which the binary molecule of man and woman embracing rationalises the messy, blood-spattered colonisation of the western half of the North American continent and makes it tolerable anew. When I imagined seeing Ang Lee's new film adaptation of Brokeback Mountain, based on a screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, I imagined the first kiss of its two protagonists. I thought the only way I was going to like it was if these cowboys had sex! And then they did!" And yet I remember calling out to my wife, midway through this particular story, saying, "I'm reading this cowboy story that I thought I was going to hate. The early pages of this unknown western narrative did not interest me, because I thought at that time, and think still, that the myth of the Old West, with its gunslingers and traditional masculine bravado, was stifling, repellent, and misguided. ![]() The names of the writers were stripped from the works for the purposes of the competition. It's by Annie Proulx, but I didn't know that then. I first read "Brokeback Mountain", the short story on which Ang Lee's new film is based, when I was judging a short story award in 1998. ![]()
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