Content area
Full text
THE TERM "NEW QUEER CINEMA" was coined by film critic B. Ruby Rich to describe the emergence in the early 1990s of a number of independent films that dealt frankly, even aggressively, with queer politics, culture, and identity ("New Queer").1 Writing for the Guardian in September 2005, Rich described Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005) as "the most important film to come out of America in years," and credited it with bringing about a "shift" in queer cinema of a "scope and tenor so profound as to signal a new era" ("Hello" par. 2). With Rich's argument in mind, I explore in this article some of the challenges involved in seeing Ang Lee as an exponent of "queer cinema." Through a close reading of his two "queer" films-The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Brokeback Mountain-I shall define the particular quality that sets these films apart from other queer films. What makes these films distinguished and original, I argue, is not so much that Lee has embraced "queer cinema" per se; rather, in each film Lee has come up with a cogent and credible way to reconcile the sensibility of "queer" with the formalist aesthetic of "conventional" narratives. In the process, Lee may have perfected his own subgenre-the "queer" film done "straight"-through his ability to balance and preserve both the power of "queer" content and the integrity of "straight" narrative style.
Strange Bedfellows: Queer Cinema and Ang Lee
There are broadly three ways to categorize "queer cinema" (Benshoffand Griffin 1-2).2 The first way is to look at the status of the filmmakers: "queer cinema" describes films made by gays and lesbians. The second is to look at the content of the films: "queer cinema" describes films that address issues relevant to gays and lesbians. The third way is to look at the reception of the films: "queer cinema" describes films that are watched by gays and lesbians. The implication of reception can be narrow or broad. Narrowly, it means being embraced as a "cult movie" by queer audiences. Broadly, it means being subjected to a queer theoretical approach to cinema; hence potentially any film can be "queered" by a queer interpretation. Most of the filmmakers who belong to the "New Queer Cinema" movement of the 1990s have benefited...