Lee wanted to avoid the two most common types of normalization of queer stories: universalizing and particularizing, as they are described in Brenda Cooper and Edward Paese’s article Framing Brokeback Mountain. This scene isn’t just a narration but is shown in a flashback, making the violence and queer connection in Ennis’ life register deeply for the viewer-this happens again when, after getting word of Jack’s death, Ennis imagines his lover being similarly brutally murdered. For Ennis, queerness is inherently tied to violence he tells Jack about a childhood experience where his father takes him and his brother to witness the murdered body of a neighboring rancher, who was rumored to be in a gay couple, tortured and killed for that reason. The sex scene is shocking for its violence (the viewer, quickly wonders if this is going to be a rape scene before realizing Jack Twist is consenting to the rough sex), but the story of Brokeback Mountain is a story of love in the face of violence. In his interview On The Geneaology of Ethics, Foucault explains that difference between friendship and a sexual relationship is that “Friendship is Reciprocal, and sexual relationships are not reciprocal: in sexual relations, you can penetrate or you are penetrated.” Lee shows us the penetration immediately, there is no playfulness or shared intimacy in it, it is instantaneous and to the point in showing us who is penetrating and who is getting penetrated.
The arguments from both sides (yes, it’s real cowboy sex, or no, it’s too hardcore to be realistic) are heated, but one user sums up the consensus succinctly: “If you can’t put up with a little shit, you have no business being gay.” As filmmaker Annelise Ogaard said in a recent tweet, “Lee meant to confront his audience with the realities of gay sex, not only refusing to sanitize it, but exaggerating the stuff straight people find abject.” One user even raises the possibility that Jack did douche, he hid behind some bushes or something with a bottle of Summer’s Eve, we just didn’t see that scene, as movies never show the prep work it takes to have anal! With… beans?) Other points are raised: perhaps Jack had been stretching the area, or perhaps Jack was blessed that night in the fact that Ennis has a very petite penis. Space is given to how long it would have taken Jake Gyllenhaal's character to have had a BM after eating the beans, whether or not his character had IBS, the possibility that Jack had pre-lubed (but with what did he lube, one longs to ask. No foreplay! No lube! A 2014 thread on a forum called Data Lounge called “I find the buttfucking scene from Brokeback Mountain unconvincing” begins “Seriously, they fucked after they had beans for dinner? I saw no evidence that either of them douched their asses first.” With nearly a hundred comments, the thread goes on to discuss the scene and debate the claim.
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The movie doesn’t have many sex scenes and this one comes as a shock to the viewer.
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Ennis wakes up confused and bolts upright, but Jack insists, hugging him and kissing him briefly before he unbuttons his pants and then suddenly, Jack bends over and, braver than the marines with an ass full of beans, allows Ennis to penetrate him, using only a little spit. It’s in this scene that Jack reaches over and puts Ennis’ arm around himself. When Ennis falls asleep by the fire, Jack wakes up at Ennis’ shivering and tells him to get in the tent. “I think that’s the most I’ve ever said,” says Ennis as the two seem to relax into each other’s company, drinking whiskey. “That’s the most I’ve heard you say in weeks,” says Jack when, over a campfire Ennis begins to open up about his dead parents and his life. Their job is a solitary one, and they’ll be there for months, sleeping in a tent, their only point of outside contact being a once-a-week drop of provisions (mostly beans.) All they have is each other, and the first thirty minutes of the film is a quiet pastoral build to very sudden sex. The two farmhands, their boss informs them, are going to stay up in the mountains.