"They'd Kill Us if They Knew": Transgression and the Western1

Sue Brower

Journal of Film and Video, Volume 62, Number 4, Winter 2010,

pp. 47-57 (Article)

Published by University of Illinois Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jfv/summary/v062/62.4.brower.html

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“They’d Kill Us if They Knew”: Transgression and the Western1
sue brower
a film that touched audiences with its
epic tale set in the West, Ang Lee’s Brokeback
Mountain (2005) tells the story of hidden ho-
mosexual love, beginning in 1963 in the Wyo-
ming wilderness and spanning the next twenty
years. The film’s use of the Western genre in
its setting and iconography intensifies the lov-
ers’ transgression by juxtaposing the mythic
roots of our country and the masculine arche-
type of the cowboy with a taboo love affair—a
combination, as critics have noted, resulting
in a film closer to melodrama than Western
(Kitses “All That”; Osterweil). A smaller film
released in 1993, The Ballad of Little Jo, writ-
ten and directed by Maggie Greenwald, is a
tale set in the West (the old West) that also
features social and sexual transgressions,
including at least two taboo love stories. Both
films also illuminate the lives of marginalized
people. My intention is to explore the filmmak-
ers’ use of the Western genre in telling these
stories and to consider how in each case they
blend the Western with other genres. I hope to
show The Ballad of Little Jo deserves as much
recognition as Brokeback has garnered, or
more, for the former’s critique of gender and
racial stereotypes, its examination of gender-
based assumptions on which the Western is
largely based, and its generic response to the
theme of transgression that results in blend-
ing the Western not with melodrama but with
comedy.
sue brower teaches film and media studies in
the Department of Theater Arts at Portland State
University.
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Problematic Heroes (or, Who’re You
Callin’ a Cowboy?)
Despite an increasingly cynical, media-wise
audience that can spot and often dismiss es-
tablished generic icons, the Western archetype
of the cowboy still possesses power as a sym-
bol of American courage, strength, capability,
and masculinity. The Western figure continues
to inhabit popular culture, from the Marlboro
man to President George W. Bush’s references
to Western mythology (e.g., “we’re gonna
smoke ’em out”) to the recent flurry of Western
films, including Appaloosa (2008) and 3:10 to
Yuma (2007). The Western protagonist’s identi-
fication with masculinity, in contrast to Eastern
femininity, goes unchallenged unless that chal-
lenge becomes the point of characterization.
James Stewart in Destry Rides Again (1939),
for example, is initially presented as less than
a “real man” by his entry into town carrying a
birdcage and a parasol. As Dennis Bingham
points out, what is seen as “‘sissified’ to the
townspeople” proves to be an act of “chivalry”
to a young woman he is assisting (47). In My
Darling Clementine (1946), Wyatt is challenged
by Doc Holliday to “draw,” and Wyatt mildly
declines (“Can’t—not wearing a gun”) without
sacrificing masculine pride because of the well-
established reputation of Wyatt Earp, within
both the film and American culture. The sub-
tlety and irony of these characterizations are
cast aside by the extreme violence of Clint East-
wood’s Western protagonists in Leone’s films of
the 1960s and many of Eastwood’s subsequent
films made with Don Siegel or under his own
47
direction. Eastwood’s (perhaps) final Western,
Unforgiven (1992), offers a stark comment on
the hideous obligations of an individual assum-
ing the role of masculine protector/avenger.
These characters are Western heroes or antihe-
roes, but they are not cowboys.
In films since the 1960s, there has been a
self-conscious use of the term; indeed, “cow-
boy” has taken on a theatrical, artificial, camp,
and/or homosexual connotation. Ara Osterweil
identifies both Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cow-
boys (1967) and John Schlesinger’s Midnight
Cowboy (1969) as precursors to Brokeback
Mountain (39–40).2 “Cowboy” has become a
signifier of an ironic twentieth-century (and now
twenty-first-century) perspective on the genre’s
tradition as it has been commercialized, such as
The Electric Horseman’s (1979) has-been rodeo
champion, repeatedly called a “cowboy,” cor-
nered into selling breakfast cereal, or the term is
trivialized, as with John Travolta’s turn on a me-
chanical bull in Urban Cowboy (1980). In Mid-
night Cowboy the term is literally prostituted.
In their allusions to the Western genre,
Brokeback Mountain and Ballad of Little Jo offer
a host of mythic associations and cultural refer-
ences to the Western and its protagonist. In the
case of Brokeback, the term “cowboy” is used
frequently in the film, whereas Ballad, in keep-
ing with dramatic Western conventions, avoids
the word. Consider the difference in inflection
48
when Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine
introduces himself and his brothers as “cattle-
men” rather than “cowboys.” In her essay
about the adaptation of her short story to the
film of Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx notes
that both of the main characters aspire “to be
cowboys, be part of the Great Western Myth,”
with Jack Twist ( Jake Gyllenhaal) settling for
rodeo “as an expression of cowboy” and Ennis
del Mar (Heath Ledger) toiling away as a mere
ranch hand. In their transformative summer on
the mountain, however, they tend sheep, “ani-
mals most real cowpokes despise”; moreover,
she writes, “the word ‘cowboy’ is often used
derisively in the west by those who do ranch
work” (“Getting Movied” 130). By identifying
with and being identified as “cowboys,” Jack
and Ennis are already out of the mainstream.
In Proulx’s short story, the word “cowboy”
does not appear until nearly the end: Jack
recalls a moment years earlier in his relation-
ship with Ennis, when the two young men had
shared an embrace while they stood, Ennis
holding Jack, rocking him as they gazed into the
fire, lulling Jack into a doze, “until Ennis, dredg-
ing up a rusty but still useable phrase from the
childhood time before his mother died, said,
‘Time to hit the hay, cowboy . . .’” (“Brokeback
Mountain” 22). In this context, “cowboy” has
none of the irony of later uses of the term in
either the film or our recent cultural history. It
Photo 1: Jake Gyllenhaal
(left) and Heath Ledger as
Jack and Ennis in Broke-
back Mountain (2005).
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has, instead, all the affectionate nostalgia of
childhood innocence.
In the screenplay of Brokeback, however,
Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana make much
more use of the term “cowboy” than Proulx
does in her short story, as generic shorthand
(referring to cowboy hats and shirts) but also
as a way to capture the constructed quality of
the two characters. On one level, Ennis and Jack
are rare men of the late twentieth century who
make their livings riding horses and tending
livestock, but on another level, they are not the
archetypes of heterosexual masculinity they
seem; they are masquerading. In an interview,
actor Jake Gyllenhaal discussed the challenge
of “cowboy school,” the training in riding and
roping he underwent to portray Jack Twist:
I’m not really a cowboy, and I think that’s a
really great thing for this part. I learned how
to do the cowboy things, but my struggle with
trying to do it for real is the essence of Jack.
He’s trying really hard. That’s who Jack is to
me. (Brokeback DVD)
In the film, both Jack and Ennis fall short of
being topnotch cowboys. We see it in Jack’s
dogged efforts to succeed in the rodeo and En-
nis’s stunted progress in his career.
Following that first summer on Brokeback
Mountain, the term “cowboy” takes on a sexual
connotation, both straight and gay, in the film.
When Jack approaches a rodeo clown in a bar,
ostensibly to buy him a drink for distracting
the bull he was riding, the man deflects his
approach with “Save your money for your next
entry fee, cowboy” (McMurtry and Ossana
35).3 Lureen (Anne Hathaway), the rodeo bar-
rel rider Jack eventually marries, proves to be
more aggressive than he in their first meeting:
“What are you waiting for, cowboy—a matin’
call?” (40). Several years later, after Ennis and
Alma have divorced, Ennis is almost snagged
by Cassie, who loves to dance: “C’mon cow-
boy, you’re stayin’ on your feet” (78). As both
Jack and Ennis age, references to their status
as “cowboys” become increasingly ironic
in contrast to the truth of their situations.
McMurtry and Ossana’s repeated use of the
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term throughout the screenplay heightens
this irony, reminding us that the story of Jack
and Ennis is not the classic, heroic tale of the
West. After Jack’s death in the film, Ennis visits
Jack’s parents and looks for consolation in his
lover’s boyhood room, finding a little cowboy
figurine—an emblem of boyhood dreams—
before he finds their two shirts hidden away
together. Repeatedly, we see that both men
have struggled to live up to the mythic image of
the western man and found themselves outside
the boundaries of tradition and expectation.
“Cowboy” is never used in Greenwald’s The
Ballad of Little Jo, but much of the film, “based
on a true life” (Ballad), traces Josephine Mon-
aghan’s self-construction as a “Westerner,”
to use Robert Warshow’s term. Heading west
after her Boston family disowns her for having
a child out of wedlock, Josephine is a female
Easterner who decides to protect herself by as-
suming a disguise in men’s clothes—a “simula-
crum cowboy,” as Jim Kitses describes her (“An
Exemplary” 369)—and begins her life as Little
Jo. As played by Suzy Amis, Little Jo’s disguise
may at first seem unbelievable to contempo-
rary spectators, but writer-director Greenwald
explains, “[W]e’re so used to women wearing
jeans and suits and such that we don’t real-
ize the extent to which your outer appearance
dictated what you were accepted as being”
(Modleski 561).
When Little Jo enters the primitive settle-
ment of Ruby City, he/she is almost immedi-
ately challenged as a possible “dude,” which
most critics interpret as “homosexual,” but
which Greenwald has defined as “an upper
class person, dressed fancy, who didn’t have
to work” (personal interview). In one of many
sly gags, then, Little Jo is challenged not as
a man but as the right kind of man, much as
Jack Twist is challenged, as I discuss later.
Many of the ensuing episodes or verses of
this “ballad” turn on Little Jo’s having to pass
another test or acquire another skill of the
Westerner. Like Jack and Ennis, Jo is hired
for the lonely job of watching sheep—in Jo’s
case, over an entire winter. More than Jack
and Ennis, Jo faces isolation, harsh weather,
49
and the threats of wild animals. But unlike
Jack and Ennis—both real men biologically—Jo
in her disguise as a man proves to be an out-
standing Westerner, returning from the moun-
tain in the spring with the flock virtually intact
and sporting a mountain man’s coat of coyote
pelts. This key difference—the issue of the
protagonists’ success or failure as “cowboys”
and Westerners—resonates in the generic
makeup of the two films.
Transgression, Guilt, and Violence
in the Western
The main project of the classic Western was to
dramatize the settling of the West, a story ani-
mated by the figure who embodied both civili-
zation and savagery, engaged in a conflict set
on a territorial border between the two (Schatz
48). Since the days of the classic Westerns, that
terrain, both geographical and cultural, has
also suggested a border dividing not just ter-
ritory but also people who have a “right,” who
“belong,” and those who do not.
In his discussion of My Darling Clementine,
Scott Simmon focuses on the scene in which
Wyatt Earp and his brothers first ride into
Tombstone for a drink and a shave, leaving
youngest brother James at camp. Interrupted in
his shave when a drunken Indian starts wildly
shooting, Wyatt dispenses with Indian Charlie
by hitting him on the head and dragging him
out of the saloon. He hauls the Indian onto his
feet, kicks him in the rear end, and tells him to
“Get out of town and stay out!” For this display
of frontier justice, Wyatt is offered the job of
marshal on the spot. Simmon points out the
film’s treatment of Native Americans extends
to Chihuahua, who is Mexican or Apache or a
combination of both, and is at first tossed into
a horse trough and later told to go back to the
reservation.
As Simmon’s description of Indian Charlie
and Chihuahua and, indeed, the conventional
treatment of minorities in studio-era Westerns
suggest, these characters’ marginal status is
paired with some crime or transgression: Indian
Charlie is drunk and disorderly; Chihuahua
50
helps a gambler cheat at poker, and later she
lies about how she received the necklace,
which becomes proof of both her infidelity to
Doc Holliday and the identity of James Earp’s
killer. The greatest punishment these minor-
ity characters experience, Simmon argues, is
exclusion. He notes the physical transforma-
tion of Tombstone after the scene with Indian
Charlie. The next day, the two-story saloon
Wyatt entered to stop the Indian no longer ex-
ists across the street from the barber shop, and
Wyatt can sit on the long wooden sidewalk,
gazing into open country. Says Simmon, “The
town is literally a different place after the Indian
has been kicked out of it” (238–39). Chihuahua
pays for her more serious crimes by being shot
not by Wyatt, but by the Clanton boy who mur-
dered James. Despite Doc Holliday’s attempt to
save her, Chihuahua dies, ridding Tombstone of
another non-white member of the community,
without Wyatt having to resort to violence.
One way or another, elimination of marginal-
ized characters becomes morally justified and
expected in the course of the typical Western
plot. In The Six-Gun Mystique, John Cawelti
turns to a sociopsychological analysis from the
1950s by Peter Homans. In one passage of Ho-
man’s work, a contemporary reader might find
the Western’s subtext of emotional repression,
homophobia, and misogyny brought into a dif-
ferent light. Homans sees the plot of the West-
ern as “a series of temptations to be resisted
by the hero” by an act of will, but “[w]hen faced
with the embodiment of these temptations,” the
hero becomes justified in violent elimination of
the threat (qtd. in Cawelti 23). As Cawelti points
out, Homans is arguing that the Western thus
permit[s] a legitimated indulgence in vio-
lence while reasserting at the same time
the ‘Puritan’ norm of the primacy of will over
feeling. Therefore, Mr. Homans believes there
is a connection between the popularity of the
Western and the cyclic outbursts of religious
revivalism in the United States. (23)
Based on this argument, the protagonists of
Brokeback Mountain and Ballad of Little Jo are
characters whose transgressive behavior, if
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we allow for any latent homosexual or Oedipal
subtexts, would be seen as the sources of
temptation, and thus, they would be characters
whom the conventional Western hero would be
compelled justifiably to dispatch violently.
The two young men we meet at the begin-
ning of Brokeback would not appear to be good
material for righteous elimination. In fact, the
first suggestion of any behavior outside proper
laws and boundaries comes from their new
boss, Joe Aguirre, who tells them to establish
a base camp on a designated Forest Service
campsite, but “pitch a pup tent on the Q.T. with
the sheep. . . . [D]on’t leave no sign . . .”(3).
As a condition of their job, they have been
asked to violate a law, and Jack complains once
they have begun working on the mountain:
“Aguirre’s got no right makin’ us do somethin’
against the rules” (7). In contrast to Aguirre’s
casual unlawfulness, as the two young men
drink one night around the campfire, the song
Jack sings is a Pentecostal hymn. Ennis asks
what exactly Pentecost is, and Jack, himself
puzzled, finally offers, “It’s when the world
ends and fellas like you and me march off to
hell.” But Ennis replies, “Uh uh, speak for your-
self. You may be a sinner, but I ain’t yet had the
opportunity” (17).
But the subsequent night of quick, urgent
coupling between Jack and Ennis makes them
“sinners” by traditional (“Puritanical” to use
Homans’s term) values. There is no more talk
about the boss’s breaking of rules. In that pas-
sionate summer on Brokeback Mountain, they
end up jeopardizing the flock they were hired to
care for: Jack fails to shoot the coyote that has
killed at least one sheep (Ennis finally kills it
later), and at another point while the two men
are together, Aguirre’s flock gets mixed up with
another. Their behavior is witnessed by their
boss through his field glasses and confirmed
when he checks the flock upon their return.
As author Proulx points out, “livestock work-
ers have a blunt and full understanding of the
sexual behaviors of man and beast. High lone-
some situation, a couple of guys—expediency
sometimes rules and nobody needs to talk
about it and that’s how it is (“Getting Movied”
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131). But Jack and Ennis’s preoccupation with
one another results directly in the dead sheep,
which Ennis discovers with “shame” (McMurtry
and Ossana 20), and the lower count when
they bring the flock back to Aguirre. When Jack
returns the following year to ask for employ-
ment, Aguirre turns him down not merely for
homosexual activity but for failing to do his job:
“you guys wasn’t gettin’ paid to leave the dogs
baby-sit the sheep while you stemmed the
rose” (32). This failure to care for the sheep, to
kill the coyote—in essence, their failure to be
successful cowboys—is paired with Jack and
Ennis’s homosexuality.
Like the marginalized characters of classic
Westerns, the two homosexual characters in
Brokeback are shown to be guilty of something
other than their marginal status, but in an
interesting process of transference typical of
stereotyping (e.g., Indians are drunks), their
marginality—their homosexuality—becomes the
primary reason for punishment. Jack in particular
is repeatedly cast as ineffectual and inept, by
his boss, his wife, his father-in-law, and ulti-
mately his own abusive father, all of whom seem
aware of or suspect Jack’s sexuality. This paired
prejudice is internalized, however, and violence
against homosexuals assumes its own justifica-
tion. When Jack proposes he and Ennis buy a
ranch and live together, Ennis immediately re-
jects the idea: “Bottom line, we’re around each
other and this thing grabs hold of us again in the
wrong place, wrong time, we’re dead” (Broke-
back). He tells the horrific story of being forced
by his father to view the results of a hate crime
committed against one of two men who had
lived together: “They’d took a tire iron to him,
spurred him up, drug him around by his dick till
it pulled off. . . .” It is the terrifying memory of
this violence that prevents Ennis from openly
entering into a relationship with Jack.
Because of their fear of being discovered,
Jack and Ennis eventually are guilty of not just
one transgression but of others as well. Both
marry within a few years after their summer on
Brokeback and become adulterers through their
relationship and, in Jack’s case, other affairs,
both gay and straight. They lie to themselves
51
and to their wives; several years after Ennis and
Alma’s divorce, she finally confronts him with
his deception about the “fishing trips” the two
men had taken for years. In what turns out to
be Ennis and Jack’s final time together, Ennis
confronts Jack about his trips to Mexico, his
rage barely suppressed: “What I don’t know,
all them things I don’t know . . . could get you
killed if I should come to know them. I ain’t
jokin’” (Brokeback). This threat is consistent
with the violence Ennis has exhibited at key
moments throughout the film, such as the beat-
ing he gives two drunks at a family Fourth of
July outing. Ennis’s violence has operated as a
macho smokescreen for his homosexuality but
also manifests as a result of bottled-up rage
and self-loathing.
In the final scene with Jack, then, Ennis
threatens his lover with the brutality he himself
has feared. When Ennis learns of Jack’s death,
Proulx’s story leaves the cause ambiguous—
was it an accident, as Jack’s wife reported to
Ennis on the phone, or a tire-iron beating, as
Ennis feared? The film is clear, however: In a
brilliant scene revealing the toll Jack’s choices
have taken on his wife, down to her chewed
nails and frozen mask of a face, Lureen me-
chanically recites the accidental cause of her
husband’s death, but during her rote narration,
Ang cuts to the beating. A year after Annie
Proulx’s story was published—a story she says
is “of destructive rural homophobia” (“Getting
Movied” 130)—Matthew Shephard was beaten
to death just outside of Laramie, Wyoming,
guilty only of homosexuality.
Transgression that leads to violence marks
several key scenes in Greenwald’s Ballad of
Little Jo as well. First appearing as a solitary
young woman walking west with a valise and
parasol, Josephine Monaghan is victimized by a
traveling peddler who, calling her a vagrant and
implying she is a prostitute, feels morally justi-
fied in selling her to two horsemen in uniform.
He has her read from The Scarlet Letter just
before the men appear to collect on their “justi-
fied” bargain. In terror, she escapes from them,
but when she wanders, wet and bedraggled,
into a shop to buy fresh clothes, the female
52
shopkeeper also passes judgment as Jose-
phine turns to the stacks of men’s ready-made
pants and shirts. “It’s against the law to dress
improper to your sex,” says the shopkeeper
with narrowed eyes. Nevertheless, in a dressing
room mirror, Josephine watches herself strip
off layers of feminine adornment and confine-
ment. This scene is intercut with the scene of
her seduction and the subsequent rejection by
the family patriarch of her and her “bastard.” In
the dressing room, we see her slash her cheek,
which will heal into a scar that becomes part
of her gendered smokescreen—men will notice
the scar, not the woman beneath it.
In the next sequence we see a lone figure on
a horse; the slight figure rides into Ruby City
and speaks to a couple of the locals, who ad-
dress the newcomer as “kid.” This newcomer
is menaced by men in the saloon for possible
“dude” status. Like Indian Charlie in Tomb-
stone, the last “dude” was run out of Ruby
City, in this case for wearing striped socks. Our
protagonist is forced at gunpoint to remove his/
her boot to reveal a plain sock. Here, as Ennis
did in Brokeback, Little Jo Monaghan protects
her secret with aggression. In this instance, it
is merely a verbal retort concerning “dudes”
(“They’ve got as much right to be here as you
do, Mister”), but increasingly, her challenges
will be backed up with a gun.
Indeed, much of the central part of Ballad,
which is closest to the conventional Western in
plot and character development, focuses on Lit-
tle Jo’s education as a Westerner, including her
growing proficiency with a gun and willingness
to use it. Tracing Jo’s progress as a sheepherder
in a classic montage of the greenhorn’s self-
training, we see Little Jo become a good shot to
protect the sheep, resulting in both the fur coat
and a successful return with the flock. Jo does
not use her gun against another person until
her confrontation with Percy (Ian McKellen),
the older, seemingly more “civilized” citizen of
Ruby City who had acted as a mentor. This rela-
tionship had changed when a deaf-mute whore
came to town and Percy slashed the whore’s
cheek in a drunken rage. This violence (an echo
of the violence Josephine, also called “whore,”
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did to herself to escape worse) precipitated Jo’s
taking the sheep-tending job—self-imposed
isolation, similar to Ennis’s toward the end
of Brokeback. When Jo returns to town in the
spring, Percy has read a letter that came for
Jo over the winter, and he knows all of Jo’s se-
crets: “You made a fool of me, Josephine.” He
calls her a whore, and the attempted rape that
follows, in a sharply edited onslaught of ugly
close-ups and overturned furniture, is halted
when Jo draws her gun. Percy agrees to leave
town and keep her secret, for a price. He taunts
her, saying, “They wonder about you. They’ll
never forgive you,” but swears he will keep his
word. Jo makes an oath of her own—“I’ll find
you and kill you”—but she lets the hammer
click on an empty gun.
Years later, when Little Jo rides into town,
now from her own ranch, she glimpses the
top-hatted president of the Western Cattle Com-
pany (a dude for sure) and then stops when
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she sees someone harassed and threatened—a
Chinese railroad worker, being passed among
a jeering crowd of men, with a noose around
his neck. The ringleader of this mock lynching
is Frank Badger, the same man who had been
most concerned about Jo’s socks many years
before. Here the Chinese man’s transgression
may sound especially familiar today: he is a
foreigner accused of taking white men’s jobs.4
Little Jo replies, “He’s tryin’ to eat,” but Badger
persists in the harassment and humiliation of
“Tinman” Wong until Jo draws her gun.
Transgression, Melodrama, and Comedy
And here’s where The Ballad of Little Jo returns
to a tone first struck in the “dude” scene early
in the film. As in the earlier scene, there is a
threat of violence, but with the chief perpetrator
played by Western character actor Bo Hopkins,
there is also a comic undercurrent. The dia-
Photo 2: Suzy Amis as
Josephine “Jo” Monaghan
in The Ballad of Little Jo
(1993).
53
logue between Badger and Little Jo deals not
just with the issue of a person of color being in
Ruby City, but with gender-laden issues as well.
When Frank asks, “Don’t you ever have any
fun?” Jo replies, “[We] don’t agree on what’s
fun. . . .” Further into the scene, the dialogue
becomes even more personal as Badger tries to
persuade Jo to hire the Chinese man as a cook.
jo: I don’t need a cook.
frank: It’s nice havin’ a hot meal ready when
you get home.
jo: My cookin’s fine.
frank: Too lonely out there. You need com-
pany.
jo: I don’t want company.
frank: You’ll go crazy out there. I’ve seen it
happen to men. And it worries me.
jo: Who asked you to worry about me?
frank: I can’t help it. (Ballad)
This exchange, despite the reciprocal threat
of violence, with Little Jo’s gun still drawn on
Frank Badger and Frank’s knife at Tinman’s
throat, suggests at the very least Frank’s pro-
tective feelings toward the “boy.” Because we
know the truth about Jo, however, the dialogue
edges into another generic territory altogether.
To director Maggie Greenwald, “An underlying
theme in the movie is: Frank in love with Jo.”
She sees Badger’s relationship with his wife as
“more like business partners . . . They had chil-
dren, but they didn’t make love because they
were in love. The real intimacy [for Frank] is with
his friends. Jo is his true love, based on a soul-
ful friendship” (personal interview). Although
no romance will bloom openly between Frank
and Jo, they remain close until the film’s end.
The humor in part comes from the gender rever-
sal that has the man expressing feelings of car-
ing and concern, while the character we know
to be female remains tight-lipped and stoic.
The joke is at Badger’s expense, given that the
macho pose he has maintained throughout the
film is undercut by feelings he “can’t help” hav-
ing for what appears to be a young man.
In her study of women’s genres, Kathleen
Rowe has identified melodrama and romantic
54
comedy as two genres associated with women’s
stories, dealing with similar issues: complica-
tions in romance and family. Melodrama, Rowe
says, presents a tragic, suffering, (usually)
female hero, positioning the spectator as pow-
erless to alter the unfolding tragedy, whereas
romantic comedy offers a resistant, rebellious
female hero: “Making fun of and out of inflated
and self-deluded notions of heroic masculinity,
romantic comedy is often structured by gender
inversion, a disruption of the social hierarchy of
male over female. . . .” Melodrama is the trag-
edy of the individual; romantic comedy leads to
a new, utopian community (41).
With Rowe, we turn to Robin Wood, who
considers it an error to “treat the genres as
discrete,” arguing instead for an approach that
would recognize genres as “different strategies
for dealing with the same ideological tensions”
(62). Ballad and Brokeback, looking like West-
erns and similarly focusing on taboo relation-
ships, employ different secondary genres with
profound ideological import. Jim Kitses cites
Brokeback’s “sophisticated play with Western
conventions” (“All That” 23), but he quotes Ang
Lee as saying the film “has very little to do with
the Western genre” (24), and Kitses ultimately
concludes, “The expansive images from the
film’s early scenes . . . shrink to the dimen-
sions of crowded kitchens, closets, trailers, and
window-framed views” (26). Thus, Kitses sug-
gests (as does Osterweil) that the film “transi-
tions into melodrama” (27). He compares Ennis
del Mar with the tragic Kyle Hadley of Douglas
Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956).
Interestingly, The Ballad of Little Jo, despite
its gender-bending female protagonist, follows
more closely the typical Western plot and char-
acterizations as well as the Western’s visual
conventions. As Little Jo faces Frank Badger
with her pistol drawn, she is taking up the
Westerner’s fight to bring civilization to Ruby
City—a more enlightened civilization than in
Clementine because she is acting on a principle
of inclusion rather than exclusion.5 But from
this point on in the film, Little Jo’s Western tra-
jectory will be intertwined with romance and, at
times, comedy of a special sort.
journal of film and video 62. 4  /  winter 2010
©2010 by the board of trustee s of the universit y of illinois
 Little Jo’s new domestic servant, of course,
quickly discovers the true sex of his employer,
first in a tense scene in the cabin after supper
when Jo, contentedly cleaning her gun, begins
humming in a distinctly feminine register and
Tinman notices. Again in a harshness similar
to Ennis’s, Jo banishes Tinman from the cabin
into a driving rain. The next day, while the com-
petent Jo helps the physically weaker Tinman
build a shelter, she nearly falls from the lad-
der, and he catches her, his hand on her rear
end: “You’re no Mister Jo,” he says, and their
relationship turns to deep friendship and love.
Whereas Frank Badger provides the comedy
and a hint of homosexual attraction, Tinman
provides real intimacy, sensuality, and a life-
long partnership for Jo. Alone in the wilderness
like Jack and Ennis, Jo and Tinman act on for-
bidden desire, but unlike the Brokeback lovers,
they are able to create a utopian world in the
old West.
Greenwald says of the Tinman character,
“Who in that landscape would be able to love
Jo? . . . Someone who was her complement.
Someone marginalized” (guest lecture). In
Tania Modleski’s interview with Greenwald, the
director describes the Western’s stereotype
of Asian men as asexual (363), which would
have made the doubly transgressive romance
between Jo and Tinman unnoticeable to others
around them (Greenwald, personal interview).
But eventually, they are forced to ponder the
danger created by their transgression. After a
surprise visit from Badger, Jo worries, “How
long do you think it would take him to figure
out about me? . . . Little Jo Monaghan turns out
to be a woman, and she’s lovers with an ailing
Chinaman?”—a beat—“They’d kill us.” Tinman
answers, “Unquestionably. Brutally” (Ballad).
This new threat of violence parallels actual
violence perpetrated against the immigrant
family Jo had befriended years earlier. Their
murder by masked men of the Cattle Company
demands retribution but temporarily robs Jo of
her courage. Overwhelmed by the power of the
Cattle Company, she prepares to sell her ranch
to the owner, but a glimpse of his stuffy wife
and repressed child, coinciding with Tinman’s
journal of film and video 62. 4  /  winter 2010
©2010 by the board of trustee s of the universit y of illinois
recovery from grave illness, leads Jo to the
decision to stay and fight the Cattle Company.
In the climax of the Western plot, Badger takes
a shot at the company’s masked men and is
wounded; Jo ends up shooting all three. After
the last shot, the camera circles from behind
the classic Westerner to Jo’s face, in tears. The
scene may be read as indicating Jo is “only a
woman” after all, but Greenwald is showing
instead the emotional toll of even righteous
violence on the perpetrator—something the
male Westerner is never allowed to reveal. Just
as Frank Badger’s concern for Jo opens up the
emotional and romantic implications of men’s
relationships in the West, this is the moment
when the trope of the female Westerner opens
up the human (not male or female) implications
of the Western myth.
Ideologically speaking, both Brokeback and
Ballad address issues of gender, especially
masculinity, as the Western has tradition-
ally displayed and exploited it. As a blend of
Western and melodrama, Brokeback links its
exploration of gender with sexuality and the
failure of its characters to live up to gender-
bound expectations and the tragedy resulting
from their transgressions as homosexuals. Bal-
lad was condemned by some lesbian critics for
not covering similar territory; critics including
B. Ruby Rich and Karen Backstein argued Little
Jo’s cross-dressing should be linked with trans-
gressive sexuality as well (cited in Modleski;
Kitses, “An Exemplary”). Director Greenwald
has said explicitly that she intended the film
to be about gender, not sexuality (Modleski
358), but the film is clearly about both gender
and sexuality as well as race (Kitses, “An Exem-
plary” 371–73). Although Ballad is by no means
pure comedy—Jo’s sorrow over having to live
without her child is a melodramatic theme—its
challenges of gender roles in the film’s grow-
ing context of heterosexual romance gives this
Western ultimately a comic inflection. As Rowe
has suggested, the spectators of melodrama
are positioned to passively accept the Law
of the Father and its tragic implications; the
spectators of comedy, however, are positioned
as antiauthoritarian “subjects of a laughter
55
that expresses resistance, solidarity and joy”
(41). Surely Jo and Tinman’s relationship, in all
its sensual complicity (opium-smoking in bed
beneath the coyote-fur covers), demonstrates
joyful subversion of traditional Western expec-
tations.
Epilogues of the two films confirm their ge-
neric tendencies. The end of Brokeback finds
Ennis some years after Jack’s death, living the
existence of a hermit to avoid his lover’s fate.
The visit from his grown daughter to announce
her upcoming marriage underscores all that
he has been denied, all that he has suffered.
When his daughter leaves, he is alone again
with the two shirts and the postcard of the
mountain. In keeping with melodrama, his
transgression, guilt, and suffering have brought
Ennis to this lonely, tragic end.
The Ballad of Little Jo also moves years for-
ward to a time after Tinman has passed away,
and an elderly Little Jo is discovered sick in
bed by Badger, who (lovingly) tucks Jo into a
wagon to go to the doctor. But Jo is dead by
the time Badger reaches town, and he orders
“the best funeral ever” for his friend. When the
undertaker announces Little Jo was a woman,
and townspeople go to see for themselves,
their faces are seen almost from the body’s
( Jo’s) point of view. Each face registers surprise
and amazement, except that of the one woman
present, who breaks into laughter over the
joke that only she—and Jo, whose dead face is
shown as the woman’s laughter continues—
can fully appreciate.6 While the men of the
town go through the comic business of posing
the body on a horse for a photo, we see Frank
Badger ransack Jo’s home, in rage or grief or
both, discovering the old photo of Josephine as
a Boston debutant. Here we see the liberating,
comic potential of transgression in the Western.
Both photos of Little Jo, printed side by side in
the local newspaper, are the film’s last laugh.
notes
1. This article is a revised, expanded version of
a paper presented at the 2007 UFVA Conference in
Denton, Texas.
2. Osterweil suggests that the Schlesinger film
56
comes closer to Brokeback in its incorporation of
melodrama than Warhol’s parody of the Western that
“mocked the taboo against homosexuality” (39–40).
3. For convenience, lines of dialogue from Broke-
back Mountain are cited by page numbers in the pub-
lished screenplay, unless the dialogue is different in
the film.
4. This is another scene with historic basis. The Chi-
nese Exclusion Act of 1882 made Chinese immigration
to the United States illegal in order to prevent further
competition with whites in the workforce. See http://
www.asian-nation.org/racism.shtml.
5. In “Introduction: Post-Modernism and the West-
ern,” in The Western Reader, Kitses celebrates The
Ballad of Little Jo as one of two postmodern Westerns
(Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man being the other), citing
inclusion as one of the hallmarks of these new films
based on the old genre. See also his wonderful analy-
sis of Ballad, “An Exemplary Post-Modern Western:
The Ballad of Little Jo,” in The Western Reader as well.
6. I am indebted to my colleague, William Tate, for
his comments on this scene.
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