‘Brokeback Mountain’ Is a Time Capsule of Culture at 20 Years Old
Two decades after its release, Ang Lee’s film stands as an important part of LGBTQ+ film history
Watching movies on an airplane can be a mixed experience. On one hand, when confined to a seat for extended periods of time, we’re captive viewers by definition. Without a window seat at our disposal, it’s a hard truth of the sky that we can either tirelessly stare down the seat in front of us or watch Meet the Fockers.
But there’s something to be said for the sky-high cinema substitute. I was thousands of feet above the Pacific Ocean when I watched Moonlight for the first time. And shoddy headphones with intermittent audio be damned — I was locked in for that experience, and there wasn’t a flight attendant in the entire American Airlines workforce that could have removed me from Chiron’s crushing plight. By the time the movie finished, my eyes were raw, my heart heavy, and my ears sore enough to necessitate Advil.
The circumstances under which I watched Brokeback Mountain for the first time were hardly better. But I didn’t care.
It didn’t matter to me that my phone had been all but flattened by a Costa Rican e-scooter a week prior, nor that navigating the in-flight movie menu was nearly enough for my shattered screen to leave my finger bleeding, nor that my entire viewing was peppered with curious pantomimes from the non-English speaking grandma sitting beside me. She wanted to know how to watch the movie also, but our linguistic barriers proved too high to vault, and Google Translate was of no use in our hypersonic sky tube. (Through my peripherals, I watched her sit in silence through the entire flight with a level of patience that most millennials can scarcely imagine.)
Yet with all odds stacked against me — and bearing the weight of occasional jealous glances from my maternal seat neighbor — I managed to love the movie all the same. Through a screen that looked more like a spider web than an iPhone, the story of those closeted gay cowboys still managed to stick with me.
Don’t ask me why it is that I have an affinity for watching these poignant stories about homosexual identity on airplanes.
Anyway, this lengthy introduction is my convoluted way of saying that, perhaps seeing Brokeback Mountain on the big screen this past weekend for a 20th anniversary showing was essential.
We don’t always stop to appreciate what a visual medium cinema is. Of course, it goes without saying that watching a movie is different than reading a book, but sometimes it demands the right screen to really appreciate the story being told. A cracked iPhone is no substitute for an actual movie theater, no matter how rapt my attention. Visual fidelity matters.
(My father and I once obliviously watched the same movie twice only a few years apart, not realizing until the final act that we’d both already seen it. The only difference was that we swapped the living room TV we’d bought when I was in fourth grade for a modern 4K display.)
That first time watching Brokeback Mountain, it was lost on me just what a visually impressive movie it is, and what an escape that eponymous getaway represents for the story’s two protagonists. Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger both showcase the struggle of being homosexuals in a less progressive world than the one we know today.
There’s a discordance between their characters’ miserable lives back home and the authentic ones that they cultivate while camping out in the rugged beauty of Wyoming. The rift between the bucolic magnetism of life on that mountainside and their suffocating routines back home is reflected in the film’s subtle but deliberate shift from warm, natural tones to cooler, more sterile ones. I couldn’t quite pick up on that detail when crammed like a sardine between two strangers.
An interesting realization I had about Brokeback Mountain is that, even while the message behind it is one of tolerance, it’s likely not a film that would be made today in this form — certainly not with two straight lead actors. The movie would be lambasted for all of the gay actors that could have been cast instead. With such a wide array of talent in the gay community to draw from, people may have been right to give that flak.
And yet, it was Ledger and Gyllenhaal’s tender, nuanced, and heart-wrenching performances that make the movie so much of what it is. Actors define movies. Tom Cruise nearly starred in The Shawshank Redemption, and if he had, it would have been a different film. If Al Pacino was the one tasked with portraying Han Solo, or Leonardo DiCaprio had gotten the lead in American Psycho, each finished product would be virtually unrecognizable.
Maybe actual gay actors would have embodied the sexual tension better than Ledger and Gyllenhaal ever managed to, but maybe it was the clash between their real lives and those fictional roles that made them feel so viscerally tortured and believable. Whether it’s important to cast gay actors in gay roles wasn’t a conversation in 2005, but in 2025, it’s inescapable. And rightfully so. There’s a powerful argument that real damage is done when we exclude people in the LGBTQ+ community from taking on LGBTQ+ parts in film.
Brokeback Mountain is a product of its time, but that doesn’t reduce its impact. It played a part in furthering a conversation, and whether or not the actors who embodied those roles were gay themselves, they put familiar faces to a kind of love that was still heavily stigmatized twenty years ago. It helped stir conflict inside of the viewers who walked into the movie believing their whole lives that being born gay was wrong. And it helped others to come to terms with the fact that they were no less for loving who they love.
Brokeback Mountain is also one of the many movies from recent years that’s caused me to reflect, not just on how dramatically culture has shifted during my own life, but throughout the lives of my parents as well. When the movie came out, the culture around casting gays in Hollywood films was very different. In that way, the film serves as a poignant glimpse into more than just one era. The fact that the conventions around casting have grown to feel almost inappropriate in only the twenty years since its release are proof of the force behind the argument it helped to ignite.
I was in elementary school at the time of the movie’s release, and I remember that back then, being called gay felt like one of the worst insults a kid could incur. When a fellow second-grader stamped the label on a pair of gray joggers I wore one day, I decided then and there to stop wearing them.
It wasn’t until middle school that I felt safe to put on sweatpants again at all. By then, “gay” was no longer used as an insult. That derogatory application had left our vocabularies.
By high school, using the word as an epithet would sooner get you labeled a homophobe than it would spur any real sense of judgment among fellow classmates. Tens of people in our school had come out by then.
Even as we enter into a period of political regression, it’s easy to forget that, in my own parents’ lives, there was a time when no one felt safe to come out of the closet as gay.
Brokeback Mountain serves as a subtle reminder that progress is slow and messy. But looking back to 2005, and even further, to the years in which the movie is set, it’s hard to deny that progress is taking place. That the world today is less hateful than the one we once knew, even if we sometimes backslide.
As time goes on, our broader attitude almost always evolves toward tolerance and compassion. It’s easy to look at the adversities the LGBTQ+ community now faces and forget how far we’ve come. The threats they face are real, it’s undeniable. Yet movements built on hate rarely stand the test of time, and it takes stories like Brokeback Mountain, not only to shine an ugly light on bigotry, but to grant mainstream legitimacy and humanity to its victims.
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This film has been on my radar for a while but I never managed to watch it. I think I'll be watching it this weekend!
As for how 'being gay' has gone from being an insult to being something (largely) neutral: I come from a Catholic family in which being gay would have resulted in me getting kicked out of the house. I often heard statements like "It's just a trend to be gay" and "Why do they have to throw their sexuality in my face?" at home. Luckily, I've always been interested in people who are different and managed to kick that thinking in the melons early on. Though I have to say, it really helped to get out of that environment first.
I'm gonna go with the shallow analysis here and say that if straight actors can't play gay characters, then gay actors can't play straight characters.
Sure, people will say, but power dynamics, minority representation...! Nah.
These kinds of "rules" should just make straightforward sense to people. And since of course gay people should be able to play straight characters, the inverse should be equally true. The impulse to police this comes from a decent place but is exactly the kind of - I'm really terribly sorry to have to use this term, but I've run out of denial of its existence - virtue signaling that has made a lot of people under 30 disgusted with the left.
I'm okay with applying this standard to trans actors, for what it's worth. Which it did not, until very recently; I think it was only with Laverne Cox on OITB that this was finally written in stone. Very different thing, much less mutable and something where authenticity is more important - it's more like race than sexual preference in many ways. As an almost-tautological general rule, authenticity does not matter AT ALL in acting, if you're good at it, but there are exceptions.