I hope you'll indulge me as I continue to work through my grief. My counselor told me last fall that grief never really goes away, although it (usually) gets easier to bear after a while. Now that I think about it, you wouldn't really want it to go away entirely, because that would mean forgetting about the people you lost.

So as you can probably imagine, Heath Ledger is much on my mind lately, what with the anniversary and the movie awards season and the year-end retrospectives on people who have died in 2008.

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At long last, I went to see The Dark Knight last night. I was going to wait until it came to the discount theater, but I decided to splurge because for some reason (probably various reasons) I've been having dreams about it, like this one I had in August, but didn't make public at first because it felt a little too personal at the time. Then Saturday night/Sunday morning I had at least 3 distinct dreams about it, and they all had to do with Heath Ledger playing the Joker. The one I remember most was particularly upsetting because in it I was involved with the making of the movie, and I had prior knowledge that Heath was going to die, but couldn't tell him or anyone (although I think some other people knew anyway) because it would tear apart the fabric of the space/time continuum.

So I realized that the cure for having dreams about Heath Ledger playing the Joker was to go and actually watch him play the Joker, but now I wonder if maybe the cure is not worse than the disease, because now I'm having dreams about just the Joker, which has the potential to be even more upsetting since the Joker is, like, evil personified; I believe the MST3k cast refers to such characters and images as "nightmare fuel." As it turns out, though the Joker (just the character) did appear in my dreams last night, I was surprised and grateful to find on waking that he turned out to be a benign presence (not a benevolent presence, you understand, but temporarily refraining from killing and maiming and otherwise torturing people).

So as to the movie itself, it was very good. In the first place, it was head and shoulder above Batman Begins, which was a very good movie in its own right; its main weakness, if it was indeed a weakness, was that it was an origin story, even the best of which get bogged down by their expository nature (in my opinion). And I think that a strength of The Dark Knight is that it doesn't concern itself with the Joker's origin; the Joker just is. So it was a good movie: suspenseful, compelling, even gripping. But even though a movie is good, that doesn't necessarily mean that it is enjoyable, and I found this to be true of The Dark Knight.

( On Heath Ledger as the Joker--With Spoilers )

Oh yeah, and there were some other people in the movie too. ( On the rest of the cast and some miscellaneous comments, With Some Spoilers )

All in all, it was a good movie that had a certain resonance for me, and I'm glad I saw it once, and I'm grateful to Heath for bringing me to it, because I probably would not have seen it but for the fact that he was in it, but I don't know if I ever want to see it again.

Oh yeah, in related news, The Dark Knight is currently number 3 on IMDb's top 250, and The Shawshank Redemption is number 1! Hooray! Sadly, Brokeback Mountain is not currently on the list.

When I first heard that he'd passed away, after the shock wore off and the grieving set in, my thought was "When does the hurting stop?" I'd experienced grief before, of course, but never grief quite like that. I had lost people that I care about before, but only after prolonged illness, in which case there's always an element of relief that the person's suffering is over. I had known people my age or close to it who have died, but no one who had been meaningful in my life, or who had left "footprints on my heart", as someone unknown to me at the moment has eloquently put it. It still amazes me that the death of someone whom I'd never even met (and of whose films I've seen comparatively few) would make the world seem so much emptier, and would leave such a gaping hole in my heart.

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Heath, you've left behind many people who love you and miss you. You gave so much of yourself...you gave us so much...and you had so much more to give.

I'm still grieving over Heath Ledger's death. As I've been working through my grief over the last couple of days, I couldn't help thinking about when Brokeback Mountain came out and people were making all those jokes about it and parodies of it; many in questionable taste and some in undeniably poor taste. As I remembered that time I thought to myself, "I hope we don't have to endure people making tacky 'I-wish-I-knew-how-to-quit-you' jokes about Heath Ledger's death, because I think that would be more than I could bear." I figured they must exist, but so far most of the reactions I've seen have been very kind.

But then, just when I was in danger of having renewed faith in humanity, I visited IMDb.com (as I do on a nearly daily basis) and I saw this item; to summarize, a Fox News Radio commentator named John Gibson made cruel jokes about Heath Ledger and his involvement in Brokeback Mountain mere hours after his death, and refused to apologize for them the next day. Insensitivity from Fox News? I'm shocked! Incidentally, the tagline for this John Gibson's radio program is "The Real Deal...even if it hurts". I'm not making this up. "Especially if it hurts" would seem to be more fitting, and "real deal" is apparently a subjective term, in that the "real deal" seems to consist of whatever this John Gibson happens to think, even if it's at complete odds with reality.

There are no words for how angry and hurt and ... sickened I am about this. This John Gibson is a so-called "journalist", and not only does he make wild, unfounded, irresponsible speculations about the circumstances surrounding Heath Ledger's death and casts aspersions upon his character, but he makes stupid, tasteless, immature, and hurtful jokes about this one movie that he happened not to like. Gibson's entitled to an opinion about Brokeback Mountain, and has the right and privilege to express that opinion as he sees fit. But in the name of all that is decent, Heath Ledger was a human being and he deserves respect. He had family and friends who loved him and who are going through unimaginable pain and grief (and, I might add, bearing their pain and grief with remarkable grace and dignity) and they deserve respect too. Apart from the rudeness and inappropriateness of speaking ill of the dead, what kind of a coward makes jokes at the expense of a man who can't even defend himself? The unabashedly hateful things John Gibson said are like a defilement of the body by words, the verbal equivalent of what the lynch gang did to the character of Earl in Brokeback Mountain.

Once I spent a whole week analyzing Brokeback Mountain in depth, which included examining the parallels between the plot of Brokeback Mountain and the events leading to and following the murder of Matthew Shepard. And while I saw some similarities between Matthew Shepard and the characters played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in that movie, until now I never saw nor expected to see any parallels between Matthew Shepard and Heath Ledger. No one committed an act of violence against Heath Ledger, but these "jokes" that Gibson made at his expense are not jokes at all, but what Father Roger Schmit, in The Laramie Project, calls, "the seeds of violence." When I read about the seeds of violence that this so-called "journalist" had sown, I was reminded of this moment from The Laramie Project in which Rulon Stacey, the CEO of the hospital where Matthew Shepard was treated after his beating, recalls the press conference in which he announced Matthew Shepard's death. He ended the press conference with a statement from Matthew's mother, "go home, give your kids a hug, and don't let a day go by without telling them that you love them":

And--I don't know how I let that happen--I lost it on national television [...] in a moment of complete brain-deadness, while I was out there reading that statement I thought about my own four daughters--and go home hug your kids--(He begins to cry) and oh, she doesn't have her kid anymore.
[...]
and then we started to get people sending us e-mails and letters. And most of them were just generally very kind. But I did get this one. This guy wrote me and said, "Do you cry like a baby on TV for all your patients or just the faggots?" [...] I guess I didn't understand the magnitude with which some people hate.

Well, Heath Ledger's parents don't have their son anymore, and Matilda Rose Ledger doesn't have her father anymore, but I hope someday she understands how brave her father was to take on the role of Ennis Del Mar, and take a stand in the face of such deep-rooted, irrational, but often sublimated hatred. I hope she will be proud of him and his legacy.

I'm sure you've heard by now that Heath Ledger died. I just found out this morning; I have been in a state of shock all day. My heart is broken.

Heath Ledger was, in my opinion, the greatest male screen actor under the age of 30. I derive some comfort from the fact his brief time here was well-spent, yet I mourn the movies he will never get to make. We have lost a great actor and a good man.

I, of course, never had the opportunity to meet him personally, but his role in Brokeback Mountain earned him a special place in my heart. There is a sort of indescribable kinship among those of us raised between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains, and by his portrayal of Ennis Del Mar, Heath Ledger earned himself an adopted place in that extended family. It is in the spirit of that kinship that I mourn his passing.

My broken heart aches when I think of his daughter, who is just barely two years old; she'll be lucky if she has any memory of him at all. My heart goes out to all his family and loved ones.

My words seem so hollow and inadequate to express my grief. Perhaps it's foolish to feel so deeply for someone I've never even met but only admired from afar, but I truly care about Heath Ledger. Not only that, he's the first person of my own age whom I truly care about who has died, which forces me to contemplate mortality, my own and that of the people I love, in less abstract terms than those to which I am accustomed.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona eis requiem sempiternam. Lux aeternam luceat eis, Domine

This marks the end of Brokeback Mountain Week. I chose this week because it has special significance. Tomorrow marks the nine-year anniversary of the first publication of "Brokeback Mountain" in The New Yorker magazine (October 13, 1997); this past week marks the eight-year anniversary of Matthew Shepard's beating and death (October 6-October 12, 1998)¹.

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I admit that I had some misgivings about including today's topic, but I decided I couldn't devote a whole week to talking about Brokeback Mountain without talking a little bit about the Oscar controversy. Fortunately I don't have a lot to say about it; Crash won; nothing I can say will change that, and I've made my peace with it. I've already talked at great length as to why Crash sucks in general. What I'd like to do today is draw a couple of specific comparisons between BBM and Crash, and I promise to be as objective as I can.

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I actually don't have a lot to say on this subject since it's been obsessed over by so many people before me. I mean, it's obviously important to the story, but so many people have made it up into the end-all and be-all of what the movie is about, and that's not fair and I don't want to do it. But I do have a few thoughts to share, and what I was going to say today I'd rather save for tomorrow or Wednesday because I'm going to be comparing BBM to another film, which will probably be more effective if I have the DVD of the film to use as reference, but I don't want to rent it because that would involve spending money on it, and the libraries are closed today because it's a holiday.

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Of the criticisms I have read of Brokeback Mountain (and I haven't read very many) it seems that many critics, both amateur and professional "get" Ennis more than they "get" Jack. They understand where Ennis is coming from, what motivates him, etc., but Jack they don't get. And their inability to get him leads them to malign him, or if that be too harsh, at least to interpret his character uncharitably. Such uncharitable interpretations include Gene Shalit's harsh criticism of Jack as a "sexual predator" (although, in fairness to Mr. Shalit, he did later apologize for that remark), and a review I saw on a website called HollywoodJesus.com¹ in which one reviewer dismissed Jack as merely a "guy who likes guys."

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I've declared this to be Brokeback Mountain Week here in my journal. During this week I will be posting ponderings related in some way to the movie Brokeback Mountain (though probably not every day).

Now, those of you familiar with my journal and my comments made in the journals of others may be asking, "Isn't every week Brokeback Mountain Week for you?" And indeed, it is true that the film holds a special place in my heart, not only every week but every moment of every day.

That being said, I've only written in depth about my initial reactions to the film, not of the insights I have gained from it over repeated viewings over the 10 months since it was released (has it been ten months already? only 9 since I've seen it though, because it didn't come here until January) and the six months since it was released on DVD (needless to say I bought it that very morning). So I'm devoting this week to sharing those insights.

Of course it remains to be seen how insightful they truly are. The entries will be behind cuts out of courtesy to friends' pages, the spoiler-sensitive, and to people who would prefer not to read the ramblings of a Brokeback devotee. I'd prefer the cuts over censoring myself for spoilers because (a) that would defeat the whole point and (b) I don't think this is a film where it particularly matters; it's not like the Sixth Sense or something. So just be aware that there are spoilers behind the cuts, and that goes for any other movies I may choose to compare with Brokeback Mountain (there will be at least two such movies). I don't know whether or not anyone cares (my guess is probably not) but I hate it when people spoil things for me so I'm paranoid about not spoiling things for people.

So, Brokeback Mountain Week starts today and ends on the 12th. The only thing more I have to add for tonight is to draw attention to my new icon that I made in honor of the occasion. The essay entries start in earnest tomorrow.

Yesterday (August 8)'s IMDb Daily Poll question (What is the worst Best Picture Oscar winner of the last ten years?) suggests that people still care about the quality (or lack thereof) of Academy Award winning/nominated films. Therefore I feel it is not entirely tardy of me to go back and give an informed opinion on this year's Best Picture race, having finally had a chance to see all five nominated movies. What follows is what I would have said in March had I had the opportunity to see all five Best Picture nominees, but I was very busy at that time (and since then, what with school and moving and work and all), so it has had to wait until now.

Here are the five nominees as I would have ranked them:

1. Brokeback Mountain
2. Good Night and Good Luck
3. Munich
4. Capote
5. Crash

( Brokeback Mountain, Good Night and Good Luck, Munich )

( Capote and Crash )

( Conclusions )

I had good intentions, in the sense that I had intentions that I honestly intended to carry out.

Events in my life over the past year have prevented me from maintaining this journal as I originally intended it, as an outlet for social commentary with a political purpose. Writing a good essay, particularly a good persuasive essay, takes time to write and to revise. And time has become such a precious commodity that I've had to spend it elsewhere.

Since the Oscar ceremony, I've felt the need to comment publicly on the Academy Awards, specifically Brokeback Mountain's loss. I did so in a friends-locked entry in order to articulate my feelings so as to revise them later. I was unsuccessful in getting my true feelings across, and instead of revising I had to write an entirely other essay, this time one more of apology/explanation.

I had more thoughts to share, but I don't have the time to do them justice, and three weeks after the fact I can hardly justify their relevance anymore.

So I'll just present my thesis, which is this: in spite of the Award ceremony's self-congratulatory theme of celebrating their willingness to stand in defiance of the status quo and challenge the prevailing attitudes, many of the choices for Award winners--particularly Best Picture--seemed to reveal a desire to not appear TOO controversial.

Though I originally did a lousy job of defending my thesis, I was later gratified to learn that others--people with at least a reputation for being knowledgable about the film medium--shared my viewpoint. I read many good and thought-provoking essays, but one stood out as the best, as somehow taking the ideas from my head and writing the words I wanted to write but couldn't, for whatever reason. At this point I would like to relinquish the floor to Mr. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, who accomplished what I could not: articulated and defended a thesis very similar to mine with eloquence and with objectivity.

Mr. Turan, if you please.