Brokeback Mountain and Fake Love

I read recently that Hollywood loves to produce this thing called fake love. They present this ideal romantic setting that everyone wants to fall into. It's what makes actors sometimes. After all, when you are good looking as some of the actors these days, how can you not fall in love when they start showing that men can be just as sensitive as women want them to be?

I just finished watching Brokeback Mountain for the first time. I bought the DVD the day it came out, but didn't have the time until this evening. The movie ended about at midnight, and I found myself denied something. What was I denied? The idea of romance.

Ever since the movie came out in theatres, it has been built up as this true-to-life gay love story. There are no rose lens covering the cameras. The film tried to be as honest and as contemporary as it can be. It succeeded.

It also made me question my idea of this thing called love. I stumbled upon a National Geographic article earlier this year talking about how love is no different than any other chemical imbalance that triggers things like ADD and OCD. Yet, thanks to Hollywood, we think love is this magical moment where we find someone and time stops. Once that happens, that's it. You are destine to be together until you either divorce or die.

And it's suppose to be magical. But chances are, it rarely is.

The divorce rate in America sums it up nicely. There is no such thing as love. Love is just something we make up to blind us into thinking that we like someone we are attracted to when all we want is either sex or companionship. We claim to make families out of love, but in reality, we are just fulfilling our biological programming. That is, those of us that are not programmed to thin out the herd. But even those of us that are, for us there is no such thing as love either.

The only love that is real is, ironically, the fake love that is shown in movies. It is real because the actors and actresses make it real. They give us what we can never have. Why? Because that is their job. To perform our dreams and our stories for us because we can't live them ourselves.

Is there love out there? No. Is there attachment to another person? Yes. So much so that some of us solidify that obsession by getting married. Right now, I am starting to believe that marriage is no different than having to wash your hands fifty times a day just because you have to.

This film, much like most truths, was a bitter pill to swallow. I didn't take away what most of the reviews took away from the film, about how this is a step forward into opening the country's eyes into the fact that we are human no matter who we fall in love with. What I took away from this film is worlds different than most.

Brokeback Mountain taught me that it doesn't matter what sexuality you are. There is no such thing as love. Period.