"Brokeback Mountain" and The Art of the Screenplay

(Published in the East Bay Psychiatric Association Newsletter, January 2006)


It is not often when a book and a movie are equally masterful. But within the recent Academy Award nominated best film category is "Brokeback Mountain", adapted from the short story by the same name in Annie Proulx’ book of short stories of the American West entitled "Close Range". The movie and the book are both exceptional artistic achievements, neither to be missed.

According to Ms. Proulx, when asked to discuss “that gay cowboy movie”, she said, “Excuse me, but the story is about two inarticulate Wyoming ranch hands who experience something they don’t understand and can’t put words to.” So much for the romantic fantasy of the hard drinking, gun toting frontier cowboys as heroes who won the West—this story completely explodes that mythology.

The story/movie deals with homosexuality in the pre-AIDS and pre “out of the closet” era of 1963, but it is not so much about sexuality as it is a love story between two people who are lonely and isolated. The full-length movie is amazingly true to the relatively brief, 35 page long short story, as it is virtually identical in dialogue and content. It is a creative tour de force for the screenwriter to be able to flesh in the details of the characters in the movie so well, based on such a brief tale. Yet this is also to the credit of the story’s author, who has been able to create such full and colorful characters in such a brief story.

As much as I liked the movie "Brokeback Mountain", I enjoyed reading that story and the others in "Close Range" even more. The loneliness and emotional impoverishment of Ms. Proux’ characters are so penetrating that one feels transported into the lives of these people in the rural ranch-land of Wyoming.

As a psychiatrist, it was notable to me that this story so effectively conveyed the difficulty that emotionally deprived people have in “making love” as opposed to “having sex”—or in some of the stories “taking sex.” This seems to be an underlying dynamic in the lives of many of the Proulx' characters, as it is in some of my patients as well.

Whether you see the movie, read the story, or do both, I think you will agree, "Brokeback Mountain" represents a breakthrough in cinema and story telling. And it is the screenwriter who can take credit for transforming one media form into the other so masterfully.