I recently watched Ang Lee’s multi-award winning Brokeback Mountain, and absolutely loved it. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal both give superb performances, and the story is beautiful and painful in equal measure – I would highly recommend giving it a watch (it’s free on Amazon Prime Video). Having read an excerpt of the short story upon which the film is based in class last year, I decided to re-read it, and was inspired to do a bit of writing about the two together. Please excuse the clunkiness of my writing – I’m very out of practice, but plan to try and get back into the groove again with this blog, which I have dreadfully neglected throughout my year off so far…

Brokeback Mountain tells the story of Ennis and Jack, two cowboys whose lives are forever intertwined after a summer spent together in 1963 as ranch-hands. 

In the film, and in the 1997 short story by Annie Proulx upon which the film is based (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/10/13/brokeback-mountain – really worth the read), we are directed towards clothing as an important symbolic feature, by the bloodstained and intertwined shirts that Ennis finds in Jack’s closet at the end of the film.

“At the north end of the closet a tiny jog in the wall made a slight hiding place and here, stiff with long suspension from a nail, hung a shirt […] The shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack’s sleeves. It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he’d thought, long ago in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack’s own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one.”

The symbolic weight of these isn’t hard to understand: hidden, much like Ennis and Jack’s relationship, but constant and lasting, reflecting the love that each felt for the other. The image of the two skins, one encased in the other, reminds us of course of the passionate moments the two men shared, but more poignantly, of an embrace that stuck with Jack through the years, from their time on Brokeback Mountain:

‘the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger […] Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives.’

Physicality was central to Ennis and Jack’s relationship. Two men of few words who rarely express their emotions, they have an almost animalistic relationship, vividly played out by Ledger and Gyllenhal in the rough wrestling up on Brokeback. Yet underneath this there is real love, and this long-ago moment of deep desire in each to love and be loved is, I feel, what Jack tries to preserve in placing Ennis’ shirt within his own. 

This is the enduring image of Brokeback Mountain. Proulx deliberately leaves it till the end, and Lee follows suit, closing with the image of the Brokeback mountain postcard, and the shirts.

“When [the postcard] came—thirty cents—he pinned it up in his trailer, brass-headed tack in each corner. Below it he drove a nail and on the nail he hung a wire hanger and the two old shirts suspended from it. He stepped back and looked at the ensemble through a few stinging tears.”

Struck by the importance of these pieces of clothing, I began to consider clothes throughout the film and story. 

Another important symbolical item is of course the cowboy hats that both Jack and Ennis wear. 

“he saw Jack get out of the truck, beat-up Resistol tilted back” 

These ‘high-crowned, wide-brimmed, soft-felt western hats’, worn by both men in the opening scene when they first meet one another, are ‘intimately associated with the cowboy image’, an image of old-fashioned masculinity. Indeed, the brand of hat they wear is so closely identified with the cowboy image that it is the first line on the company’s website: ‘Ask any cowboy what brand of cowboy hat he wears, and you’ll likely hear the name Resistol’. Both Ennis and Jack are pretty much perfect depictions of the athletic, good-looking cowboy figure which saturated popular culture, and became a symbol of the American spirit, ‘considered to be the embodiment of freedom and independence’. Ironic when we consider that it is the culture they live in which prohibits the two from living truly freely. 

Eric Patterson notes in On Brokeback Mountain: Meditations about Masculinity, Fear, and Love, that by depicting the love between Ennis and Jack within the ‘iconographic system of landscape, clothing, and activities that are fundamental to the Western’, Brokeback Mountain forces us to ‘recognise how the American national fantasy of Western adventure and and particularly the idealised cowboy hero have distorted history and endorsed a homophobic construction of masculinity.’ 

And it is not just the hat that creates this iconic cowboy look: Jack and Ennis both dress in plaid shirts, boots, jeans, the bull-riding belt buckle that Jack is so attached to, as well as the classic sherpa jacket. 

Priya Elan writes about the connotations of the sherpa jacket in an article for the Guardian, elaborating on its suggestion of being a loner, of being expressing the ‘unspoken longing’ of the wearer. In this way it’s the perfect item of clothing for Ennis and Jack, especially Ennis – Ledger used his wardrobe to help with characterisation, and in Brokeback he doesn’t disappoint, wearing his sherpa done up tightly, evoking Ennis’ emotional repression. 

As for plaid? This is a textile with a fascinating symbolic history. At the turn of the 19th century, plaid was introduced to the US and was, to begin with, expressive of masculinity, worn by lumberjacks and the like. A few years later, in the first half of the 20th century, it had lost its strictly gendered connotations and was popular with women and children too. Then, in the 70s and 80s, its meaning developed even further, and was adopted by the ‘masculine homosexuality of the 70s’. Though Brokeback is set in ‘63, this varied symbolism of plaid lends an interesting depth to the outfits of the two men, and of the final image, Ennis’ plaid shirt tucked inside Jack’s. 

On a couple of occasions Ennis and Jack are without clothing – when they have sex, and when they jump from high up into a lake (in the film). This second instance is particularly noteworthy, as it happens on their first trip together after being separated for so many years; a rare moment of absolute freedom and spontaneity, it exemplifies that which they lack and want most. It is perhaps unsurprising that when Jack and Ennis are without clothes they are most free, liberated from the constraints and expectations which their clothes place upon them. 

And yet, it is two pieces of clothing that Proulx and Lee choose to mark the end of Jack and Ennis’ story – proof of their secret, their burden, their love.