Davis, Magnola (18 december 2005). ”Masculinity and Its Discontents in Marlboro Country”. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/movies/18darg.html?ref=heath_ledger. Läst 17 oktober 2010. ”That "Brokeback Mountain" quickly and jokingly became known as "the gay cowboy movie" speaks to the unease surrounding the film's subject, but it also reflects an unfamiliarity with both the West and the western. The image of the cowboy looms large in our popular imagination, even if the history of the actual cowboy was relatively short, having begun during the great cattle drives after the Civil War and ended as cattle were increasingly moved by rail. By the time the movies were invented, the era of the cowboy and the freedom he symbolizes was long over, but Hollywood, and later television and advertising, kept him alive in the collective consciousness... "[But] it is not a story about 'two cowboys.' It is a story about two inarticulate, confused Wyoming ranch kids in 1963 who have left home and who find themselves in a personal sexual situation they did not expect, understand nor can manage." Jack and Ennis are not cowboys (if anything the two are shepherds), but they are, in Ms. Proulx's resonant words, "beguiled by the cowboy myth."”
Davis, Luke. ”Heath Ledger, 1979–2008”. The Monthly. Morry Schwartz. http://www.themonthly.com.au/monthly-essays-luke-davies-heath-ledger-1979-2008--821?page=0%2C2. Läst 17 oktober 2010. ”Ledger's performance was described by Luke Davies as a difficult and empowering portrayal given the environment of the film, stating: "In Brokeback Mountain the vulnerability, the potential for danger, is so great - a world so masculine it might destroy you for any aberration - that [Ledger's] real brilliance was to bring to the screen a character, Ennis Del Mar, so fundamentally shut down that he is like a bible of unrequited desires, stifled yearnings, lost potential."”
