March 2006 – It is the talk of Hollywood, a movie about two gay cowboys that is being touted as a vehicle that will change the way America views homosexuality – and perhaps even same-sex marriage. 

The film is Brokeback Mountain, a product of Focus Features, a divison of NBC Universal. Directed by Ang Lee, the film has met with modest box office success and garnered significant critical acclaim. It has picked up prizes from the Venice International Film Festival, Critics’s Choice Awards, American Film Institute and the Golden Globes, among others. Not surprisingly, it was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Although the film deals with universal themes of love and loss, it is the homosexual relationship at the heart of the story that has the media and Hollywood gushing their praises. Brokeback Mountain centers on two young cowboys in 1963, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), who spend the summer sheepherding on Brokeback Mountain. They “fall in love,” engage in sex, and part ways. They believe – as Ennis insists  – that their encounter “is a one-shot thing we got going on here.”

But it isn’t a one-shot thing. Even though they return to what they assume will be ordinary heterosexual lives – Ennis marries Alma, his high school sweetheart; Jack marries Lureen, a cowgirl whose daddy owns a farm equipment dealership – they can’t forget what happened on Brokeback. 

As a result, they continue to meet furtively for “fishing trips” several times a year. The film follows their lives over a 20-year span, until Jack dies in a tragic accident.

The return of pagan eros
Even on the surface, there is plenty for Christians to dislike about Brokeback Mountain. For example, there is the overt same-sex activity, including an explicit scene of the two men engaging in anal sex, which Lee himself describes as “animalistic” and “aggressive”.

The movie also serves as a shameless shill for gay advocates who demand society’s full acceptance of homosexuality. Even secular reviewers could see this, although they then applauded the message.TV Guide’s Ken Fox, for example, said, “Lee’s film says unequivocally to straight audiences that it’s in everyone’s best interest for gay couples to live openly and safely. …” And David Leavitt, in his review for Slate, applauded Brokeback as an eloquent “defense of gay marriage.”

Beneath the surface, however, there is much more going on in Brokeback Mountain, so much so that Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman said the film was “a quietly revolutionary love story.”

And it is revolutionary, because Brokeback Mountain asks the viewer to embrace what is essentially a pagan view of love and sex. It is not the first nor, one would expect, the last Hollywood flick to do so.

That pagan, pre-Christian view of what we call “romantic love” was called eros, and it proposed that love was a power that simply grabbed people unaware and drove them to each other with an irresistable force.

In his recently released first encyclical, “God is Love,” Pope Benedict XVI described eros as “[t]hat love between man and woman which is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings. …” 

Moreover, the encyclical states, the pagan culture of the ancient Greeks viewed eros “principally as a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a ‘divine madness,’” and when a man participated in it, he could be torn away from his mundane existence in order to “experience supreme happiness.” 

This is precisely how Brokeback Mountain presents the love between its two protagonists. In fact, in one interview Lee described Ennis and Jack as “two lonely souls. They live together, and love brews. It just happens. They don’t know what hit them.” As the tagline on the movie’s Web site says, “Love is a force of nature.”

This is not necessarily something new for Hollywood, which has been promoting such a view of the uncontrollable power of love between heterosexuals long before two gay cowboys became the focus.

The English Patient, for example, which won an Oscar for Best Picture in 1996, focused on infidelity during World War II. In his journal, the male half of the adulterous pair wrote of the intensity of eros, saying that “the heart is an organ of fire.”

Boundaries for the fire
Certainly, eros is a powerful emotion.  When kindled within the heart, it can burn like a warming fire. But it can also inflame everything and everyone around it. In other words, like fire, love may, indeed, have the appearance of a “force of nature.”

What gives love its destructive fire is, of course, the fact that love is often consummated by sex. The act of sex not only expresses the love but deepens it, as it welds the souls of those who physically join themselves together.

It is interesting to note, as Pope Benedict does, that of the three Greek words for love – eros, philia and agape – the New Testament never uses eros in its discussions of Christian love. 

This is not to suggest that romantic love is considered un-Christian. Instead, Christianity revolutionized the concept of eros altogether. In the Judeo-Christian world-view, man is not simply a passive agent, acted upon by eros or anything else. The expectation was that human beings – within the institution of marriage – would experience and enjoy eros, but they were to be its masters, not its servants.

The potential for heartbreak when two people begin down the wrong path towards a sinful coupling is one of the reasons why God has set boundaries on human relationships. This is certainly why sex is reserved by God only for marriage and only between heterosexuals.

However, love Hollywood style flagrantly disregards God’s boundaries. In Premiere magazine, Gyllenhaal says of Brokeback: “The idea of the story is that love has no bounds. … People just think, ‘Guy gets the girl, guy loses girl, guy gets stoned.’ This movie is not that. The idea ultimately is, if you have love, no matter what that love is, whatever the boundaries, you have to hold on to it.”

One has to wonder if Gyllenhaal would give a big Hollywood thumbs up to incest as long as the participants “have love.” 

Why not? If two people – three people? four? – love each other, why should they heed any boundaries? And what about adultery? When Gyllenhaal marries, surely he would look unkindly upon his wife were she to be unfaithful a la The English Patient.

The truth is, love is not right simply because it exists. Boundaries in human relationships – like boundaries for driving, voting, or getting money out of one’s ATM – are there for a reason. In instituting boundaries for love and sex, God protects us and provides the means for orderly and honorable human society. We break those rules at our own risk and our own pain.

Idolatry of the heart
Nevertheless, throughout our society there is a pervasive tendency to elevate human love to a status deserving of worship. Love becomes an end in itself, the highest goal of human existence, and, thus, nothing less than idolatry. 

This was notable in Shakespeare in Love, for example, which also won an Academy Award for Best Picture in 1998. That popular film portrayed a fictional, adulterous relationship between William Shakespeare and the Lady Viola de Lesseps.

Before falling in love with Will, Viola tells her nurse, “I will have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love. Love above all … Love that overthrows life. Unbiddable. Ungovernable, like a riot in the heart, and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture. …”

This exalting of human love as the highest good is so pervasive that it is the foundational element of virtually every “love story” in the entertainment world.

In his review for CNN.com, Paul Clinton says, “Human beings have a deep need to love and to be loved in return. Brokeback Mountain celebrates that need without making any moral judgments.”

But this worship of eros has the effect of justifying things which God has forbidden and, in the case of Brokeback Mountain, things which He declares to be an abomination.

While Clinton is certainly right about the human need to love and be loved, he assumes that human love is the answer to that need. The full truth, however, is that mankind was created – above all other things and all other loves – to love and be loved by God.

While human love is powerful, it is too powerful to be restrained without God’s boundaries and God’s grace. While human love may be “a force of nature,” it is a force of fallen nature and subject to perversity and a fire that rages out of control. While love denied may be tragic, the greatest tragedy is that its sorrow blinds men to the one love that truly heals the broken heart.

In light of this, even happily-married heterosexuals will eventually discover that human love is not enough to quench their thirst. Even healthy relationships suffer through disappointments, irritations, and the burdens of life in a fallen world. And, ultimately, even the most loving of couples must walk through the sorrows of death because human love is not eternal.

The heartbreak of Brokeback Mountain, therefore, is that in our search for ultimate and prevailing love, we look only to the mountain peaks of human experience. Sadly, we look to our own version of Brokeback Mountain, and no higher.  

Recommended resources for a Biblical view of romantic love
• Not Even a Hint: Guarding Your Heart Against Lust by Joshua Harris 
• Sex and the Single Person by Bob DeMoss 
• When God Writes Your Love Story and When Dreams Comes True by Eric and Leslie Ludy
• www.desiringgod.org – Articles and sermons on the topic of Sexuality from John Piper, pastor and author