Melancholic Landscape:

Intertexual Reflection on Brokeback Mountain

Abstract

The idea of melancholy could be traced back from the early Aristotelian conceptions of the humors and of black bile to the contemporary psychoanalytic discussions. The two psychological qualities of melancholy, namely Freudian unconscious dream-wish and Kristevan abjection, will set up a theoretical foundation to come to terms with the self-representation and inner-struggles of the maternal “other.” For Sigmund Freud, melancholy is a subject’s failure to return to the normal society and a larger-than-mourning depression that refuses the possibility of mental recovering from an everlasting loss and pain revealed from a form of the unconscious dream-like language that is dominated by the fear of Oedipus castration and the narcissistic wound. The Freudian fulfillment of a melancholic dream wish has been interpreted as the concept of Julia Kristeva’s abjection discourse to detail a floating bodily whose texture is embedded in both a fragmented social rubric and a reflected melancholy self that is abjected from the institutions of normalization. In other words, the two heterogeneities in Freud and Kristeva, namely dream-wish and abjection, proffer a formulation of the pre-oedipal and narcissistic structures of subjectivity that constitutes two oppositional systems, explicitly paternal law and maternal authority that constitute a conflicting paradigm of melancholy.

The study, with a psychoanalytic analysis on the topic of melancholia, focuses on the cross-fertilized intertextuality between the contemporary American writer Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain” and its 2005 film adaptation made by the Taiwanese director Ang Lee. Kristevan “intertextuality” is a kind of coextension whose overlapping function refers to a field of transpositions of many signifying systems, such as an original novel and adapted film. There is a psychoanalytic element attached with the notion of intertextuality that indicates a problematic subject-in-process whose identity suffers form a threshold experience. The reading of Freud and Kristeva’s investigations into melancholic pathology and its association with abjected dream will explore two major characters Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain and its intertextual relationships to Proulx’s original same name short story.

Both the writer and director attempt to depict the melancholic situation of the gay lovers whose intimacy is not allowed in the traditional Wyoming society in the 1960s. The inexpressive, moody, and practical Ennis is frequently contrasted with the outspoken, gentle, and romantic Jack to demonstrate a subtle and complicate symbiotic brotherhood. I will propose that the gay lovers, Jack and Ennis, fall into melancholy states which couch on unspeakable narcissistic wounds and abjects that are completely indifferent to or expelled from the traditional conventions dominated by the Symbolic order. The desire for a recalling to a lost object situated in a pre-symbolic chora, fluctuated in an imaginary and secret sanctuary “Brokeback Mountain,” could thereby serves as a meditating rhythm linked with Ennis’s dream-like memory of a forlorn mother whose beloved image is constantly threatened by a strict patriarchal father. Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” starts with Ennis’s spring dream about Jack. The dream brings back all the bitter and sweet past that forces Ennis to fall into the memorable time on Brokeback Mountain with Jack. Although this scene is not visualized in the adapted films, Ang Lee makes other scenes to truly capture Proulx’s loneliness and drifting motif. However, in Lee’s film, Ennis and Jack’s bona fides as seemingly macho yet depressed American men is revealed through the following two scenes to show their hidden anger and repression that is greater than Proulx’s narrative. Jack challenges his boorish father-in-law at a Thanksgiving celebration, whereas Ennis punches a couple of biker goons at a July Fourth picnic, standing against a skyscraper of exploding fireworks. Proulx’s literary description seems to be more about a Freudian dream-play whose elaborated metaphors such as wind and mountain shown in the beginning of the story symbolizes a melancholic yearning for a motherly and feminine space where creative and tenderness are possible. In the end of the story, the metaphors such as the spoon handle, tire iron, the wet images in the pillow and sheet, constitute a serial of phallic symbols that constrain a desire for the maternal love that could be traced back to the pre-oedipal phase. 

In conclusion, Proulx’s literal account inspires Ang Lee’s visual invention of the repressive environment of 1960s Wyoming Cowboy Society has been explored along with its living characters who suffer from the brittle cultural landscape they inhabit. At the same time, Ang Lee’s visual images have been juxtaposed side by side with Proulx’s literal texts in order to invoke an alternative intertextual reading between two media. Ang Lee’s visual narrative normalizes homosexuality, rendering it as a sublime natural landscape whose melancholy mise-en-scene captures the essence of Proulx’s epic-like cowboy story. Whereas the film/novel intertextuality poses many questions and provisional answers are offered by orchestrating a dialogue between the film/novel, Kristeva’s musings on melancholy and Freud’s thoughts on dream indeed build up a dream-like landscape of melancholy on Brokeback Mountain.

Key Words: Melancholy, abjection, Kristeva, mother, intertextuality, semiotic/symbolic, maternality, landscape, dream, Freud, the unconscious, pre-oedipal, phallic symbols, 1960s, Wyoming Cowboy Society.