Raping the Marlboro Man

Another Brokeback post. There's a reason for all these Brokeback posts- but the primary reason is that I loved the film.

To recap: before The General had seen the film, we said this:

And it is a self-contained non-debate- not one person in this article says that the film was ever considered, or in its current form, deserving, of an NC-17 rating. Yet the supposition that it somehow culturally deserves one seeps through the article.

The article itself seems to exist solely in a world where the only possibility for homosexuality would be a stern, adults-only rating- preserved in the queer-cinemas; insulating the average American from the possibility of having to deal with the subject matter. If the same story were heterosexual, it could fly with a PG-13. But GAY?!?! Slap it with the Showgirls treatment!

And that is exactly why the source material for the film is brilliant, and why the film is so promising to me. Annie Proulx's series of Wyoming Stories, Close Range, in which Brokeback appears as a short story, do just this. The goal is to resist this sense of over-simplification. Her stories crack through the veneer of how people percieve Wyoming and the citizens of the West. They crack that western mindset of machismo and present characters dealing with specific troubles and conflicting truths. They remove the factor of insulation, through choice or trauma. Brokeback, in particular, deals so delicately with a guarded secret of the west [and of course, by extention, this entire country]- that yes, homosexuals exist even in the most barren, isolated, and difficult landscapes in the country, despite our continued attempts to contain and deny it.

Back then, Brokeback was controversial to some [conservatives] because it was rated a lowly R for its, presumed, as they hadn't seen it yet, strong gay sexual content. But what they were really after was a deeply humanizing gay film. Because for them, any attempt to allow humanity into the life of The Other is a reprehensible act of treason, a secularist, propagandist attempt to turn the world queer and into sin. It's not the movie they hate, its the fact that it exists: an effort to turn gays into normal people. This tradition of hatred and exclusion is strong in humanity- and certainly has been in our country.

But Brokeback [yes, Lons, still shorthanding it, if only to spite you] is a particular threat to American hetero identity, because it is a quoteunquote "Western." It seeks to humanize and really emotionally explore that most manly of American worlds: the Cowboy's world.

What is controversial about Brokeback? Well, in the movie, not much. It's a sweet, very sad film.

But to these guys it's controversial because it undermines that most precious hideout of American Masculinity- the west. The Christian-White-Hetero-Rich Man has felt like they've been under fire from that roving gang of Queers through all other metaphoric landscape in the country in the past few years. And now, some Hollywood scum has gone and turned cowboys queer. And if they can do that, then hell. It's all over. Might as well everybody just turns gay and rots in hell. And you don't have any control over it: once you see the movie... you turn to "The Other Side."

Don't believe me?

The Rape of the Marlboro Man, by World Net Daily's own David Kupelain:

"Brokeback Mountain," the controversial "gay cowboy" film that has garnered seven Golden Globe nominations and breathless media reviews – and has now emerged as a front-runner for the Oscars – is a brilliant propaganda film, reportedly causing viewers to change the way they feel about homosexual relationships and same-sex marriage.

And how do the movie-makers pull off such a dazzling feat? Simple. They do it by raping the "Marlboro Man," that revered American symbol of rugged individualism and masculinity.

We all know the Marlboro Man. In "The Marketing of Evil," I show how the Philip Morris Company made marketing history by taking one of the most positive American images of all time – the cowboy – and attaching it to a negative, death-oriented product – cigarettes.

Hit the pause button for a moment so this idea can completely sink in: Cigarette marketers cleverly attached, in the public's mind, two utterly unrelated things: 1) the American cowboy, with all of the powerful feelings that image evokes in us, of independence, self-confidence, wide-open spaces and authentic Americanism, and 2) cigarettes, a stinky, health-destroying waste of money. This legendary advertising campaign targeting men succeeded in transforming market underdog Marlboro (up until then, sold as a women's cigarette with the slogan "Mild as May") into the world's best-selling cigarette.

It was all part of the modern marketing revolution, which meant that, instead of touting a product's actual benefits, marketers instead would psychologically manipulate the public by associating their product with the fulfillment of people's deepest, unconscious needs and desires. (Want to sell liquor? Put a seductive woman in the ad.) Obviously, the marketers could never actually deliver on that promise – but emotional manipulation sure is an effective way to sell a lot of products.

The "Marlboro Man" campaign launched 50 years ago. Today, the powerful cowboy image is being used to sell us on another self-destructive product: homosexual sex and "gay" marriage.

Gonna hit that pause button likes like The K-Man says.

He's establishing the quite interesting point of psychological appeal with advertising. Here, he's pinned the toxicity of the situation onto advertisements. Literally toxic- he's established a link between the masculine psyche and the cowboy, an image which Marlboro exploited greatly.

But he's also operating with a second social toxicity- "'gay' marriage." He literally can't even bring himself to the posibility that those two words would exist side-by-side without quotes around one of them.

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Yes, the talents of Hollywood's finest are brought together in a successful attempt at making us experience Ennis's suffering, supposedly inflicted by a homophobic society. Heath Ledger's performance is brilliant and devastating. We do indeed leave the theater feeling Ennis's pain. Mission accomplished.

Lost in all of this, however, are towering, life-and-death realities concerning sex and morality and the sanctity of marriage and the preciousness of children and the direction of our civilization itself. So please, you moviemakers, how about easing off that tight camera shot of Ennis's suffering and doing a slow pan over the massive wreckage all around him? What about the years of silent anguish and loneliness Alma stoically endures for the sake of keeping her family together, or the terrible betrayal, suffering and tears of the children, bereft of a father? None of this merits more than a brief acknowledgment in "Brokeback Mountain."

What is important to the moviemakers, rather, is that the viewer be made to feel, and feel, and feel again as deeply as possible the exquisitely painful loneliness and heartache of the homosexual cowboys – denied their truest happiness because of an ignorant and homophobic society.

Thus are the Judeo-Christian moral values that formed the very foundation and substance of Western culture for the past three millennia [three millennia...? You mean, "western culture " includes Greek Love?- GS] all swept away on a delicious tide of manufactured emotion. And believe me, skilled directors and actors can manufacture emotion by the truckload. It's what they do for a living.

Co-star Jake Gyllenhaal realized the movie's power to transform audiences in Toronto, where, according to Entertainment magazine, "he was approached by festival-goers proclaiming that their preconceptions had been shattered by the film's insistence on humanizing gay love."

"Brokeback Mountain," said Gyllenhaal, "is that pure place you take someone that's free of judgment. These guys were scared. What they feared was not each other but what was outside of each other. What was so sad was that it didn't have to happen like that." But then, said the article, Gyllenhaal jumped to his feel and exclaimed triumphantly: "I mean, people's minds have been changed. That's amazing."

Changed indeed. And that's the goal. Film is, by its very nature, highly propagandistic. That is, when you read a book, if you detect you're being lied to or manipulated, you can always stop reading, close the book momentarily and say, "Wait just a minute, there's something wrong here!" You can't do that in a film: You're bombarded with sound and images, all expertly crafted to give you selected information and to stimulate certain feelings, and you can't stop the barrage, not in a theater anyway. The visuals and sound and music – and along with them, the underlying agenda of the filmmakers – pursue you relentlessly, overwhelming your emotions and senses.

And when you leave the theater, unless you're really objective to what you've experienced, you've been changed – even if just a little bit.

Cinema is propaganda immersion. Everytime you enter a cinemaplex, you are subjected to a little bit of the ultraviolence- Alex-style- and you have absolutely no choice in the matter. In fact, once the projector turns on, because of the magical, manipulating, and more-often-than-not evil powers of the producers of cinema, you will lose all capability of proper judgement and personality. Only in certain cases has this propagandist's tool been used for good, right, Mr. K?

But understand, o-reader, you lack any capability of judgement. And you are not- indeed, can not- ask the right questions when you see a film. You, my friends, are mindless masses- dolts- who pay for your own toxic immersions in cinema. And you don't know what you're getting into:

Do we understand that Hollywood could easily produce a similar movie to "Brokeback Mountain," only this time glorifying an incest relationship, or even an adult-child sexual relationship? Like "Brokeback," it too would serve to desensitize us to the immoral and destructive reality of what we're seeing, while fervently coaxing us into embracing that which we once rightly shunned.

All the filmmakers would need to do is skillfully make viewers experience the actors' powerful emotions of loneliness and emptiness – juxtaposed with feelings of joy and fulfillment when the two "lovers" are together – to bring us to a new level of "understanding" for any forbidden "love." Alongside this, of course, they would necessarily portray those opposed to this unorthodox "love" as Nazis or thugs. Thus, many of us would let go of our "old-fashioned" biblical ideas of morality in light of what seems like the more imminent and undeniable reality of human love in all its diverse forms.

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Ultimately, propaganda works because it washes over us, overwhelming our senses, confusing us, upsetting or emotionalizing us, and thereby making us doubt what we once knew. Listen to what actor Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays Jack, told the reporter for Entertainment magazine about doing the "love" scenes with Heath Ledger:

"I was super uncomfortable … [but] what made me most courageous was that I realized I had to try to let go of that stereotype I had in my mind, that bit of homophobia, and try for a second to be vulnerable and sensitive. It was f---in' hard, man. I succeeded only for milliseconds."

Gyllenhaal thinks he was "super uncomfortable" while being filmed having simulated homosexual sex because of his own "homophobia." Could it be, rather, that his conflict resulted from putting himself in a position, having agreed to do the film, where he was required to violate his own conscience? As so often happens, he was tricked into pushing past invisible internal barriers – crossing a line he wasn't meant to cross. It's called seduction.

In fact, even co-star Jake Gyllenhall could not avoid this. He had no choice in the matter. He went queer.

Sorry Jake, you're going to hell.

This is how the "marketers of evil" work on all of us. They transform our attitudes by making us feel as though our "super uncomfortable" feelings toward embracing unnatural or corrupt behavior of whatever sort – a discomfort literally put into us by a loving God, for our protection – somehow represent ignorance or bigotry or weakness.

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As I said at the outset, Hollywood has now raped the Marlboro Man. It has taken a revered symbol of America – the cowboy – with all the powerful emotions and associations that are rooted deep down in the pioneering American soul, and grafted onto it a self-destructive lifestyle it wants to force down Americans' throats. The result is a brazen propaganda vehicle designed to replace the reservations most Americans still have toward homosexuality with powerful feelings of sympathy, guilt over past "homophobia" – and ultimately the complete and utter acceptance of homosexuality as equivalent in every way to heterosexuality.

If and when that day comes, America will have totally abandoned its core biblical principles – as well as the Author of those principles. The radical secularists will have gotten their wish, and this nation – like the traditional cowboy characters corrupted in "Brokeback Mountain" – will have stumbled down a sad, self-destructive and ultimately disastrous road.

So there you have it.

Brokeback Mountain is indeed not about star-crossed-lovers, it is not about the overwhelming, confusing, terrifying possibility of a love so powerful that it disrupts everything you know about the world. It is not about a love between two people who, under every social circumstance and code, are prevented from engaging in their love. In Romeo & Juliet, this is possible. [I should point out that in R&J, both characters are way underage, and behaving completely recklessly. I suppose that's fine with Mr. K.]

But in the lesser-known Romeo & Tybalt... No go.

It's interesting that Mr. K then, in his essay "rapes" the Marlboro Man. He spent the entire intorduction of his essay essentially setting up the premise that the Marlboro Man himself "rapes" the Cowboy- that the pyschologically damning practice of advertisement infused the all-powerful masculine image of the cowboy with toxic smoke. The Marlboro Man is the image of toxicity. And suddenly, at the end, he is revered, victimized, lamented.

All because of some emotional gay sex.

But see, it's this one last thriving image- the Cowboy- the Free West, the struggle for Rugged Individuality. All of this has been suddenly, by Mr. K's estimate, turned Queer. And we all were suckers to it, too simple-minded to maintain our composure under great cinematic duress. And once we, the audience, let that imagery get lost, then all of our culture is condemned to distruction.

This, of course, is patently moronic. Our culture is doing just fine.

Mr. K discusses Ennis' neglect of his family- the shambles of his life, and how the film does not cover these topics. I'm not exactly sure what he's talking about. Ennis' life sucks. There is not one person in the film who escapes unscathed from the emotional decisions his character makes. All the devastation in the film comes from the environment of emotional isolation. Had Mr. K really watched the film, instead of looking for the gay-mind-beam, me might have noticed Alma's restricted life; and how she chooses to divorce him and build her family around a responsible, centered man. He might applaud her strength, her wish to build that "central family unit."

But what I'm saying is this: in the film, no action or choice exists without consequences for these characters. And that, in itself, is exactly what makes the film brilliant.

I guess Mr. K lost that. He was too busy wearing his tinfoil gay-beam protecting and munching his Jujubes, wanting desperately to get home to his computer so he could report to the world how close he came to being swallowed up by the propganda of the Evil Other Side, and how heroically he survived to tell the tale.