Reading Brokeback in Orem

I'm currently listening to Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. Well, technically, I'm currently listening to Feedback by Jurassic 5, but in a broader sense of "currently" I am listening to Reading Lolita. I'm only about halfway through, and that's after listening to it on the way to and from work for the past couple weeks and on the five-hour drive home from Vegas. It's kind of hard for me to get into because it's rather slow--slow like taking a walk through the park and taking time to smell all the flowers and feed all the birds, so it's a good kind of slow, but slow nonetheless. It's interesting, though, to see how Nafisi remembers her life through the various books she's read and the literature classes she's taught.

As I reentered Utah Valley on Monday afternoon, Nafisi (or the narrator in Nafisi's name) was talking about a mock trial she conducted in a class, sparked by a student's objection to reading The Great Gatsby. As she spoke to the jury, representing the defendant--the book itself--she brought up the issue of morality in fiction. This is nothing new to me; one does not get a master's in English from BYU without having a Morality in Fiction discussion at least twelve hundred times. I appreciated Nafisi's perspective, though. She says that a good novel is democratic. Not that it promotes democracy, she assured her students, but that it is democratic because it represents a multiplicity of voices. In moral fiction all viewpoints are represented.

The example that came to mind for me was Brokeback Mountain. Because of my particular position in life, I felt a need after watching Brokeback twice to defend my decision to see a movie about a man who cheats on his wife with another man. My defense was that the movie was moral because it portrays an important truth: indecision, as represented by Ennis del Mar's inability to choose between his wife and his lover, leads to unhappiness. However, this is not quite true. The movie is not moral because it portrays this truth, but because it allows me to see what I consider truth in it while allowing others to see other truths, even conflicting truths. Another viewer might see that Ennis is unhappy because he has tried to live a straight life when he is Undeniably and Unchangeably Gay, while another might see that Ennis is unhappy because he tried to make a gay relationship work when straight is, in fact, the One True Sexuality. Brokeback Mountain does nothing to deny any of these interpretations, nor to promote any one of them over the others, and this is precisely what makes the movie moral--as in life, the experience can be seen from a number of perspectives and it is up to the viewer to decide what is true, not to accept a "truth" imposed on him by the artist.

But then I don't know. This might just be another case of Master Fob the Moral Relativist. What do you think?