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Yep, I'm still thinking about Brokeback....
My CD of the motion picture soundtrack arrived a couple of days ago. I have been listening to it a lot. I'm listening to it right now. Composer Gustavo Santaololla has accomplished much the same thing Howard Shore was able to do for me, albeit on a much smaller scale: creating original film music that so strongly evokes the scenes from the films, when I listen to it, I pant to see and experience the film all over again.
Although I thought I was all finished talking about this film, I am not. I have resumed talking about themes and film scenes in greater detail, in the LJ of an e-friend, a fellow-fan of LotR and this film. This morning, she linked me to a film review I had not yet read, by Daniel Mendelsohn.
His review is so excellent, so thoughtful, and so challenging to me, I wanted to post it here for my own reference and, well, “for posterity.”
(I have some things to say about it, too, which will appear under the review.)
From the New York Review of Books – Feb. 23, 2006 edition
An Affair to Remember ~ By Daniel Mendelsohn
A review of Brokeback Mountain, a film directed by Ang Lee, based on the story by E. Annie Proulx
Brokeback Mountain—the highly praised new movie as well as the short story by Annie Proulx on which the picture is faithfully based—is a tale about two homosexual men. Two gay men. To some people it will seem strange to say this; to some other people, it will seem strange to have to say it. Strange to say it, because the story is, as everyone now knows, about two young Wyoming ranch hands who fall in love as teenagers in 1963 and continue their tortured affair, furtively, over the next twenty years. And as everyone also knows, when most people hear the words "two homosexual men" or "gay," the image that comes to mind is not likely to be one of rugged young cowboys who shoot elk and ride broncos for fun.
Two homosexual men: it is strange to have to say it just now because the distinct emphasis of so much that has been said about the movie—in commercial advertising as well as in the adulatory reviews—has been that the story told in Brokeback Mountain is not, in fact, a gay story, but a sweeping romantic epic with "universal" appeal. The lengths to which reviewers from all over the country, representing publications of various ideological shadings, have gone in order to diminish the specifically gay element is striking, as a random sampling of the reviews collected on the film's official Web site makes clear. The Wall Street Journal's critic asserted that "love stories come and go, but this one stays with you—not because both lovers are men, but because their story is so full of life and longing, and true romance." The Los Angeles Times declared the film to be a deeply felt, emotional love story that deals with the uncharted, mysterious ways of the human heart just as so many mainstream films have before it. The two lovers here just happen to be men.
Indeed, a month after the movie's release most of the reviews were resisting, indignantly, the popular tendency to refer to it as "the gay cowboy movie." "It is much more than that glib description implies," the critic of the Minneapolis Star Tribune sniffed. "This is a human story." This particular rhetorical emphasis figures prominently in the advertising for the film, which in quoting such passages reflects the producer's understandable desire that Brokeback Mountain not be seen as something for a "niche" market but as a story with broad appeal, whatever the particulars of its time, place, and personalities. (The words "gay" and "homosexual" are never used of the film's two main characters in the forty-nine-page press kit distributed by the filmmakers to critics.) "One movie is connecting with the heart of America," one of the current print ad campaigns declares; the ad shows the star Heath Ledger, without his costar, grinning in a cowboy hat. A television ad that ran immediately after the Golden Globe awards a few weeks ago showed clips of the male leads embracing their wives, but not each other.
The reluctance to be explicit about the film's themes and content was evident at the Golden Globes, where the film took the major awards—for best movie drama, best director, and best screenplay. When a short montage of clips from the film was screened, it was described as "a story of monumental conflict"; later, the actor reading the names of nominees for best actor in a movie drama described Heath Ledger's character as "a cowboy caught up in a complicated love." After Ang Lee received the award he was quoted as saying, "This is a universal story. I just wanted to make a love story."
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. What love story there is occurs early on in the film, and briefly: a summer's idyll herding sheep on a Wyoming mountain, during which two lonely youths, taciturn Ennis and high-spirited Jack, fall into bed, and then in love, with each other. The sole visual representation of their happiness in love is a single brief shot of the two shirtless youths horsing around in the grass. That shot is eerily—and significantly—silent, voiceless: it turns out that what we are seeing is what the boys' boss is seeing through his binoculars as he spies on them.
After that—because their love for each other can't be fitted into the lives they think they must lead—misery pursues and finally destroys the two men and everyone with whom they come in contact with the relentless thoroughness you associate with Greek tragedy. By the end of the drama, indeed, whole families have been laid waste. Ennis's marriage to a conventional, sweet-natured girl disintegrates, savaging her simple illusions and spoiling the home life of his two daughters; Jack's nervy young wife, Lureen, devolves into a brittle shrew, her increasingly elaborate and artificial hairstyles serving as a visual marker of the ever-growing mendacity that underlies the couple's relationship. Even an appealing young waitress, with whom Ennis after his divorce has a flirtation (an episode much amplified from a bare mention in the original story), is made miserable by her brief contact with a man who is as enigmatic to himself as he is to her. If Jack and Ennis are tainted, it's not because they're gay, but because they pretend not to be; it's the lie that poisons everyone they touch.
As for Jack and Ennis themselves, the brief and infrequent vacations that they are able to take together as the years pass—"fishing trips" on which, as Ennis's wife points out, still choking on her bitterness years after their marriage fails, no fish were ever caught— are haunted, increasingly, by the specter of the happier life they might have had, had they been able to live together. Their final vacation together (before Jack is beaten to death in what is clearly represented, in a flashback, as a roadside gay-bashing incident) is poisoned by mutual recriminations. "I wish I knew how to quit you," the now nearly middle-aged Jack tearfully cries out, humiliated by years of having to seek sexual solace in the arms of Mexican hustlers. "It's because of you that I'm like this—nothing, nobody," the dirt-poor Ennis sobs as he collapses in the dust. What Ennis means, of course, is that he's "nothing" because loving Jack has forced him to be aware of real passion that has no outlet, aware of a sexual nature that he cannot ignore but which neither his background nor his circumstances have equipped him to make part of his life. Again and again over the years, he rebuffs Jack's offers to try living together and running "a little cow and calf operation" somewhere, hobbled by his inability even to imagine what a life of happiness might look like.
One reason he can't bring himself to envision such a life with his lover is a grisly childhood memory, presented in flashback, of being taken at the age of eight by his father to see the body of a gay rancher who'd been tortured and beaten to death—a scene that prefigures the scene of Jack's death. This explicit reference to childhood trauma suggests another, quite powerful, reason why Brokeback must be seen as a specifically gay tragedy. In another review that decried the use of the term "gay cowboy movie" ("a cruel simplification"), the Chicago Sun-Times's critic, Roger Ebert, wrote with ostensible compassion about the dilemma of Jack and Ennis, declaring that "their tragedy is universal. It could be about two women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic groups—any 'forbidden' love." This is well-meaning but seriously misguided. The tragedy of heterosexual lovers from different religious or ethnic groups is, essentially, a social tragedy; as we watch it unfold, we are meant to be outraged by the irrationality of social strictures that prevent the two from loving each other, strictures that the lovers themselves may legitimately rail against and despise.
But those lovers, however star-crossed, never despise themselves. As Brokeback makes so eloquently clear, the tragedy of gay lovers like Ennis and Jack is only secondarily a social tragedy. Their tragedy, which starts well before the lovers ever meet, is primarily a psychological tragedy, a tragedy of psyches scarred from the very first stirrings of an erotic desire which the world around them—beginning in earliest childhood, in the bosom of their families, as Ennis's grim flashback is meant to remind us—represents as unhealthy, hateful, and deadly. Romeo and Juliet (and we) may hate the outside world, the Capulets and Montagues, may hate Verona; but because they learn to hate homosexuality so early on, young people with homosexual impulses more often than not grow up hating themselves: they believe that there's something wrong with themselves long before they can understand that there's something wrong with society. This is the truth that Heath Ledger, who plays Ennis, clearly understands—"Fear was instilled in him at an early age, and so the way he loved disgusted him," the actor has said—and that is so brilliantly conveyed by his deservedly acclaimed performance. On screen, Ennis's self-repression and self-loathing are given startling physical form: the awkward, almost hobbled quality of his gait, the constricted gestures, the way in which he barely opens his mouth when he talks all speak eloquently of a man who is tormented simply by being in his own body—by being himself.
So much, at any rate, for the movie being a love story like any other, even a tragic one. To their great credit, the makers of Brokeback Mountain—the writers Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, the director Ang Lee—seem, despite the official rhetoric, to have been aware that they were making a movie specifically about the closet. The themes of repression, containment, the emptiness of unrealized lives—all ending in the "nothingness" to which Ennis achingly refers—are consistently expressed in the film, appropriately enough, by the use of space; given the film's homoerotic themes, this device is particularly meaningful. The two lovers are only happy in the wide, unfenced outdoors, where exuberant shots of enormous skies and vast landscapes suggest, tellingly, that what the men feel for each other is "natural." By contrast, whenever we see Jack and Ennis indoors, in the scenes that show the failure of their domestic and social lives, they look cramped and claustrophobic. (Ennis in particular is often seen in reflection, in various mirrors: a figure confined in a tiny frame.) There's a sequence in which we see Ennis in Wyoming, and then Jack in Texas, anxiously preparing for one of their "fishing trips," and both men, as they pack for their trip—Ennis nearly leaves behind his fishing tackle, the unused and increasingly unpersuasive prop for the fiction he tells his wife each time he goes away with Jack— pace back and forth in their respective houses like caged animals.
The climax of these visual contrasts is also the emotional climax of the film, which takes place in two consecutive scenes, both of which prominently feature closets—literal closets. In the first, a grief-stricken Ennis, now in his late thirties, visits Jack's childhood home, where in the tiny closet of Jack's almost bare room he discovers two shirts—his and Jack's, the clothes they'd worn during their summer on Brokeback Mountain—one of which Jack has sentimentally encased in the other. (At the end of that summer, Ennis had thought he'd lost the shirt; only now do we realize that Jack had stolen it for this purpose.) The image —which is taken directly from Proulx's story—of the two shirts hidden in the closet, preserved in an embrace which the men who wore them could never fully enjoy, stands as the poignant visual symbol of the story's tragedy. Made aware too late of how greatly he was loved, of the extent of his loss, Ennis stands in the tiny windowless space, caressing the shirts and weeping wordlessly.
In the scene that follows, another misplaced piece of clothing leads to a similar scene of tragic realization. Now middle-aged and living alone in a battered, sparsely furnished trailer (a setting with which Proulx's story begins, the tale itself unfolding as a long flashback), Ennis receives a visit from his grown daughter, who announces that she's engaged to be married. "Does he love you?" the blighted father protectively demands, as if realizing too late that this is all that matters. After the girl leaves, Ennis realizes she's left her sweater behind, and when he opens his little closet door to store it there, we see that he's hung the two shirts from their first summer, one still wearing the other, on the inside of the closet door, below a tattered postcard of Brokeback Mountain. Just as we see this, the camera pulls back to allow us a slightly wider view, which reveals a little window next to the closet, a rectangular frame that affords a glimpse of a field of yellow flowers and the mountains and sky. The juxtaposition of the two spaces—the cramped and airless closet, the window with its unlimited vistas beyond—efficiently but wrenchingly suggests the man's tragedy: the life he has lived, the life that might have been. His eyes filling with tears, Ennis looks at his closet and says, "Jack, I swear..."; but he never completes his sentence, as he never completed his life.
One of the most tortured, but by no means untypical, attempts to suggest that the tragic heroes of Brokeback Mountain aren't "really" gay appeared in, of all places, the San Francisco Chronicle, where the critic Mick LaSalle argued that the film isabout two men who are in love, and it makes no sense. It makes no sense in terms of who they are, where they are, how they live and how they see themselves. It makes no sense in terms of what they do for a living or how they would probably vote in a national election....
The situation carries a lot of emotional power, largely because it's so specific and yet undefined. The two guys—cowboys—are in love with each other, but we don't ever quite know if they're in love with each other because they're gay, or if they're gay because they're in love with each other.
It's possible that if these fellows had never met, one or both would have gone through life straight.
The statement suggests what's wrong with so much of the criticism of the film, however well-meaning it is. It seems clear by now that Brokeback has received the attention it's been getting, from critics and audiences alike, partly because it seems on its surface to make normal what many people think of as gay experience— bringing it into the familiar "heart of America." (Had this been the story of, say, the love between two closeted interior decorators living in New York City in the 1970s, you suspect that there wouldn't be full-page ads in the major papers trumpeting its "universal" themes.) But the fact that this film's main characters look like cowboys doesn't make them, or their story, any less gay. Criticisms like LaSalle's, and those of the many other critics trying to persuade you that Brokeback isn't "really" gay, that Jack and Ennis's love "makes no sense" because they're Wyoming ranch hands who are likely to vote Republican, only work if you believe that being gay means having a certain look, or lifestyle (urban, say), or politics; that it's anything other than the bare fact of being erotically attached primarily to members of your own sex.
Indeed, the point that gay people have been trying to make for years—a point that Brokeback could be making now, if so many of its vocal admirers would listen to what it's saying—is that there's no such thing as a typi-cal gay person, a strangely different-seeming person with whom Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar have nothing in common—thankfully, you can't help feeling, in the eyes of many commentators. (It is surely significant that the film's only major departure from Proulx's story are two scenes clearly meant to underscore Jack's and Ennis's bona fides as macho American men: one in which Jack successfully challenges his boorish father-in-law at a Thanksgiving celebration, and another in which Ennis punches a couple of biker goons at a July Fourth picnic—a scene that culminates with the image of Ennis standing tall against a skyscape of exploding fireworks.)
The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really homosexual—that they're more like the heart of America than like "gay people"—you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed.
* * *
I want to say that Mendelsohn’s review put me to the test. I myself have been one of those insisting that BBM is not a movie about, "gay men in love," but "men who happen to be in love with men" (well, Ennis is, anyway – Jack is clearly gay). I could have written what Mick LaSalle wrote, quoted above. But Mendelsohn’s argument is so compellingly presented I am thinking about changing my mind. I, too, had been lumping BBM’s love affair with stories of other star-crossed lovers, not gay, who found themselves in “forbidden” relationships, punishable by their societies.
His comparison with “Romeo and Juliet” was too easy an example, but it made his point. Relationships that cross prohibitions based on race or religion, which can bring extreme animosity, even death, upon those who cross them, seem worthy of greater respect. What of a Nazi concentration camp guard who falls in love with his Jewish prisoner, and she with him? From the outside, the love would be condemned by both groups. Inside, both lovers would have to struggle with their own intense internalized opposition. She would feel herself an arc traitor to her people. He, deeply conditioned to believe Jews only worthy of contempt – even less than human – would have his own intense inner struggles.
But Mendelsohn’s point that gay lovers [in the story’s time and place] not only have to struggle against opposition from without, but their own internalized opposition, is a valid one. I think I had not taken it fully into consideration until I read his review.
As a fan of the film, I still strongly want to see Brokeback Mountain as a film about, “just people.” It gives it its “universal” appeal. If it is labelled as a “gay” movie, I fear it will be more easily dismissed as film valuable only to viewers who are gay. Defining the film as “gay,” or defining the characters in it as “gay,” seems to make sexual preference the determining factor for how the film and its characters are to be understood. I want to think of sexual preference as one part of each person’s make-up, rather than the determining one. I suspect, though, that if Mendelsohn heard me he would point out that being persecuted for being gay makes sexual preference the determining factor in a person’s life -- whether he or she likes it or not.
Reading this review has made me suspect I really haven’t finished thinking the whole gay-straight thing through. I have resisted understanding the film as the story of "gay men in love." The article's argument makes me ask myself, “Is it true? Am I only able to like this film if I think the characters ‘aren't really gay’?”
Maybe I will learn more this afternoon, when I will go see the film again -- for the fifth time.
~ Mechtild
Brokeback Mountain Links Page HERE
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The only thing I wish he'd touched on is the poverty of the emotional lives of so many of the characters, even the ones who seem open, like Lureen, aren't really expressing their real selves. Ennis is so shut-up, boxed-in repressed that it's agonizing to watch him struggle to express himself. Jack seems much more open, but when Ennis went to Jack's childhood home and met that poor, emotionally starved woman living that gray, hopeless life, I wondered how he had managed to be able to express his feelings at all. It seems to me that many of us are taught from an early age to hide our feelings and not show emotions, and that is magnified beyond belief by the world in which those two men were born and had to live. I'm not sure this makes sense. I'm still trying to come to terms with all the things that movie made me feel.
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Jack seems much more open, but when Ennis went to Jack's childhood home and met that poor, emotionally starved woman living that gray, hopeless life, I wondered how he had managed to be able to express his feelings at all. It seems to me that many of us are taught from an early age to hide our feelings and not show emotions, and that is magnified beyond belief by the world in which those two men were born and had to live.
I think training children in societies to hide their emotions is probably widely-practiced. In some cases it is a matter of manners; one doesn't subject others outside one's intimate acquaintance with the full bore of one's emotions, especially negative ones. Also, one doesn't show one's feelings until one knows the person seeing them can be trusted. Training children to veil their emotions from others is a way of protecting them. It is a harsh world in most places, and in most eras. People who grow up "thin-skinned," who "wear their hearts on their sleeves," can hurt or destroyed far more easily than those who are taught to protect themselves.
What the characters in Brokeback seem to be taught not only to guard or veil their emotions, but to deny them, even to despise them. That is something else. I think that's what is so wrenching and bleak in the lives of so many of the tenderer film characters. They have not only learned to veil their feelings from the world, they have veiled them from themselves, even to the point of nearly quenching them. Which characters easily show their feelings in the film? The characters whose feelings are negative. Joe Aguirre, Jack's father, and Jack's father-in-law aren't the least bit inhibited to show they are angry, pissed or petulant. The more vulnerable characters show their negative emotions, but only when pressed. Showing their tenderer feelings is more challenging still, so used are they to protecting themselves for fear of hurt or rejection. But, with those they trust, they will dare to do it. It happens between the two lovers, when Ennis comes to Jack's tent the second night. It happens between Jack and his daughter, between Jack's mother and Ennis. The beauty of those moments blazes from the screen. It fills me with hope, too.
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When Jack lays into his father in law, his wife smirks approval. When Ennis pounds on those jerks at the fireworks, nobody is a bit bothered.
Interestingly, both of these scenes were written for the film and were not in the original story. I thought they were in there for a number of reasons, but one of them would surely be to show how these behaviours were affirmed, societally, establishing them as males worthy of respect.
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OK, I haven't seen BBM, but I've read all the spoilers (bad me! :D) and this review as well, and I have something to say.
I want to be "just a person". To be honest, I hate the seperation of straight and gay, I get uncomfortable when somebody calls me a lesbian, including myself. Not because I live in a hostile environment. I just want to be a person. A girl. Just somebody. And the thing is thst it cannot be - not for me myself and not for any person who knows me. I cannot run away from what I am, I cannot choose, and that's it. And from this review I see a very special point. No matter how doomed the straight couple's romance is, self-loathing and the feeling of being robbed of a choice is very rarely there.
When a girl falls in love with a man, no matter what the situation is, she never thinks: "Oh, woe is me, I've been robbed of a chance of a lesbian relationship." In my case, I did feel robbed of any chance of happiness.
Yes, I know, I'm an idiot. And, of course, I'm not so depressed as I was years ago over this.
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As long as sexual orientation is considered a distinguishing factor about a person, it's going to make an impact on any gay or lesbian person, as to how they feel about themselves.
I used to feel that way about being overweight (I fluctuate between being average to what I am now - too heavy). I still do, but less strongly as I get older. More than anything, I wanted to be trim just so that people who met me would think of me as, "the woman who talked about Lord of the Rings all night, " rather than as "the fat woman who talked..." I hated it that the most determining factor for people meeting me was that I was overweight. I wanted people to look at me and see a person, not a fat person.
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I used to feel that way about being overweight (I fluctuate between being average to what I am now - too heavy). I still do, but less strongly as I get older.
I know what you mean. :k I'm not slim, either, and that makes me very self-concsious sometimes, too.
BTW, concerning looks. ;) I had a very funny conversation with Anna the last time I saw her:
I: Oh, I look terrible, I've picked a wrong shampoo...
Anna: No, no, you look wonderful, and I look terrible....
And so on and so forth for five minutes. :D
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I think BBM, for those who respond to it, will do much to encourage the reconsideration of assumptions, unexamined prejudices, and personal priorities -- all for the better.
:)
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My two (or more like, fifty) cents worth
sexual predatorcruiser from his first appearance, when he fixes that smoldering glance on poor, unsuspecting Ennis, then sneaks in a quick shave. He knows he wants Ennis, and knows without a doubt that he will have him. His crafty little grab in the tent didn't surprise me, what amazed me was how Ennis seized him back and topped on very their first time together. Yet during that whole summer, Ennis continued (imho) to be emotionally disconnected from everything they were doing.And I still wasn’t sure, after the first viewing, that Ennis’s vomiting in the corner was from heartbreak or shame (or both).
On the second viewing (last Saturday), having had several weeks to process what I had seen, my thoughts are a bit different. I saw the slow blossom of friendship, joy and warmth in Ennis, his almost boyish playfulness and teasing. It almost seemed as though Jack was the friend, the soulmate he had always longed for, perhaps without knowing or understanding that lack, and their physical relationship was another expression of their warmth and affection for each other.
After Ennis returned home, married, fathered two children in quick succession, and began his series of low-level, hopeless jobs - that's when the story began to resonate for me, because I can very easily relate to that type of life ( what Mews 1945 referred to as the poverty of the emotional lives of the characters - very well put!) It wasn't until he heard again from Jack that he realized, I think, the dreariness and futility of his life. Then: The Kiss. Does Ennis realize at that moment what Jack means to him, whether it is love or affection or escape, even temporarily, from his life? Do Ennis’s feelings grow deeper, stronger, each time they manage to get away together?
Another very painful aspect was how deeply imprinted his father's lessons were on Ennis - remember, he lost his father at an early age, before he was old enough to have some rebelliousness, some natural questioning of what he heard. So he carries with him the message that men who love men are unnatural, will be found out, and hounded or even killed. He lives with that terror, cannot for that reason admit to himself that he is one of them, and, on hearing of Jack's death, projects that same fate upon him. [How did Jack really die? In the story, the clear implication is that he was murdered.]
One other element that I’ve been thinking quite a bit about lately, and even more since Saturday’s viewing: Mrs. Twist’s unconditional love for her son. Jack has suffered under his father’s contempt, but he has not been brutalized by it –was it his mother’s love for him that allowed him to accept himself, despite his father? Ennis did not have it in him to be happy; he had no experience with happiness. His deeply ingrained self-loathing kept him from loving Jack unconditionally. Neither could Jack love unconditionally, even though he had received unconditional love: he expressed his rage and despair in the infidelity that (I think; I think word about Jack got around) resulted in his death.
Mrs. Twist must have seen the shirts and realized those filthy, bloody garments had some deep meaning for her son, so she left them, hidden, in the shrine she had built for him. When Ennis comes back downstairs holding the shirts, balled up together, she merely looks at him and nods. He doesn’t need to ask permission to take them away, she knows that Ennis is the one who was meant to have them, the one who will treasure them as she did. Her love and grace are extended to him in that moment as well. I can’t help but believe that it was her grace that allowed Ennis to change, to realize the importance of love in his life, both his daughter’s love, and acceptance of the love he felt for Jack.
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Re: My two (or more like, fifty) cents worth
I had read the short story a few times before I saw the films, and read a lot of threads before I did either, so I can say that I saw the films with many takes on the story and characters. You seem to have seen the film with raw eyes.
What you say here is especially fascinating to me:
Mrs. Twist must have seen the shirts and realized those filthy, bloody garments had some deep meaning for her son, so she left them, hidden, in the shrine she had built for him. When Ennis comes back downstairs holding the shirts, balled up together, she merely looks at him and nods. He doesn’t need to ask permission to take them away, she knows that Ennis is the one who was meant to have them, the one who will treasure them as she did. Her love and grace are extended to him in that moment as well. I can’t help but believe that it was her grace that allowed Ennis to change, to realize the importance of love in his life, both his daughter’s love, and acceptance of the love he felt for Jack.
I think you are right - it really did seem to be a turning point for Ennis in the film, experiencing the grace that Jack's mother seemed to shed, ever so quietly, and unperceived by her loutish husband.
I had been concentrating so hard on how much Ennis's visit had meant to her, trapped in ranch house hell with her glowering mate, unable to speak of the dearness of her son to anyone until Ennis showed up, I hadn't paid attention to what the visit had meant to Ennis. You have shown me how much meeting her meant to him, and not just the other way around.
We have been talking elsewhere, asking (among other things), how could film Jack could have turned out as expressive and emotionally warm as he did, raised in such a barren home, with such a father?
I think you are right: we are meant to see in Jack's mother (during Ennis's visit) the person who would have shown Jack the love, the grace, that allowed him to thrive in spite of his dad and his bleak, hard childhood, to be the person who was able to draw Ennis out, to trust him in a risky but whole-hearted love. As you point out, Ennis didn't have that. He only had the sister and brother, who "did what they could." It was not enough, whatever it was.
I feel like running around the block!
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Re: My two (or more like, fifty) cents worth
Another very painful aspect was how deeply imprinted his father's lessons were on Ennis - remember, he lost his father at an early age, before he was old enough to have some rebelliousness, some natural questioning of what he heard. So he carries with him the message that men who love men are unnatural, will be found out, and hounded or even killed. He lives with that terror, cannot for that reason admit to himself that he is one of them, and, on hearing of Jack's death, projects that same fate upon him. [How did Jack really die? In the story, the clear implication is that he was murdered.]
It never occurred to me that the early death of Ennis's father left him no time for opportunities to resist that message, the way a child normally would in his older youth and teen years.
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Re: My two (or more like, fifty) cents worth
...read a lot of threads before I did either, so I can say that I saw the films with many takes on the story and characters. You seem to have seen the film with raw eyes.
Well, as you know, there's been buzz all over everyone's f-list since September, reaching fever pitch over the holidays. I knew what I suppose you could call "the party line" was, especially among friends and friends-of-friends; I felt a bit isolated after my first viewing because I hadn't seen and interpreted things the same way.[The first, third and fourth paragraphs of my comment, above, are actually copied from another discussion I was involved in immediately after seeing the film.] It took a lot of thought, several days worth, to realize the power and the beauty, and the anguish of the film. (I also admit, quite guiltily, that I was focused so much on waiting for That Kiss, You Know The One I Mean, that I completely missed much of the loveliness and joy of their time together on Brokeback. When I saw it Saturday, I was like, ooh, there was lots more kissing! pretty! V. shallow of me, I know!)
Unconditional love - Although for various reasons I'm not longer practicing organized religion, this concept is still very important to me - in striving to give it (not always easy), and in the joy of recognizing its grace in others.
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Jack, "sexual predator"?
You know, I remember reading a blurb in which Gene Shalit had called film Jack, "a sexual predator." A bit strong, I'd say. But in the film version Jack is clearly the instigator, apart from whom Ennis would still be married to Alma, scraping by, but happy enough. In the book, Jack's self-knowledge is much more ambiguous. In the opening book scene outside Aguirre's office, Proulx merely portrays two scrappy, down-and-out kids nervously eyeing the other, wondering whom they will have to work with, that sort of thing. The tent scene in the book, when Jack makes the move of sleepily applying Ennis' hand to his erection, seemed to be presented in such a way that it came as a surprise, as much to the two young men as to the reader. In the film version, Jack seems to be cruising Ennis from the beginning.
But, apart from whether Jack was culpable for seducing the work-mate that he knew up front was engaged and who showed no interest in him, romantically or sexually, the film seemed right and solid in keeping its perspective, the perspective which made it so real -- it just said, well, whatever should have happened or not happened, here's what happened and once it had happened it was too late to pretend it hadn't happened.
If in the film Jack had been a woman, say, two U.S.G.S. scientists up on doing geology research up on Brokeback, and he/she was portrayed as attracted to Ennis, knowing he was engaged to be married, yet initiating a sexual encounter, anyway, viewers might have grumbled about how she shouldn't have "led him astray," too. But in the normal course of events, Ennis would have broken his engagement and made a life with the person he had fallen in love with, however inopportunely. Viewers would have smote their brows if the two had gone off and married someone else, even if they had promised. Viewers would know full well it could not work, denying such powerful emotions, once they had been brought to life.
Yeah, that kiss. *grin* I'll attach a separate comment for that, Ann.
But that couldn't happen in BBM's scenario.
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On that kiss on the stairs (still thinking about THAT, too)
We had been noting that although book Ennis and Alma didn't seem to have much spark in their sexual life (talking about whether Ennis was constitutionally gay, or a "straight" man who happened to fall head-over-heels for another man), there was definitely a sense of warmth between Alman and Ennis on screen. Did it spill over from Ledger and Williams's offscreen love affair? We did not know. But Ennis and Alma definitely seemed to have some sexual pleasure going on between them, even if she didn't look too thrilled about being flipped over for rear entry (whichever entrance he was using; in the book, as I said, it seemed Proulx meant it anally; the film leaves it ambiguous).
My LJ correspondent replied,
I replied,
I just thought I'd like to share that with you, Ann, as a fellow-fan of the stairs kiss.
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Re: On that kiss on the stairs (still thinking about THAT, too)
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On the retching
And I still wasn’t sure, after the first viewing, that Ennis’s vomiting in the corner was from heartbreak or shame (or both).
The story tells that Ennis did not know for whole a year why it was that he felt like retching after Jack drove away. A year! But, in the film, I think they make a different choice about this. In the film scene, Ennis is not just suddenly retching, but crying. He upbraids the man passing by for seeing him, not retching but crying. That Ennis is crying suggests to me that he already knows that he has watched something precious to him drive away.
Watching that first goodbye scene after I had already seen the whole film made a big impact on me. Jack's tentative, wistful questions and prods, "Think you'll go back to Brokeback next year?" etc. He makes a few stabs, trying to see if Ennis is interested in getting in touch again, once they part. Ennis walks off without giving Jack a shred of encouragement or hope.
Yet, Jack already cares -- and knows he cares about Ennis deeply. We only find out at the end of the film, when we (and Ennis) see that Jack has stolen and kept Ennis's shirt, all the way back from that last day of that first summer.
When I watch that scene now, knowing how much that seemingly final, irrevocable parting means to Jack, it makes me all weepy.
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Re: On that kiss on the stairs (still thinking about THAT, too)
I was so focused at my first viewing on that kiss, haveing watched the animation clip many more times than I care to admit, and I was not disappointed. The devouring hunger, the pause for breath, the greedy return for more, more - it was the most arousing thing I'd ever seen on screen. But my focus on waiting for that kiss caused me to completely overlook what is now My Favorite Kiss, the kiss in the tent, on their second night.
It must have been your comments, mechtild, that made me really examine this kiss carefully. When Jack draws Ennis down to him, with such infinite tenderness, to kiss him and hold him close - well, in my second viewing, this was the moment when I began to believe. I wish I had paused to appreciate this kiss the first time! My perceptions would have been very different.
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Re: On that kiss on the stairs (still thinking about THAT, too)
What did you begin to believe? Did you mean the reality of an actual love blooming between them? -- because you hadn't noticed, during your first viewing, the way their real friendship and mutual pleasure in each other's company had been developing? Or did you mean something else?
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Re: On that kiss on the stairs (still thinking about THAT, too)
Honestly, I don't know what I was thinking during that first viewing! I know it took a lot of processing over the next few days. (On my way to work the next morning, I started thinking about Jack and the boy-whore, and I began to cry while driving. I had to sit in the parking lot until I could compose myself; even after that, I couldn't get myself together to be my normal happy perky revved-up self. I had to go home sick - can you believe it? the first sick time I've taken in years. I was so heartsick I could not do my job. So I went home and got online (of course, who else could cheer me put my friends?). Someone sent me the short story, and I read it and wept some more, then got involved in a few online discussions which helped me work out some of my feelings about what I had seen and read.
Long story short (thank goodness!): I missed so much the first time that I knew to look for the second; there's more I'll search out on the dvd when it comes out too. Good thing dvd's don't wear out like tapes!
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DVD's are for poring over
And, Ann, you are not the first person for whom it takes things a while to hit:
On my way to work the next morning, I started thinking about Jack and the boy-whore, and I began to cry while driving. I had to sit in the parking lot until I could compose myself; even after that, I couldn't get myself together to be my normal happy perky revved-up self. I had to go home sick - can you believe it?
You make me think of Ennis in the alley (book version - when he doesn't know what has hit him). But it was worth feeling sick, wasn't it? I am sure it was for him. No matter how much he suffered internally over the loss of Jack and the loss of what they had together -- what they might have had had he been willing to risk more -- I am certain he never regretted a minute.
This theme of treasuring an experience of love one has lost or had to give up, in spite of the pain it causes to treasure it, has always been a main theme in my own Frodo story, to have come out in its second half. (Maybe one day I'll actually finish writing it! *grrrrr*)
So maybe that's another reason BBM has hit me so hard. Its themes were already ones that really mattered to me very deeply.
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Re: DVD's are for poring over
I have an Amazon gift certificate, a happy side-effect of all that holiday shopping, with this dvd's name on it!
You make me think of Ennis in the alley (book version - when he doesn't know what has hit him).
Thank you - I hadn't thought of it that way, but you are exactly right. All the shock and unhappiness of the situation caught up with me at once, at the worst possible time. I'm glad I had the opportunity to decompress in the company of supportive friends (even virtual ones).
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Re: DVD's are for poring over
Yes, having fellow-fans and thinkers to talk to on the internet is such a wonderful boon. I'd go nuts without it.
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Re: My two (or more like, fifty) cents worth
Your description of your impressions, seeing the film for the first time of course has me wondering very much if I'd have seen the same if I wasn't so completely spoiled having been in the fandom for months before the film premiered where I live. Knowing too much certainly takes away from the immediacy of first impressions. I don't think I'd have seen Jack as a "predator" like some reviewers have indicated, simply because I think Jake G. projects too much vulnerability and sensitivity in the role for that description to fit at all, - including in the early scenes however much he does put himself on display against the car.
Because of spoilers and me having read the short story, Jack and Ennis had me in their corner from the get-go. Nevertheless it still took several viewings of the film for me to see the slow subtle build-up that is actually there in their early scenes on the mountain. Ennis slowly loosening up, the two of them forming a largely wordless connection, the kindling affection hidden behind bean meal gripes and related activities to get hold of other food.... I am impressed with Ang Lee and the actors both that they managed - and dared - make it that subtle. It must have been a gamble.
I've been thinking quite a lot about Jack's mother too. Not only because I'm floored by Roberta Maxwell's stunning performance, managing to convey so much more than the descriptions given in the script. I did from the very first see her extending a hand of comfort and acceptance to Ennis in sending him up to Jack's room. She must have known what he'd find there and in my opinion she understood what it'd mean to him. After all, she had listened to jack's storied over the years of moving up there with Ennis - and she seems to be able to see the emotions that lie beneath the surface of words.
I think your use of the word "grace" is very fitting and appropriate. She does extend grace to Ennis there. I love the way you put that whole paragraph.
"Jack has suffered under his father’s contempt, but he has not been brutalized by it –was it his mother’s love for him that allowed him to accept himself, despite his father?"
Like you I have wondered how Jack ever managed to become the person he was; - caring, hopeful, self-accepting; - when growing up in that dreary place with that utterly despicable father. (My impression of father Twist is certainly coloured not only by the film but by a childhood memory of Jack's - a horrific scene of child abuse - that is in the short story but not (thank goodness!) in the film.) The answer has to be the mother. She seems to have an innate sensitivity and humanity, - she must have made Jack's life livable, she must have drawn on her love for her son just as he drew on it and returned it. She must have made him feel worthwhile and accepted.
But I still am wondering why she'd apparently not told her son anything about her religious beliefs. That seemed to indicate she never shared her innermost thoughts with him, nor the source from which she herself drew strength - and that confuses me. It seems to indicate an emotional distance that clashed with the two of them being close enough during Jack's childhood to preserve their human dignity in that otherwise so stunted household. Perhaps the father prevented or outright forbid it, though - wanting the boy to be "brought up right" as he saw it.
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Re: My two (or more like, fifty) cents worth
Maeglian, I thought they did a good job establishing that, too. As they were around each other more and more, they seemed to establish a real camaraderie. In fact, that seemed as important as the sex (which was obviously very important to both of them). They just seemed able to be themselves around each other. They could really relax and let down their guards in each other's company -- a turn of events that simply wouldn't have happened had they not been essentially stranded together, up on Brokeback. Ennis loosened up the most obviously, visibly relaxing, stretching out, and actually enjoying Jack's wacky sort of company.
But, Jack, too, relaxed in Ennis's company. He seemed finally to have an audience, an appreciative, open ear, not telling him to shut up or stop fooling around. When I think of Jack doing his silly bull-riding impression, or blatting out "Waterwalking Jesus" at the top of his lungs to Ennis and the coyotes, and think of his bleak, oppressed growing-up (symbolized by the barrenness of his childhood room - left "just like it was," his lovely mother said - yikes!), it just makes me so happy that he finally found someone to be himself around. I don't mean just sexually, not even mostly sexually -- but "himself," all of himself. It gave him so much real satisfaction, making Ennis crack a smile or say three words in a row. His dad and his peers probably told him to stuff it, when he tried to be funny and get some positive response that way. Ennis really seemed to provide that "mirroring", giving Jack back to himself in a positive way, something it is said every person needs to thrive.
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Re: My two (or more like, fifty) cents worth
You went on to say: Perhaps the father prevented or outright forbid it, though - wanting the boy to be "brought up right" as he saw it.
Mrs. Twist's Pentacostalism almost puts me in mind of a folk song from a foreign land: something deeply ingrained within her personality, but perhaps a source of embarrasment or anger on her husband's part. He could not deny her the expression of her faith, but discouraged it in his son. Jack, though, retained the song, and the memory of the love and joy with which it was sung, even if he didn't, couldn't, wasn't ever taught to understand the words.
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I need to treat myself to seeing this film again.
But there's one thing I wanted to clarify.
I loved this review, it clarified so many things for me, as did your thoughts and everyone else's comments. May I link to this post in my journal?
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As for Jack's death, Jack's fate was ambiguous in the short story. Proulx seemed purposely to write it in a way that left it to the reader to conjecture whether Jack was murdered as Ennis suspected, or really did die accidentally. I do think the film portrayed it less ambiguously, intending us to believe with Ennis that Jack was murdered.
Thanks so much for posting, Hadara. How long does NY have you for, by the way?
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Just wanted to make sure it was cool if I linked to this post on my journal, since everyone's saying some pretty personal things...
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Of course, you may! This is a public journal and this is not a locked entry. I wish I could link you to some of the intensive BBM discussions I have been reading elsewhere, but, unfortunately, they are in an f-locked journal. Nothing very racy or personal is being said in it, it is just the choice of the user.
...[T]hen it is off to Los Angeles to try to do this whole film score thing!Hopefully someday I will write something that moves you as much as the soundtrack to BBM did!
Hadara, that is a worthy and admirable aspiration. The artist who score films do as much or more than anyone on a film to make them rich experiences for the viewer. I hope you do well, and love your work.
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I could have written that "beautifully put" post that Ann made regarding her impressions of BBM on first viewing and second viewings(although I probably wouldn't have written it as well as she!)
My sentiments exactly!!!!
Brava...both of you!!!!
I loved BBM...it is an incredibly well done movie...and I don't think of it as a gay love story...it's just about love....period.
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And it's always a pleasure to share a little swooning. :)
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJoPQ6tUFrc&search=jake%20gyllenhaal%20bafta%20brokeback%20mountain
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