Brokeback Mountain

In my usual morning daze, I heard my dad telling me of how a guy in his Mongolian days screwed a sheep (and got shot later on for the crime of what-is-that-word?). Thereby he expresses disbelief for the depiction of gay love. He said the mountain is not just a mountain. Mountains' lack of human inhabitation signifies emptiness in spirit. That gay sex happened in the mountains signifies the participants of the said activity did so out of hardship, confusion for their future, loneliness - a general void of meaning in their lives. Under such circumstances anything could happen; sheep could be screwed, let alone another man.

Adverse opinions early in the morning are too much to take, especially when I'm done with intellectual cynicism for a while (It leads to nowhere and tires me out.) - for it was intellectual cynicism, not an amazingly remote piece of moral value, that prompted my dad's review of the short story. I pointed out that "spiritual emptiness" seems to be a term that's more appropriately applied to the 19th century Western European bourgeoisie. "Spiritual emptiness" versus "material excess". The guys in Brokeback are far from being in material excess. Furthermore it's not like Brokeback is barren like the Iranian mountains. It's mid-West - cowboys and pastures. Dad brushed it aside. No, it's really because they've got nothing to do. Look at them - they aren't even sure if they're gay. I said Ennis isn't, but Jack might know that about himself from the very beginning. Dad quoted them saying they aren't queer. I realise then that we were arguing on very different grounds of sensitivities. I see the subject of homosexuality in terms of social behaviour and prejudice, and issues of denial and guilt - American psychology; he sees it in terms of depraved, depressed people who can't find meaning in and aren't in control of their own lives. Eg if SY ever turned gay because nothing else had mattered.

But mainly it's intellectual cynicism. Dad read the Chinese translation of the novella. In all it discarded or couldn't translate a lot of imageries in the Western dialect (it's hard), and therefore "softened down" the cowboys by quite a bit. On top of that Anne Proulx's succint and matter-of-fact narrative style was replaced with brimming sentimental expressions and even some invention (hmm, not so forgiveable) to express more of the "dumb, boundless sorrow", which is a sentiment in fashion in Chinese literature among young people. Therefore my dad's conclusion is that he doesn't like writers who xuan4 ran3 the subject matter (of gay love, in this case) - to pick specific elements and manipulate wordings to his/her convenience to mould a certain sentiment out of otherwise ordinary ambience, scenery, people and events, etc. He just can't stand people making a show out of anything. And therefore, I told him to reserve comments before he reads the original version, which I have printed for him as well. In the first place I meant the Chinese version to help understand some parts where the use of dialect made the meaning too opaque even for inference. I told him it's not in the plainest English possible. He said in that annoying drawl of his, nooo problem, it can't be easier. According to him a combination of some cleverness and being Shanghainese gives him the license to look down on a lot of things when he has the luxury to be out of those things.