ABSTRACT
Queering the Western Ang Lee has made two Westerns, Ride with the Devil (1999) and Brokeback Mountain (2005), which may best be thought of as atypical works in the genre. Although seen to be very American, on the surface, they exude an uncharacteristic feeling of having been made from an outsider’s perspective which nevertheless engage very deeply with American history and contemporary society. At best, one can say that Lee is genuinely bicultural, well versed in both American and Chinese cultures. He is able to successfully immerse himself in American mores and tell stories that are effectively home-grown, from the American point of view. Ride with the Devil is a Civil War Western, told from the perspective of young Southerners. It was a box-office flop and a film that remains understudied and underappreciated. Brokeback Mountain is about two cowboys in Wyoming who fall in love while doing a job sheepherding in the mountain of the title and they speak in a dialectical Western tongue which is barely legible to my non-American ears. One presumes that only Americans, then, would really fully understand and appreciate these films. Brokeback Mountain was a box-office success and has generally been praised as a landmark work for treating the subject of homosexuality in the context of the American West. This chapter will focus on this work but it will also briefly consider Ride with the Devil within the purview of this book’s emphasis on Westerns. It will view both films as being infused with an essence that is Eastern, whether consciously or unconsciously. I will call this a ‘queering process’. Depending on one’s perspective, Lee’s American films are queer because they are so American, or they are queer because they have Eastern substance in them.
