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The Nation's Pulse

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That's not enough for Dallas columnist Mark Davis, who describes himself as a conservative who liked Brokeback, his privilege. Writes Davis for anyone offended by the film: "It's...a...movie." Well, sure, but did Davis similarly devalue the impact of The Passion of the Christ or for that matter of To Kill a Mockingbird? We're dealing with a category of film designed to convey impact, religious, political, social.

I learn from the LA Weekly that I'm in the company of many Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members, social liberals all, who just can't bring themselves to a Brokeback screening. Writer Nikke Finke has a point: "For a community that takes pride in progressive values, it's shameful that Hollywood's homophobia may be on a par with Pat Robertson's."

I'm not encumbered by their hypocrisy. Not that there's anything wrong with advancing tolerance, which appeals to America's better angels. But the unsubtle preachiness; the easy willingness to foresake traditional marriage for the two characters' lovelorn impulses (the movie purports to show the "complexity" of the extra-marital dilemma); the appropriation of iconic American masculinity for an unlikely socio-political agenda -- all call into question Hollywood's depth when it comes to authentic love. Such depth demands harder choices.

Since at least the Marlene Dietrich era, the movies have limned various aspects of same-sex attraction. But the signals were subtle, and smart audiences -- doubtless more tolerant than current, politically correct chroniclers insist -- accepted them. In recent years the studios have made the point with a searing branding iron. All the subtlety, you might say, of a political campaign.

But of course, Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, and who knows who else, no doubt required by their studio handlers, concealed their sexual identities. Liberace, on the other hand, neither felt impelled to conceal his or announce it; we just knew. If the closeted stars had followed suit, what would have been the worst that could have happened to their careers? Or am I being an insensitive lout?

THE QUESTION IS RAISED: If homosexuality is, as its advocates insist, normative but hidden, and Hollywood now offers vehicles for openness and honesty, why aren't homosexuals cast in these roles? Surely someone across the great divide, some gay diversity activist, is wondering what I'm wondering?

Is it so important that actors keep making those Oscar-winning points by playing against type? Is that the whole point, like Samuel Johnson's dog walking on two feet? Will and Grace's talented Sean Hayes seems to me to be playing a gay caricature, much as queer-baiters have always done. Why is that not offensive? Surely the program, clever as it is, feeds prurience as much as it liberates?

Brokeback serves as a climactic device, squared and cubed, by which Hollywood can congratulate itself for its tolerance, simple as that. Steven Spielberg's Munich, another nominated film, works as a conveyance of moral relativism and historical revisionism. Meanwhile, Chronicles of Narnia, the cinematic treatment of C. S. Lewis's popular work of moral imagination, gets only a few nods for technical craftsmanship. The asymmetrical honors tell us what we need to know about Hollywood.

Lewis, Pascal's 20th century intellectual heir, also in his vast writings warned of those twin seductions, megalomania and erotomania, each now with a gleaming capital on an opposite coast. No wonder the Academy is uncomfortable with him.

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