Ennis Del Mar &  Jack Twist | Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain, or also known as Ang Lee’s harrowing “Gay Cowboy Western,” is a love tale about two angsty ranch hands in Wyoming and their torturous, decades-long mountaintop love affair that leaves a hollowed-out ache in your stomach. It is still credited for its impressive portrayal and affection between two nineteen-year-old “cowboys” who grow old together, or rather apart.

Jack Twist, portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal, and Ennis Del Mar, played by Heath Ledger, end up herding sheep and scarfing down beans by the light of a fire in the rugged peaks of Wyoming’s Brokeback Mountain one summer in the 1960s. Jack and Ennis, touch-starved and hypermasculine, initiate a romantic relationship after spending so much time with each other and just having a single tattered tent between them. The film is undeniably stunning. It is set in Wyoming, but it was shot in Alberta, Canada’s Canadian Rockies. The vast, elevated landscapes that surround Jack and Ennis’ relationship seem to be appropriate for this environment. Their love is spread so thin over such difficult terrain, and their meetings in the wooded mountains serve to highlight how marginalized they are in society.