House of Eratosthenes

Alright, there are obviously several things about this kid that are messed up. But one of the things he’s got out of place, is something that a lot of “normal” kids and “normal” adults have busted too. It concerns a certain movie about a couple of gay cowboys.

There’s been this wave of amateur reviews on this gay-cowboy movie, in which one is expected to find it a wonderful movie if one is liberal and to find it a horrible movie if one is conservative. I haven’t joined the parade because I don’t have an opinion on how good of a movie it is. I don’t have an opinion on how good of a movie it is, because I haven’t seen it. And I won’t see it.

I’m not refusing to see it because of my values.

I’m not refusing to see it because I expect that it’s a bad movie.

I’m not refusing to see it because it will gross me out.

I’m not even refusing to see it.

I simply don’t plan to.

I don’t plan to see it because…get ready for this staggeringly complex, philosophically profound decision-making process…here it comes…I’m not gay.

And that, to me, represents such an incredibly simple decision to make, I’m at a complete loss as to understand why any heterosexual person would decide any differently (unless, I suppose, they had some gay friends dragging them to it).

Well, we have lots of straight people paying good money to watch the movie. Is that such a bad thing? I think it probably is, because try as I might I can’t come up with too many reasons to watch it when you’re straight, and aren’t watching it with a gay friend:

1. You wish to broaden your understanding of and compassion for gay people;
2. You want the movie to do well, so that other straight people are forced to understand gay people better;
3. You’re bored;
4. You want to be able to say you saw this movie because the movie is new;
5. You want to be able to say you saw this movie because the movie is controversial;
6. You want to be able to say you saw this movie because the movie is “progressive”;
7. You like Ang Lee’s films, or Jake Gyllenhaal’s films, or Heath Ledger’s films;
8. You heard about Anne Hathaway’s nude scene.

#1 and #7 are somewhat healthy, but there are other ways to achieve those. Come to think of it, there are other, better, cheaper ways to address all eight of these. Unfortunately, I suspect #2 captures most of the ticket revenue from the wallets of straight moviegoers, and #2 is the sickest of the lot.

People just don’t work this way. Repeated exposure to the gay culture, does very little to cultivate sympathy for that culture where it does not previously exist. What it cultivates, in fact, is hostility.

Well, enough of that rant, and back to the subject at hand. Brandon Flyte is not in the news because he’s a straight person who chose to see “Brokeback Mountain”; he’s in the news because he seems to be something of a psychopath. And this was found out about after he, as a straight student, chose to make a movie along the lines of the gay cowboy movie.

The school forwarded to police e-mails threatening to burn down the school and other claims of physical threats.

It started with an English assignment to film a tragedy. Flyte created “Brokeback High,” which told the story of a secretly gay high school athlete forced to live the life everyone expected of him despite it being a lie. After meeting an openly gay student, he eventually admits his homosexuality. The two end up in bed together, shirtless and snuggling. Flyte, who is a heterosexual, played the part of the athlete.

“It’s just something we wanted to do,” Flyte said of the project. “There’s not a lot of straight kids out there making gay movies.”

The assignment, however, forbid sex scenes, nudity and violence. Flyte removed the snuggling scene for the English class and got rave reviews for the film. Several other students also had to remove scenes from their projects. The class voted Flyte best actor.

No, making a gay-athlete movie has very little to do with threatening to burn down a school. (One has strong doubts, after reading the story carefully from beginning to end, that Flyte has anything whatsoever to do with these threats.) There’s a much stronger connection between the arson threat and typing stuff into a web page…and what is it that I’m doing right now?

Except people have been known to put up blog pages that nobody ever actually reads, which is also something I’m doing right now. On the other hand, to make a movie for an English assignment based on a real movie, you have to expect some critical mass among your peers has been exposed to the real movie. And I doubt like hell you’d be voted Best Actor by those peers, if those peers hadn’t seen the real movie.

I doubt like hell that all of the students who’ve seen the real movie, are gay.

Among the straight students who’ve seen the movie, I doubt like hell that very many of them, at all, were motivated by #7 in the list above. Or #8.

No, no, I’m not writing some elaborate treatise about the gay culture trying to “recruit” our straight high school students into becoming gay. I’ll leave that to someone else. My beef, here, is actually the intrusion into the gay culture. Heterosexual high school students, somehow, are coming to the realization that a cultural item — in this case, a love story in a movie — created for the commercial consumption by homosexuals, has some compelling interest for heterosexuals. When, in fact, it doesn’t. They’re coming to that faulty realization on their own, or they’re being coerced into it.

Well, that’s really nothing new. Any time you see a married couple going to a Barbra Streisand concert, you could say there’s a guy being coerced into thinking he’s interested in something that actually has no appeal to him. But that isn’t nearly as offensive. When a man loves his wife, he starts to actually want to “waste time” on things his wife likes, and besides, the decision to buy tickets is a personal decision that applies to that couple alone, impacting nobody else.

This is a prevailing cultural sentiment that says: The time has come for straight people to pretend they’re gay. Why? Maybe the Brokeback Mountain phenomenon is actually “Payback Mountain.” I’m sure a lot of gay people between the ages of sixteen and sixty, have had to pretend they’re straight while going to a James Bond movie, for example, and who knows how many other high-profile films.

Point made. But is payback healthy?

What about the elites dictating to the commoners what the commoners should pretend their sexual preference is? If you’re gay, and you’ve had to pretend you’re straight so you can appreciate straight culture, then obviously this can’t be said to work very well if you’re still gay. Therefore, this “Brokeback Culture” is a huge waste of energy — just for starters. But there are other messages packed into it. Like, we all have some pressing business to get excited about things that other people happen to be excited about.

That is what really rubs me the wrong way. What happens to these high school students if they have gay friends, who went to see Brokeback Mountain and really liked it, and those straight high school students decide not to get excited about the movie and/or to go see it? What, is that some kind of an attack on the gay students now?

That seems to be where our culture is heading now. I remember when I bought my car, new, my mother was still alive. I was telling her, half-jokingly, that one of the things I was most excited about was the spoiler on the back. She turned to me, smiled, and said “if you like it, Honey, that’s all that matters.” There was no mistaking her unstated meaning, at all.

You know what? She’s been dead-and-buried for thirteen years now. The car has 320,000 miles on it. And I don’t think, since that day, I’ve ever heard anyone say that to anyone else: If you like it, that’s all that counts. I don’t think anyone can say that now. THAT, right there, is the bee in my bonnet. We have lost the societal ability to say to each other “I like you, and you like X, and while I don’t like X I’m happy for you that you are happy with X.”

It appears this has been entirely re-written. If Bob likes X, and Bob is friends with Dave, Dave has to like X, even if Bob is gay, it’s a gay movie, and Dave is straight. Nevermind. Dave has to become an X fan, or else Dave is attacking Bob. There is no in-between.

Yes, this is a problem. No, I don’t think it’s connected to school arson. Because even if the arson threat was a real threat, and even if it actually came to pass, that isn’t something that happens all the time.

But for the last several months, it seems I can’t go from one weekend to another weekend without hearing some straight person pretending to be exuberant and thrilled about a gay movie…at least half a dozen times that week.

We’re at war, and a lot of people are unhappy about that. Even those of us who support the war, are supposed to want peace. We’re supposed to be in complete agreement on that desire. For the most part, I think we are. Well, that’s the first step to peace, boys & girls. You like your things; I like mine; they’re different things. This doesn’t make us enemies, and if we’re friends we stay that way.

Are we losing that? I’m afraid we are.

Thing I Know #8. It is hard to get people to argue about private matters, but easy if you can somehow turn them into public matters.

Update: Brandon Flyte’s blog is still up and is still being updated with his comments about the situation.

My own comments, above, stand. Nothing really wrong about straight students making gay movies. Nothing really right about it, either.

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Payback MountainFriday, March 17th, 2006

Payback Mountain
Friday, March 17th, 2006