"I'm stuck with what I got," Ennis Del Mar tells his lover Jack Twist about not leaving his wife and kids to live on a ranch together. "If you can't fix it, you got to stand it." “How long?,” Jack asks, At long as we can ride it," Ennis says. "Ain't no range on this one."(Proulx, 285 ; Brokeback Mountain Focus Features 2005).In the short story, Brokeback Mountain written by Annie Proulx and later film adaptation by Dianna Ossana and Larry McMurtry: No guns are fired, no cowboys and Indians fight to the death, there are no duels, and no damsels in distress are saved. Yet it is your typical all American Western.
The story centers on the unfulfilled love affair between two cowboys, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist played in the movie by, Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. They live out their idyllic love affair on “Brokeback Mountain” a place in Wyoming where they are hired as ranch hands in the summer of 1963. Both are young men under twenty years old. After this summer, they go off their separate ways to marry and have children. They both live seek to fulfill the expectations of playing heterosexual gender roles. Without each other, both men are unsatisfied, in their heterosexual relationships. They even sustain heterosexual affairs with other women outside of marriage. Jack for example has an affair with a rancher’s wife and homosexual prostitutes. Ennis also attempts a heterosexual relationship with a waitress after his wife Alma divorces him.
Both men only find love and a sense of completeness when they meet each other on “fishing trips” to “Brokeback Mountain”. They have occasional and intense encounters over the span of twenty years. Due to work and family compromises, they are never able to repeat the intensity of their first encounter but that is what both men aspire to when they meet on “Brokeback”. Because of social taboo’s and Ennis pathological fear of being killed for “being queer” Brokeback is their safe haven. It has the natural backdrop of maintains, sheep and a vast terrain. It represents the ideal place where they can live out their love without remorse. It is also the place where they can conserve what they value as cowboys, the outdoors and companionship as well as playing what Rosa Linda Fregoso calls, the role of the romanticized “ noble savage” that is at peace in touch with nature” in her book , The Bronze Screen. (Brokeback Mountain Focus Features 2005; Fregoso 70-80; Proulx, 255- 285).
Their story represents the typical western archetype of “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” It has been dubbed by the press as the first “Gay Western”, “Anti Western and “New Age Western” among other titles that imply that it is not a Western; however, it fits the typical Western archetype in what Nina Rosenstand in her book The Moral of the Story the West may not have been as it appears in the movies. If the values in westerns may have seemed offensive to modern audiences such as killing Indian, Westerns for the author have the ability change their message as along with the times. There have always been good guys and bad guys but in each period they reflected the problems of the contemporary world, at least in a symbolic sense. For her the Western is the one narrative genre that is truly American. It shows a great potential for being able to introduce many kinds of social and moral problems in a single framework in which people have to make moral decisions in a land where they are dwarfed by rocks, mountain, and desert. “These stories of momentous decisions appeal not just to Americans but to people allover the world. This makes the Western much more than just a movie genre. It has become a trans-cultural story told in a universal moral language,” she emphasizes (59-62).
“Brokeback Mountain” is a Western that has been able to give new light into homosexual and bi sexual relationships it has revitalized the pre-established formulas of the Western. In the article by Peter Swaab “Homo on the Range”, the author further examines the idea that Westerns have the ability to change their message. He cites filmmaker Martin Scorsese as saying that the Western genre has had “perverse variations” that have accommodated a wide range of attitudes regarding masculinity and sexuality. He cites two movies, Midnight Cowboy and Andy Warhol's Lonesome Cowboys (both 1969). He says that they “were playing with the homoerotic allure of the cowboy image.” Swab thanks that the image of rugged masculine individualism became irrelevant as frontier life gave way to more settled communities. He says, “The best westerns, however, have always implicitly been anti-westerns as well: thoughtfully ambivalent about violence, and aware how little may separate an ideal masculine prowess from brutality and racism. Such films have been less nostalgic for the old pioneer spirit, instead welcoming the more fluid idea of masculinity that replaced it.”
For him, “Brokeback Mountain” is the heir to this more reflective tradition. Proulx's original story, like much gay fiction, imagines a beautiful, idealized landscape in which taboo love can breathe. On Brokeback Mountain the lovers Ennis and Jack are "suspended above ordinary affairs" He also thinks that the story and film are groundbreaking in that they realistically depict modern, working-class, gay characters in the American West trying to make a life together. The tragedy of the characters for Swaab is that the only place for the characters in the Wyoming of their time is Brokeback Mountain (40-44).
Rather than be a traditional Western other experts think that “Brokeback Mountain” turns the cowboy myth on its head. In the article, “'Brokeback' rides into the mainstream” by Claudia Puig, states that “Brokeback Mountain” will find its place as a cultural landmark. Michael Taylor a film producer and chair of the University of Southern California's School of Cinema and Television, says “Brokeback Mountain” is important for various reasons. "The myth of the cowboy grew over so many years mostly because there were so few actual cowboys to contradict the myth. This movie turns the myth on its head. To sort of humanize that icon by making him gay is more interesting in what it says about cowboys as a symbol than what it says about homosexuality in cinema.", Taylor says. For him it comes at a critical time when gay rights and gay marriages have been making news. “Brokeback's” humanity, presented through universal themes of longing and loss, could open minds. He ends” Brokeback Mountain attains a sort of grand Romeo and Juliet level of tragedy that we don't see very often in contemporary movies. If it does nothing else than convey that love transcends any gender bias, it may turn out to be a seminal film."(par 7-11).
It is this sense of Aristotelian tragedy that has ultimately made “Brokeback Mountain” such a success as not only a box office hit as well as a fictitious scenario that has allowed for open debate on homosexual issues. It qualifies as a western and if it is taken out of its Western context, it would work as a tragedy as Taylor expressed. Aristotle believed that art, and especially drama, was good for people because it allowed them to act out their emotions vicariously; a good play would thus cleanse the spectator of disturbing emotions, and he or she could return home a calmer person: The exposure to strong feelings and to a considerable amount of stage violence would have a cathartic effect. Aristotle claimed that feeling pity and fear for the victim of the tragedy cleanses us by making us understand that tragedy could happen to anyone including ourselves. Aristotle makes it clear that the best tragic plays are those in which misfortune happens not to a very good person but to an ordinary person who made a monumental error in judgment. And since most of us are ordinary persons, the play and in this case the movie and short story becomes a moral learning experience-a moral laboratory in which we can see our inner urges acted out and learn from the tragic consequences (70-71).
People are able to identify and suffer with Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist reluctance to come out as being homosexual. They are ordinary men that are trying to live their lives as they see fit The enormity of the tragedy is suffered by Ennis, not only because he isn’t brave enough to go and live with Jack on a ranch because of a childhood fear of being killed for being gay. He later looses him to an accident (in the film and movie it is implied that he was killed but the reasons are not so clear it’s up to the spectator to determine if it was a hate crime). Ennis looses his family because his wife is aware of his sexual orientation and divorces him.
In the short story, Ennis will only be able to remember Jack in his dreams after Jack dies. In the movie, Ennis redeems himself by doing something he failed to do in his last encounter with Jack on “Brokeback”. He puts work aside to go to his daughter Alma Junior’s wedding. In both situations, Ennis is a man that now only has his memories of an unfilled love to live on but the movie ends for him in a more positive but not less heartbreaking light.
This fictitious scenario has helped an increasing number of wives, gay men, and heterosexual men come to terms with homosexuality according to an article entitled, “‘Brokeback’ Wives find Solace in Cowboy Tearjerker “by Katy Butler. The article focuses on the cathartic effect that the movie has had on spectators. It says that “Brokeback Mountain” helped an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 married and divorced women. Such women and their ex-husbands in mot cases have contacted online support groups, and increasing numbers of them are women in their 20s or 30s. This western has allowed people to make hard moral choices. According, to a study entitled, “Tipsheet :IU Researchers Address ‘Brokeback Mountain Phenomenon’”, by The Indiana University Bloomington suggests that the movie has not affected the homosexual community and homosexual cowboys in particular, as to how they choose to view their sexuality. The movie has caused greater impacted in the heterosexual men because the unifying theme of “lamenting what may have been” caused an increasing number of men to cry during the movie. The emotional and cleansing experience of crying during the movie increased the likely hood of these men to be more accepting of homosexual relationships after seeing the movie.
“Brokeback Mountain” is a story that definitely works as a western and a tragedy. It helps us understand ourselves as individuals and that we as humankind have more similarities than differences. Just as Ennis and Jack aspired for true love and acceptance from others in their lives, all of us have at one time or another felt the same way for various circumstances in our lives. We empathize with the characters although some of us may empathize more with Alma Ennis’s wife than with the protagonists. “Brokeback Mountain “is perhaps more a story with an agenda about homosexuality and acceptance of differences, but is also about living without regrets what ever the situation or context may be. That is what makes its message so simple and yet so powerful. Regardless of what we think about issues like homosexually, same sex marriages, and bisexual relations, “Brokeback” opens the arena for debate. As a Western and a tragedy, it tells us that the Western as a genre continues to evolve and serve its purpose of entertainment with a message.

Works Cited
Anonymous. “Tipsheet : IU Researchers Address ‘Brokeback Mountain Phenomenon’”
University of Indiana: Bloomington. 14 Feb. 2006: 25Mar.2006.< http://newsinfo.iu.edu/tips/page/normal/2929.html>

Brokeback Mountain ,dir. Ang Lee, perf. Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway,
Michelle Williams, and Randy Quaid, Focus Features, 2005.
Butler, Katy. “‘Brokeback’ Wives find Solace in Cowboy Tearjerker “, Scotsman.com. 12
Mar. 2006: 1 Apr. 2006.
Fregoso, Rosa, Linda. The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture. University
of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Proulx, Annie. “Brokeback Mountain” Close Range: Wyoming Stories.(255-285): New
York, NY: Scribner, 1999.
Puig, Clauida. “'Brokeback' rides into the mainstream”, USA Today.com. 12 Dec 2005
:19 Mar. 2006.< http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2005-12-13-brokeback_x.htm?POE=click-refer>

Rosenstand, Nina. Philosophy 111 Coursepack.(59-62,70-71):.Montezuma Publishing,
2006.
Swaab, Peter. ”Homo on the range”. New Statesman. 12/12/2005: Vol. 134
Issue 4770, (p40-43), 3p.