I tweaked Krishnan Guru Murphy for this tweet:
Just did Clegg. Asked him if he saw himself as Jake or Heath in the Brokeback Coalition – he couldn’t remember the detail of the film.
I commented:
Seriously, @krishgm, you asked Clegg if he was the top or bottom in his relationship with Cameron? Bravo. {slow clap}
Krishan replied:
I think you’re missing point. it isn’t about top or bottom. one lived – the other died.
To which I responded:
Do you think that’s what David Davis meant when he (allegedly) made his comments?
I don’t doubt Krishnan’s personal interpretation, but I’m really not sure that his reading of Brokeback Mountain resembles Davis’ – or that of the “senior Tory” whose comments Davis was allegedly repeating.
Think of it like this. David Davis is speaking candidly in a bar and making jokes. Is he a) making a joke about the very end of the gay cowboy film Brokeback Mountain or b) making a joke about two men in an heartfelt but awkward (sexual) relationship with each other? Or is it the far more likely c) a much, much cheaper gag about close male relationships being, ultimately, snort, snigger, about bumming?
I’m not sure how you get to claim option a) without a rather selective reading of both Ang Lee’s film and Annie Proulx’s short story. Both recount a relationship over the course of twenty years, separate lives marked by brief liaisons. To reduce the story to Jack’s death is to miss the point of the narrative: both the film and story are concerned with the struggle of the relationship, not its end point.
And if we’re going to focus on the death, the film provides us with contradictory accounts: we’re told Jack dies in an accident but shown him being beaten to death. What kind of political metaphor do we want to draw from an episode of possible gay-bashing? Are the “senior” Tories going to follow Clegg out of a bar one night and show him how they really feel?
Actually, scratch all that.
Choose between these two options: a) that casual, stupid comments made by a Tory can reasonably be read within the narrative structure of a neo-western short story that explores queer identity in rural settings or b) that this is a slow news weekend where journalists try to turn cheap sniping into an actual story?
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