Newswise — The film "Brokeback Mountain" has given a new twist to the great American Western, challenging the last haven of traditional American masculinity, and this is why many straight men are avoiding the film, says Dr. Richard Megraw, assistant professor of American studies at The University of Alabama and an expert on the American West in the 20th century.
Megraw says this phenomenon is similar to the last turn-of-the-century crisis of masculinity, one stemming from the perceived cultural consequences of the rise of urban-industrial society in the early 1900s.
"Their fathers and grandfathers, the argument ran, had worked outdoors with their hands. But now the grandsons worked inside with their heads, meaning that a society created by freedom-loving rugged individuals with a preference for personal autonomy was rapidly becoming a society of stressed-out mid-level bureaucrats forced to conform to strict standards of dress, deportment, and display," says Megraw. During that time words such as "panty-waist," "stuffed shirt," and "sissy" made it into the national lexicon in order to describe these people.
"In reaction, among other things, people looked to the 'Wild West' as the last haven of traditional American masculinity, a point emphasized by such western artists Frederic Remington and Charles Russell and novelist Owen Wister, and by the most popular American showman of his day, Buffalo Bill," Megraw says.
"The West then stands for gender clarity enforced in early postwar America by such 'classic' westerns as 'Red River' and, especially, 'Shane'."
However, in "Brokeback," Megraw says that Heath Ledger's character is credible as a new take on the classic inarticulate cowboy in an overtly masculine frontier setting.
"Like most other cowboy heroes, he begins in solitude and ends in solitude after a largely unsuccessful attempt to negotiate the complexities of American social relationships.
"Ultimately, for some folks, because our heroes 'have always been cowboys,' icons of moral clarity and simple virtues, many people find it difficult to confront the complexity of erotic and emotional ties between them."
Megraw currently teaches a course that examines the growth of the American West during the 20th century as both the embodiment of modernity and, as mythic imagination, an escape from the very modernity it represents.
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