Using the data provided, investigate, illustrate and discuss
the key points of divergence in viewers' reactions to Brokeback Mountain (Lee 2005).
Please remember to avoid footnotes and to include an
alphabetical list of 'References' which have been cited in the text
(not a Bibliography of anything you have read for the essay). This list should include
author's names, date, book titles (in italics), place of publication and publisher.
Within the text always cite author's surname, date and page number. Double-space your
text and number your pages.
Guidance for this assignment: For your data, use only the datafile provided.
The dataset consists of 1485 initial reviews of the film by members of the general public.
These are in database format on
the Bent Screens section of the MCS Restricted directory (for students on this module only).
The formats provided are as follows:
Download in the usual way by right-clicking on the file you want and 'Save target as...' (in some browsers,
'Save link as...') to the drive on which you wish to store it.
The Word document is the
only one providing column headings so you will need to consult this first. Public workstations have access
to Excel but a Works version has been provided also in case you have access to that.
See also the
Internet Movie Database but limit your raw data to the dataset provided.
Although your data is provided, note that you should still consult academic sources and relate these
to your findings.
Naturally you will not be expected to comment on the opinions of all of these viewers. What is required, rather, is that you should comment on
general tendencies and patterns that you see in the corpus of material
overall. You can then 'home in' on examples which will help you make your
points. Therefore, in order to have a grasp of the general trends, you will
still need to have read as many of the opinions as possible. You could
focus in on opinions regarding specific aspects or points within the film. Short quotes from viewers' reviews may help to illustrate attitudes, but
do not include long quotes, since this will take too much of your word count:
we can always check the database itself for such details. In general, you should try to describe not the views of individuals but tendencies
characterising particular groups. Sonia Livingstone refers to 'cynics' and 'romantic', for instance (though not as two clearcut groups) - can you discern
any similar kinds of groupings?
Look especially for points where interpretations
diverge substantially: what are these key points of divergence?
Was there any disagreement about what actually happened (e.g. was Jack's death a bizarre accident or a homophobic murder?).
Rather than loosely referring to 'some', 'most' or 'the majority' of viewers, wherever possible divide divergent responses into
groups and refer to actual numbers and percentages of the sample. Where this reveals clear patterns, use pie-charts or bar-charts to make such
patterns clearer to the reader. If dealing with the whole dataset is too much to cope with, take a genuinely representative sub-sample from it (e.g. maybe
you could delete all the even-numbered entries to reduce the sample by half).
In exploring differences between viewer interpretations you may find the following links useful:
Note also that this is an assignment for which the
inclusion of relevant pictorial illustrations may be useful.
Use these to illustrate particular points. Contrasting
one with another can also be productive.
Incorporate illustrations electronically into your text (e.g. by
scanning or downloading from the Internet) rather than literally cutting and pasting.
For guidance on capturing stills, click here.
Some suggested reading
- Bingham, Dennis (1994)
Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson and
Clint Eastwood. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press
- Chandler, Daniel (1998) 'Notes on "the Gaze"'. [WWW document] URL
http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/media/Documents/short/gaze.html
- Clum, John M. (2002)
He's All Man: Learning Masculinity, Gayness, and Love from American Movies.
London: Palgrave
- Cohan, Steve & Ina Rae Stark (Eds) (1992)
Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in
The Hollywood Cinema. London: Routledge
- Craig, Steve (Ed.) (1992)
Men, Masculinity and the Media. Newbury Park, CA: Sage
- Dickinson, Roger, Ramaswami Harindranath & Olga Linné (Eds) (1998)
Approaches to Audiences: A Reader. London: Arnold
- Dyer, Richard (Ed.) (1977)
Gays and Film. London: British Film Institute
[recommended]
- Dyer, Richard (1990)
Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film.
London: Routledge
- Dyer, Richard (1993)
The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation.
London: Routledge
- Farmer, Brett (2000)
Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press
- Fuss, Diane (Ed) (1991)
Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories.
London: Routledge
- Gever, Martha, John Greyson & Pratibha Parmar (Eds) (1993)
Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video. London: Routledge
- Horrocks, Roger (1995)
Male Myths and Icons: Masculinity in Popular Culture.
London: Macmillan
- Jackson, Earl (1995)
Strategies of Deviance: Studies in Gay Male Representation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press
- Jansen, Klaus Bruhn & Nicholas W. Jankowski (1991)
A Handbook of Qualitative Methodologies for Mass Communication Research. London:
Routledge
- Jeffords, Susan (1994)
Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press
- Kirkham, Pat & Janet Thumin (Eds) (1993)
You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men. London:
Lawrence and Wishart
- Lang, Robert (2002)
Masculine Interests: Homoerotics in Hollywood Film. New York: Columbia University Press
- Lehman, Peter (Ed) (2001)
Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture. New York: Routledge
- Leung, William (2008)
'So Queer Yet So Straight: Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet and Brokeback Mountain',
Journal of Film and Television 60(1): 23-42
- Livingstone, Sonia M. (1990a)
Making Sense of Television: The Psychology of Audience Interpretation.
Oxford: Pergamon (Chapter 7, 'Divergent Interpretations of Television Drama', pp. 179-80)
- Livingstone, Sonia M. (1990b) 'Interpreting
a Television Narrative: How Different Viewers See a Story', Journal
of Communication 40(1): 72-85.
- Mackinnon, Kenneth (1997)
Uneasy Pleasures: The Male as an Erotic Object. London: Cygnus Arts
- Mackinnon, Kenneth (2002)
Love, Tears and the Male Spectator. London: Associated University Presses
- Mackinnon, Kenneth (2003)
Representing Men: Maleness and Masculinity in the Media. London: Arnold
- Needham, Gary (2010)
Brokeback Mountain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
- Patterson, Eric (2008)
On 'Brokeback Mountain': Meditations about Masculinity, Fear, and Love in the Story and the Film. New York: Lexington
- Phillips, Adam (1994)
On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored. London: Faber & Faber
- Powrie, Phil, Ann Davies & Bruce Babington (Eds) (2004)
The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema. London: Wallflower Press
- Proulx, Annie, Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana (2006)
Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay. Londom: Harper
- Ruddock, Andy (2001)
Understanding Audiences: Theory and Method. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
- Russo, Vito (1987)
The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies.
New York: HarperCollins
- Schrøder, Kim, Kirstem Drotner, Stephen Kline & Catherine Murray (2003)
Researching Audiences. London: Arnold
- Schuckmann, Patrick (1998) 'Masculinity, the Male Spectator and the Homoerotic Gaze',
Amerikastudien/American Studies 43(4): 671-80
- Stacy, Jim (Ed) (2007)
Reading 'Brokeback Mountain'. Jefferson, NC: McFarland
- Waugh, Thomas (1993)
'The Third Body: Patterns in the Construction of the Subject in Gay Male Narrative Film', in
Martha Gever, Pratibha Parmar & John Greyson (Eds) (1993)
Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video. London: Routledge, pp. 141-61; also in
Nicholas Mirzoeff (Ed) (2002)
The Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 636-53
- Weinberg, Jonathan (2005)
Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art. New York: Abrams
Note: Treat with extreme caution sources labelled with this symbol!