MARGINALIA

By Paul Reidinger

paulr@sfbg.com

If Brokeback Mountain had been a porn film – and certainly it has all the makings, from a pair of fuckable stars to a setting of wild beauty, with a campfire, a tent, and some whiskey thrown in to aid sexual ignition, not to mention a title just begging to be adjusted – I doubt I would have caught myself glancing at my watch quite so often while the mournful guitar strummed and the minutes rolled by, like mile markers on some remorselessly straight road across one of those illimitable flat states in the middle, the red belly, of the US of A.

But despite Jake Gyllenhaal's voluptuous lips and moony eyes and the loud clanking of belt buckles as swelling cowboy crotches achieve a few close encounters, the movie isn't bold enough to be a porn film. It is, instead, a high-country romance, a brief interval of youthful erotic release that seizes up into years of thwartedness. The pair cannot be together, therefore they never truly come to know each other, therefore they obsess about their arrestedness – without recognizing it for what it is – until one of them dies. They are, in a sense, the opposites of Dorian Gray, who remained unnaturally young while his portrait moldered in the closet; the love cowboys' faces grow wrinkly with middle age, but they remain eighth-graders at heart.

Is it rude to note that, for all the media palaver about how Brokeback isn't a gay movie but a transcendent love story, it is in fact not just a gay movie – with a plot driven by coarse homophobia – but a retrograde one whose appeal to the great hetero majority has more than a little to do, one cannot help suspecting, with its finale of misery for the homo protagonists? The queers suffer and die, we weep for them, poor things, as we did at the end of Philadelphia, because we are fabulous empathetic broad-minded liberal straight people, and we nod off at night safe in the certainty that all's well that ends well – for heterosexuals. Happiness is being heterosexual: Isn't this bit of wisdom on a bumper sticker somewhere, perhaps on a dusty old pickup truck wending across Wyoming?

If only life were so simple. We would probably have much less divorce, among other things, at least in the no-gay-marriage states. But happiness turns out to be a slippery customer for many of us, regardless of affectional stripe: an ideal, an ephemeron, a false god. The word itself suggests to me the empty smiles of the childishly simple or the heavily medicated, and I tend to avoid it in favor of satisfaction, with its connotation of sustained engagement with the difficult but rewarding world. Nonetheless, the term turns up in the title of Jonathan Haidt's formidably learned new book, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (Basic, $26), which has more to say about the pleasures and perils, the truths, of being alive than any book I've read in a long time.

Much of the force of The Happiness Hypothesis has to do with the book's threshold recognition that the countless generations of people who came before us were not ignorant wretches stumbling about in darkness but had their share of seers and solons, wise people who perceived, in various ways across various cultures, that to be successfully human means finding ways to accept, even to thrive on, our divided destiny as bipedal animals subject to primitive needs, injuries, and illnesses and as ultrasocial, self-conscious creatures with a sense of the infinite and the divine. The greatest human understandings and wisdoms have been dearly paid for through the centuries, and they are our inheritance and guide, not trifles to be tossed aside in the arrogant certainty that the dead have nothing to teach us, we who have Google and iPods and frequent-flyer miles for a holiday in Rio.

Americans tend to view the past with irritation: We are a forward-looking people, always eager for the next new thing. Tomorrow is another day, as a great American literary heroine once put it. And – the implied corollary – yesterday is for losers. Yet time is the great distillery, the boiler-away of the superfluous and transitory in all our yesterdays, and since human well-being has always been a central concern of the human enterprise, it is not surprising that the elements of that well-being – of satisfaction, of happiness – have been distilled into succinctly statable form.

"People need love, work, and a connection to something larger," Haidt (a psychology professor at the University of Virginia) succinctly states, with an important qualification: By love he does not mean "passionate love that never fades" – this is the incendiary phenomenon mistaken for love in Brokeback Mountain; Haidt calls it a "modern myth" – but an intertwining of lives, the bond that develops as two people "begin to rely upon, care for, and trust each other." True love, then, is not found but built, as some wise person once said, or should have; "love is patient and kind," in the words of the Apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 13:4), whom one supposes was neither but nonetheless knew whereof he spoke, whether telling his truths on a mountain or somewhere else.