Perhaps this year “The Power of the Dog” will avenge “Brokeback Mountain,” which was upset at the Oscars by what is often called one of the most mediocre best picture winners in academy history. Queer westerns come in all shapes and sizes and genders, and they clearly aren’t new.
Can a movie be both erotically charged and sexless? (Bosley Crowther, writing in the New York Times, described Crawford as “sharp and romantically forbidding as a package of unwrapped razor blades”).
Roger Ebert called “Johnny Guitar” “one of the most blatant psychosexual melodramas ever to disguise itself in that most commodious of genres, the western.” With two icons of lesbian culture in Crawford and McCambridge squaring off and making the guys, who already have names like the Dancin’ Kid, look timid by comparison, Nicholas Ray’s western, shot in the blaring tones of Trucolor, is a kind of queer western fever dream, open to interpretation.
“She thinks like one, acts like one and sometimes makes me feel like I’m not.” Or Vienna, commenting on the simmering passion between her adversary, ruthless baron Emma (Mercedes McCambridge), and the Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady): “He makes her feel like a woman, and that scares her.” “Never seen a woman who was more of a man,” says one man of his boss, the saloon owner Vienna (Joan Crawford). As in “The Power of the Dog,” the queerness is largely written between the lines. Lest you think the queer western is strictly a male province, we give you “Johnny Guitar” (1954). The West was a rough place, regardless of one’s sexual orientation. They ultimately don’t fare well in “Dead Man,” but neither do many of those whom William and Nobody encounter. Why wouldn’t there be? They’re every bit as natural as U.S.
Of course there were gay men in the Old West, the film suggests. There’s something refreshingly matter-of-fact about this sequence. They stroke William’s hair, marveling at its softness, and argue over who gets to bed him (“I saw him first!”). In Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 psychedelic western “Dead Man,” a city boy named William Blake (Johnny Depp, dressed like Buster Keaton) and his Native American companion Nobody (Gary Farmer) traverse the Great Plains and come across a trio of mountain men, including Billy Bob Thornton and Iggy Pop, the latter in a dress and bonnet. The queer western needn’t always be so grave. Even in death, he can’t escape the closet. In the end, Jack is beaten to death, much like a real-life gay Wyoming man, Matthew Shepard Jack’s family makes up a story about a roadside accident to cover the truth. Their rough-hewn, ranch-and-rodeo culture has no tolerance for the love that dare not speak its name, as Oscar Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas put it, though Jack pushes the issue while Ennis insists on staying in the closet. Ennis (Ledger) and Jack (Gyllenhaal) both marry women who love them, but the men keep sneaking off for fishing and hunting trips together. It’s also a tragic love story whose tragedy is rooted in a pretty traditional dilemma: Society won’t let these two people be together.
Adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from Annie Proulx’s short story, it’s a queer western you can quote (“Why don’t I know how to quit you?”). The film struck a chord, winning three Oscars but losing the big one to “Crash” in a major upset. On a less subtle note, the queer western burst into the popular consciousness in 2005 with Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain.” Here were two stars, Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, playing Wyoming ranchers hopelessly in love with each other. In this sense, “The Power of the Dog” has more in common with Claire Denis’ often-shirtless 1999 French Foreign Legion/battle of wills film “Beau Travail” than any western. It’s the inverse of film theorist Laura Mulvey’s male gaze, in which the world is depicted from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents women as sexual objects. But the aesthetics here are more important than the screenplay.Ĭampion, one of cinema’s great sensualists, captures Phil and his men with water glimmering in the sun off their nude bodies, muscles tensed, not a woman in sight. The plot and characterizations deepen as Peter stumbles upon an old male nudie cache that apparently belonged to Bronco Henry, and Phil begins wooing Peter, at one point stopping just short of kissing him.