There is a legendary New Yorker cartoon that shows the view of the “fly-over states” from a Manhattan native's   perspective. The New York City skyline appears   as a shining frontier of civilization mirrored   on the West Coast by San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and Transamerica Pyramid. All the rest of the United States is shown in black. The new film Brokeback Mountain seems to have been created from this point of view . However, this view of the Heartland and especially the South has flaws as deep as canyons.

This film has a script written in part by Larry McMurtry, one of the last individuals able to create financially successful cowboy stories. His television miniseries Lonesome Dove can justifiably be said to have revived the Western for one last ride. This includes Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves and Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven. These films, and that gunslingers were on screen again, are not insignificant. They won Oscars. So on the surface of it, McMurtry's participation would seem a guarantee of box office gold, if anything could be. No matter how gritty the cowpoke, however, he would always marry his favorite whorehouse girl in a church by the end. This is because, in the United States, particularily the South, AKA the Bible Belt, there were actually cowboys, and a character could be what Christians call “an ordinary sinner.” No one could simply reject Judeo-Christian-Islamic values altogether and still be the good guy, though. There are limits to every film genre, and what  the market for that genre will bear is determined largely by its audience.

Brokeback Mountain is described by its stars, Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall, as a love story. There have been Western love stories before, but this one involves two men kissing and having sex with each other. This betrays the attitude toward the “fly-over states” illustrated  in the cartoon I mentioned earlier. Director Ang Lee either does not know that people still gather for Gospel singing in Deep South fast food places nights, or he does not care. Is the cultural history of the everywhere but NYC and “the City” in the U.S. so barren that it's people can be ignored when   making movies?

And the South is far from being culturally barren. Rock, blues, country , jazz, gospel, R & B, soul,   and Janis Joplin were all cultural forces born in the Bible Belt of the South. Funk musicians the Meters and the Neville Brothers were from New Orleans. For all the gothic culture enthusiasts, the horror story was invented by a drawling Southerner by the name of Edgar Allen Poe – as was the detective story. Perhaps the biggest reviver of Gothic literature in modern times is Anne Rice,   whose Interview with the Vampire and the Vampire Lestat were set largely in that Louisiana city. Politically, I will say one name and rest my case: Bill Clinton of Arkansas.

So, you say, Southern culture is bubbling like gumbo. So what? What does that have to do with Brokeback Mountain? Well, the Western story is a Southern form. The South, grounded in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition as it is, will not take kindly to what they will see as the corruption   of their cherished narratives. Christians in Berkeley may see it as no small problem compared to saving the whales, but many Southern Christians who disagreed with George W. Bush on 99% of his politics voted for him to stop just this sort of movie being made. Despite the Californian's proverbial “dumb rednecks,” they aren't so dumb that they missed their opinion being discounted by Hollywood again. And the New Yorker's famous cartoon wasn't wrong about one thing -- the “fly-over states” make up the vast majority of the United States of America.

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