Brokeback Mountain -- again!!

Daniel Mendelsohn, always penetrating, (his review of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, is one of my favorite pieces of contemporary criticism), points out the flaw in the reception of Brokeback Mountain:

Because I am as admiring as almost everyone else of the film's many excellences, it seems to me necessary to counter this special emphasis in the way the film is being promoted and received.

For to see Brokeback Mountain as a love story, or even as a film about universal human emotions, is to misconstrue it very seriously—and in so doing inevitably to diminish its real achievement. Both narratively and visually, Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy about the specifically gay phenomenon of the "closet"—about the disastrous emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression and of the social intolerance that first causes and then exacerbates it.