Dictum

Cowboys and Cowgirls

BY ANKA SPOLJAR

There are many different unexplained film successes in the film industry today. Recently Oscar awarded film ”Broke back Mountain” is in my opinion one of them. If the question here was to award a film for being politically correct, then the goal has probably been achieved. If the goal was to award it for being a true story of what life is all about, then in my opinion something has gone very wrong.

My expectation when going to see this particular film was like everyone else’s. I thought that seeing it would help people solve yet another question about how same sex relationships come into being and how they are no different from any other relationship.

The excitement about the movie was of course much greater since the story is set in a Midwestern area of the USA and the relationship it describes is a relationship between two cowboys, a relationship which developed sometime during the 60s and lasted throughout the 70s.

When leaving the cinema my impression was that this film managed quite the contrary, it managed to give people even more arguments for having prejudices against same sex relationships in addition to the ones they had before they stepped into the cinema that night.

The only two concrete sex scenes in this film are violent scenes, which show one of the characters in relation to the other main character and later on with his wife.

First, the beauty of love, the beauty of what intimacy is between two people independent of which sex they are, some years ago presented in the British drama “Priest”, was this time redefined in a quite bizarre brutal scene in the beginning of the cowboy film. The problems do not stop there. The second sex scene is not any less violent. Quite to the contrary, it really strikes to the bone of the how essentially violent our nature can be and how we know no limits when our ego is to be fed. All this really makes you wonder what the point was in making such obscenity. Why was it necessary to present the two most intimate scenes in the film as two sexual scenes with a connotation of rape? First we are seeing something that to a high degree resembles a rape as an act of love, and then we are presented with the sexual abuse of one’s own wife as the only way the main character can sexually relate to his own wife.

How is this suppose to help the average Dick, Tom and Harry not to be terrified of gay men as men who go around having sex with whatever they can get their hands on? Or we can ask ourselves the following: Is this how people imagine intimacy goes on between two people when at least one of them is gay?

When taking this subject up with some other people who had also seen this film they looked at me in wonder about what I was talking about. They appeared to think that this film seems to have an historical meaning in USAs context, and that it is a form of confronting the cowboy culture in the Midwest during a specific historical era of the 60s and 70s, and so on, and on, and on. True enough they are in real desperation to get the cow- image off their backs, but my question was is this the way to go? Excuse me, but isn’t it the case that all cultures contain their own cowboy and cowgirl subcultures which are not far off from the ones described on the screen?

Did anyone at any point in time during the making of this film know how these scenes would play into the hands of all of those who already have prejudices against the homosexual population of this planet?

Isn’t this film just another example of a manic obsession with a need to deal with the current problems in connection with the present history of cowboyism/cowgirlism, which once again did not take them anywhere else from where they were before they made this film? Is maybe the Oscar award just another desperate attempt to deal with whatever is strangling them currently, and therefore this attempt at “shocking” the public looked like a good way of doing so?

How good it looked at the time is hard to say. What we can say now in the aftermath of making a story like this one is that the ones who made it should maybe go back and consider a very old and good saying: it is always a good idea to check whether what one is saying is at least close to that which is coming across.

Isn’t it enough that prejudices are there already? Is it necessary to keep on feeding them?

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