The ‘Brokeback Mountain’ Scene We Can’t Stop Thinking About 20 Years Later

Jack Twist, I swear: the gay cowboys are back!

Brokeback Mountain arrived on screen in 2005 with great anticipation and even greater reviews. Twenty years later, the film is hitting theaters again for a special anniversary re-release. It’s clearer now than ever just how immediate and far-reaching the film’s cultural impact was, its tale of star-crossed male lovers in the American west forever imprinting on our moviegoing hearts.

The scene occurs after a Thanksgiving dinner, where Heath Ledger’s Ennis joins his now ex-wife Alma (Williams) and her new husband, all keeping face for the sake of the children. In a moment alone together, Alma confesses that she caught Ennis in a lie about the nature of his fishing trips with his old friend, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist. She sputters, a knot of anger and fear of the secret she dare not name. With years of pent up venom and lack of understanding, she finally snarls out “Jack Twist? Jack Nasty!”

Two decades on, “Jack Nasty!” has become one of the film’s most enduring lines and a shorthand for retrograde, unsophisticated viewpoints on queer people. But Brokeback Mountain hasn’t always inspired jokes affectionate to the source material.

No matter all the critical hosannas it received, the film was still plagued by several controversies in its original release. There was hand-wringing over its moniker as a “gay cowboy” movie, the heterosexuality of its creators, and an ensuing backlash and dismissal in a Bush-era homophobic culture.

Ernest Borgnine famously snubbed the movie during its Oscar race, telling Entertainment Weekly, “If John Wayne were alive, he’d be rolling over in his grave.” Even at the Oscar ceremony–where the film won three awards, but famously not Best Picture–there were gay jokes.

Though a benchmark for queer cinema in the mainstream, the film became synonymous with gay jokes. “Many, many more people have told a Brokeback Mountain joke than have seen the movie. It’s one of those things that has really transcended itself," the director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television once told The Advocate.

“Jack Nasty!” stills remains something of a punchline. Alma’s place in the love affair between Ennis and Jack has inspired Reddit threads, fancams, and, of course, lots of memes.

In twisting Jack’s name into a slur, Alma has become an online stand-in for Karen-esque homophobia, even if the film affords her more understanding than that would suggest. While “I wish I knew how to quit you!” became a line used to mock the film’s sentiment in 2005, “Jack Nasty!” became an iconic one for the film’s knowing, intended audience. The reverence for Alma is peak queer irony.

But the line’s quotability all comes from the tragic earnestness flowing from Williams’ performance. At the time, Williams was only two years removed from her run on Dawson’s Creek as the rebellious Jen Lindsay. She had pivoted to small roles in several independent films, such as The Station Agent, but none of them managed to shed the shadow cast by the soapy teen drama until Brokeback.

Even withering reviews that questioned the mildness of the film’s gay explicitness, such as one published by Slant, were effusive about her performance: “But Michelle Williams, as Ennis’s wife Alma, may be the true standout here, fascinatingly spiking her unspoken resentment for her sham of a marriage with a hint of compassion for Ennis’s secret suffering.” Compassion? Um, sure. But the unanimous praise for Williams’ Oscar-nominated performance still stands.

It was the first sign that Williams was one of the major performers of her generation. “I never really had attention on me before in that kind of a way, and I think that that attention can be sort of destabilizing,” Williams said later, “I think I felt a little bit frozen for a moment, creatively, about where I would go next, because I felt so free to try things before that, because I didn’t think anybody was really paying attention or really cared that much.”