NY Review of Books on Brokeback Mountain

[+ Tom Isern]

Volume 53, Number 3 · February 23, 2006

 

Review

An Affair to Remember

By Daniel Mendelsohn

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."

 

 

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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.

 

 

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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.

 

 

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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 is

 

about 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.

[Boston Guy]

Thanks for posting this.

 

BG

[Luv2play]

Yes, this is the best review of the film that I have read. Having read the book first, then watched the film, I agree with Mendelsohn's take on the film. Surprising how many refuse to see the closet aspect of the story. The best line in the review is the one about how if the film had been about two closeted interior decorators of the 70's, it wouldn't have been cast as an "epic love story". Right on!

[Karl-G]

Thank you for posting the review.

[Guest JohnPela]

Thanks for posting this review. Best review of the movie I have read. I enjoyed the story, then saw the movie, then read the story again the next day. Really moving story and movie.

[+ Charlie]

Tom, thanks for the review. There are some things in his interpretation that I don't agree with; for example, his use of "homosexual" and "gay" as equivalent terms, although homosexual refers to an orientation, and gay to a particular attitude toward that orientation--Jack is much closer to being gay than Ennis is. Ennis's tragedy is exacerbated by the fact that he is probably more realistic than Jack about how hard it would be for him to find the kind of happiness that Jack wants for the two of them, and still "be himself," which is more than simply a man who loves another man. Nevertheless, Mendelson has made many important points here, and has read the details of the movie very carefully, giving me a new appreciation of it.

[Guest verymarried]

I hope I am not breaking the beautiful thread of this review to ask a couple technical questions about Brokeback. Did other conclude that Jack had begun a relationship with the husband of the woman he danced with in the movie and that this was the man whom he told his parents he was bringing with him to help with their ranch? Next, did others also conclude that Jack's wife found out about this and had him killed or knew that others had killed him, or was it his father in law who may have done such an act? (The short story says that the father-in-law died earlier I believe). I apologize for such trivial questions after such masterful reading in the material beginning this thread, but I have been puzzled. As a married guy who follows this website daily, I can tell you that the film made a lasting impression on me. I saw it while away on business the first time and am to see it with my wife tonight. I am not sure how I will react this time, with someone I love deeply yet deceive in similar ways to the characters.

[trilingual]

Jack's death in the film (and the story) is mysterious. In the film Jack's wife tells Ennis in detail about the accident involving an exploding tire. As I recall the film, the flash of Jack being beaten to death with tire irons happens in Ennis's mind, perhaps triggered and distorted by his earlier memory of being shown the bodies of the murdered and mutilated ranchers who had dared to live together. That childhood memory of a crime perhaps committed by his own father was a major cause for Ennis being so emotionally stunted.

 

The film is a true work of art that changes and challenges us in endless unexpected ways. What seems at first impression to be a rather thin wisp of a tale turns out, as the posted review illustrates, to have the inexorable force of a Greek tragedy, blighting everyone who comes into the orbit with the doomed lovers. The film also forces viewers to reflect on endless other profound issues, like the nature of love, truth, masculinity, the American dream, poverty (both material and emotional), you name it! In the sparest, most economical manner, Ang Lee casts a cold, grey light on the real America. It's a vision most of the millions of suburbanites who are seeing this film in their neighborhood multiplexes may not have seen before, and I think it's a major part of the film's impact on them. This isn't the sugar-coated poison they get from TV and the Bush Administration and the manipulative, money-grubbing "evangelical" leaders so many of them follow. It's reality, and it's truth, and those are powerful things, especially for people who have had little contact with them for years, or maybe their whole lives. There's something so powerful about this film that for many, many people I think it will mark a "before" and "after" point in their lives. If it only makes people start thinking, and questioning the pre-packaged Barbie-and-Ken morality they've swallowed up to now, "Brokeback Mountain" will have made history.

[basket]

This is all getting too heavy for me! It's a movie, after all!

[+ Charlie]

I agree with trilingual that the quick flash of Jack being killed seems to be in Ennis's mind (it takes place in a field, as did the murder he remembers from childhood). Jack's wife doesn't seem to have the motivation or the personality to have him killed; whether she really knows--or cares--how he died is unclear. The new co-worker in Texas is an intriguing plot complication, but he's not the type to run off to live on Jack's parents' broken-down farm, nor is there any indication that Jack feels the same kind of romantic attachment to him that he feels for Ennis.

[Boston Guy]

> I am not sure how I will react this time, with someone I love

>deeply yet deceive in similar ways to the characters.

 

There's a danger of oversimplifying when drawing parallels from art to life. But one has to wonder if your wife, too, has her suspicions.

 

This must be very difficult for you and you have my sympathy. I'd also be very interested in your reactions to seeing the movie with your wife and how she reacts.

 

Good luck,

BG

[+ Tom Isern]

I did conclude, as you suggest, that Jack had begun a relationship with the husband he met out dancing. This is confirmed in both the movie and short story by Jack's father when Ennis visits the parents. Here's from the story:

 

"The old man spoke angrily. "I can't get no help out here. Jack used a say, 'Ennis del Mar,' he used to say, 'I'm going a bring him up here one a these days and we'll lick this damn ranch into shape.' He had some half-baked idea the two a you was goin a move up here, build a log-cabin and help me run this ranch and bring it up. Then, this spring he's got another one's goin a come up here with him and build a place and help run the ranch, some ranch neighbor a his from down in Texas. He's goin a split up with his wife and come back here. So he says."

 

I did not, however, think that his wife had him killed, although I can see where you might suspect that. She seems, at least to me, pretty clueless right until the end. Then, in her final conversation with Ennis, she's rather bitter and changed. She's covering up the truth that Jack's "outgoing" nature got him into trouble and has now forced her into a closet of her own. Who can she tell? Who be honest and open with?

 

Jack's father concludes his above remarks by saying: "But like most of Jack's ideas it never come to pass." The very next words of the story are: "So now he [Ennis] knew it had been the tire iron." Jack was in fact beaten to death--it wasn't just in Ennis's imagination.

[+ Hoover42]

>The very next words of the story are: "So now he knew it had been the tire iron."

 

That was still Ennis thinking to himself.

 

>Jack was in fact beaten to death--it wasn't just in Ennis's imagination.

 

I disagree, and I still think both the book and the movie leave it up the reader/viewer to decide whether Jack was actually murdered.

 

...Hoover

[1sf]

I thought the movie left the mode of Jack's death ambiguous; the novella, I felt, was clear -- the tire iron.

 

Oh yes, thanks Tom for your posts and this thread.

[+ Tom Isern]

I think the narrative leans toward murder. Lureen tells Ennis that Jack died by accident. But then the narrator tells us that the "little Texas voice came slip-sliding down the wire." Lureen is slick, in other words, "polite" even, but "cold as snow." She is lying and Ennis knows it: "No, he thought, they got him with the tire iron."

 

After the conversation with Jack's father, in which the other man is revealed, the narrator tells us: "So now he knew it had been the tire iron." It's true this interpretation is in Ennis's head, and it could go either way--the ambiguity is perhaps intentional--but why would Lureen's voice be "cold as snow" if Jack's death were in fact an accident? And why would the narrator say that Ennis "knew" it had been the tire iron? This is not all up in Ennis's head. The narrator is being suggestive, and the tone is not supportive of Lureen's story.

[trilingual]

I think Lureen's voice would have been cold as snow because she just no longer gave a rat's ass about Jack. Any feelings she had for him had died out years before. Ennis's wife cared enough about him to play detective with the note in the fishing tackle, and it's clear in the argument they have that she still has feelings for him. She wasn't emotionally dead like Lureen: she managed to go on and remarry. But Lureen just seems to have withdrawn into herself and her only interest seemed to be the business accounts and her hair. So I really don't know exactly how Jack died, but I think it was an accident. There was no reason for Lureen to lie to Ennis -- if he'd been murdered I think she would have said that, without necessarily going into all the details. Chances are it would have been in the papers somewhere, too, and Ennis could have found it. Jack's death happened in 1983 or later. People talked openly about such things then, and they appeared in the newspapers, too. So I tend to think the "murder" was in Ennis's mind, because he'd been conditioned by his brutal upbringing to expect things to end that way.

 

However Jack died, it affects the story very little -- all the years of denial and concealment never brought a happy life for Jack or Ennis. Even if Jack had lived, would things have gotten better? After all, Ennis had divorced and was free to live with Jack if he'd wanted to. Jack clearly would have dropped everything to be with Ennis. But Ennis wouldn't have it. So even without Jack's death I think it's unlikely they could ever have ended up happily. Ennis was just too damaged.

 

Sad, but how many other men and their families have been destroyed by society's expectations and their own concealment and self-hatred? Another recent film (available on DVD) dealt with this subject from the viewpoint of the wife in a suburban late 50s setting: "Far From Heaven." It's excellent, with another superb performance by Julianne Moore, and it makes a perfect "bookend" for "Brokeback Mountain." These are the lives we and our families would be living if we really went back to the "Leave It To Beaver" days idolatrized by Focus on the Family and Jerry Falwell and company. . .

 

P.S. And thanks, Tom, for posting the thought-provoking review, and for your own insightful postings.

[pierrot]

My guess about Jack's murder, or rather my "imagination" was that Lureen's father who had a grudge against Jack and who was a powerful man in the community, had him murdered when he found out that he was having an affair with the other married man. But that was just my guess, clearly it is left as only one suggestion among many.

[+ Tom Isern]

Yes, Jack's father-in-law was dead before Jack was murdered--so that shoots the theory that he hired it done. But in 1983, not all people were talking openly about homosexuality. In 1983 AIDS was just hitting the country, and for many subsequent years obituaries listed cancer as the cause of death--homophobia was alive and well in 1983. Particularly, one imagines, in Texas where Lureen lived--has anything really changed THERE?

 

The "regime of the open secret" is alive and well even today, I'd argue. Many people, even today, go to their graves in the closet and there are many complicit relatives wanting to keep it that way. Look at the furor that erupted when John Kerry had the "audacity" to reference Mary Cheney's sexuality.

 

Here's the real problem: If Jack's death were an accident, then it is also essentially meaningless. Matthew Shepherd wouldn't be Matthew Shepherd if he'd been a hit-and-run case or if a car had dropped on him while he was changing a tire. Whether or not he was murdered is critical to how one interprets this story. The murder makes it a tragedy. Somehow, I think, Annie Proulx wanted us to be tortured by this problem.

[J-Man]

I have not yet read the story, but what I got from Anne Hathaway's performance of the scene in which she relates the details of Jack's death was an attitude of having told this "story" numerous times to various friends and acquaintainces. My assumption was that this was now the "official" version of Jack's death, the only one acceptable to her worldview. And after having told it so many times, she now almost believes it. Maybe that's overreaching, but that's what I got out of it.

[Trixie]

In the movie version, I rather felt that one is led to suspect Lureen's father as well. A whole scene was created (The Thanksgiving Scene in which Jack stands up to and humiliates his father-in-law) to imply that he would have it out for Jack. It's been a long time since I read the short story, but I think that scene was not in it.

 

 

Trix

[trilingual]

So far, everybody's made valid points about the film and about Jack's mysterious death. Fascinating how we all see something a little different in the film and its details. We all saw the same film, but we didn't all walk away from it thinking the same things!

[+ Charlie]

Tom, I agree that whether Jack's death was murder or an accident does affect our interpretation of the story somewhat. However, it is a different tragedy, rather than more tragic, if it was an accident, since murder seems to justify Ennis's fear of the consequences of openly acknowledging their relationship ("I told you so!"). There is a social tragedy when two lovers are prevented by society from enjoying their relationship (e.g., Romeo and Juliet), but there is a personal tragedy when it is their own fear--or in this case, Ennis's fear--that keeps them from fulfillment. I don't know which interpretation Proulx intended.

[BgMstr4u]

Thank you all for this thoughtful thread.

 

An aspect of both the story and the film I have not seen dwelt on anywhere yet is poverty. Ennis and Jack are both poor as dirt at the beginning, but Jack escapes into a more affluent world, which gives him some choices -- going to Mexico, the dream of setting up a little ranch, the ability to take off and go to Wyoming pretty much whenever he wants to, the luxury of imagining himself as gay and happy in some other form of life. Ennis remains trapped in poverty, a poverty which is beautifully shown in the film through the interior shots. I think those wonderful shots of his bleak house and apartment, and then of Jack's parents' house (I think the most "esthetic" visuals in the film are the amazingly spare, linear shots in those scenes), in a way are visual stand-ins for Ennis's interior state. He, like Jack's parents, is as frozen in the poverty of his emotional life as he is in his material poverty. Like many genuinely poor people, he has no utter idea what any other way of living might be.

 

The more I think about this movie, the greater it seems to me. Not simply the central issue of homosexuality, but the two marriages, so superficially different, and yet both so much the same; the issues of friendship between the two men, in the context of sexuality, and yet somehow not equivalent to sex; and the bleakness of their lives and their settings.

 

Interestingly, Ang Lee never condescends or makes fun of their poverty. It is a fact, and, whether it is in the work Jack and Ennis do, the destitution of Ennis's marriage and family life or the bleak spareness of Jack's parents' home, there is a dignity to it. It is when we see the more affluent world Jack has married into that the film veers into a critical stance verging on satire.

 

I grew up out West in the 50's and 60's, and while we were not as poor as this, we lived a much simpler life, and knew plenty of people who had a lot less than we did. There was a dignity to that type of American life which is now compromised by our inescapably ever-present consumerism. But in that poverty there is also a severe restriction of one's field of vision and imagination and a real inability even to dream of something better, and this I think is beautifully caught in the character of Ennis.

[+ deej]

>We all saw the same film, but we didn't all walk away from it

>thinking the same things!

 

And therein lies part of the power of the original story, and what made it such an award winner in the first place. :-)

 

The movie is so good partly because it is so true to the original.

[+ Tom Isern]

Thank you Charlie, Big Master, Deej, and all who wrote for very thoughtful replies to this thread. I really liked what Charlie said about two different types of tragedy encoded in the film--maybe that's why Proulx and Lee both decided against giving us a definitive answer to just how Jack died. The ambiguity forces us to ponder. Big Master's comments about poverty are right on the money too, I think. It's kind of like Maslow's hierarchy--it's hard to think about lofty personal and spiritual goals when putting food on the table (or as our brilliant president says: "putting food on your family") is a day to day challenge. I'd appreciate hearing more about Charlie's two different tragedies theory. Ennis has internalized the homophobic gaze of his father and his culture and can't get beyond it. That is his tragedy. If Jack is murdered for pursing his sexual desires, that is his. But if Jack's death is accidental, what do we make of that?