A REPOST from TOB
=============================================================================================
It's because of you I'm like this, Ennis! -- by malina-5
by malina-5 (Tue Oct 31 2006 00:53:28 )
I’ve been sitting on this for so long – ever since I read the “you shut up about Ennis” post the first day it came out – that I’m not sure it makes any sense anymore. Oh well, I’ll try. The ‘lost month’ thread made me think about it more, too.
I’m wondering about what the film is telling us about the nature of love. B/c here’s what I see:
1963: Boy meets boy. But there are differences between these two boys. Jack comes from a home that is, if not wholly loving, at least stable. His mother is a real sweetie, and Jack speaks of his “daddy’s ranch” with ease and assurance. Jack is open, affectionate and confident. He bitches a lot, but generally with good reason – he knows that things aren’t right and that Aguirre is imposing harsher-than-normal circumstances on them, and in particular on him, Jack. He knows it isn’t fair and wants to change it.
He knows that of the world, too. That’s the real miracle. Like Ennis, Jack seems to have some investment in the idea that he “ain’t queer” – but how is it, then, that the situation they find themselves in, their overwhelming attraction to one another, doesn’t seem to cause Jack much internal conflict at all? How is it, in fact, that Jack is able to stand there and look Aguirre in the eye when, in the summer of ’64, Aguirre accuses him and Ennis of stemming the rose?
Jack accepts himself – that’s how. And that, and all of the other things listed above, are things that Jack has and that Ennis doesn’t – self-acceptance, a sense of home, and perhaps as a result, optimism. A conviction that if things “ain’t right”, they can and should be set right.
Ennis is characterized by his lack of those very things. What he has, instead, is a past that is marked by two possibly parallel traumas. The death of his parents was the loss of home and security; being taken to see Earl was, possibly, the loss of any notion of the world being a safe place for him. It circumvented self-acceptance. (Btw, I think this is true regardless of whether we regard the Earl scene as a ‘shortcut’ to Ennis’s childhood or as a single defining incident.) I’ve said this many times before, and CaseyCornelius was the one who pointed it out to me, but I do regard the image of Earl as a reference to the fisher king/ Perceval legend. The fisher king was wounded in the groin (sometimes the thigh) and it was a wound that never heals – at least until Perceval comes along. Such is the case with Ennis, as we first see him. He is wounded in a way that will never heal, at least not without intervention.
So that’s, if you will, a snapshot of the boys as they are in 1963, the summer of love. And what happens over the next twenty f*ing years?
They say that partners, over a long period of time, start to look like one another. That may not be literally true of J and E – they are very different physical types, after all – and of course they were never ‘really’ partners in the sense of sharing their lives. Still – all of those polarized differences between the two, so obvious in 1963, gradually abate as JACK TAKES ON ENNIS’S WOUNDS.
1. Homes and Homelessness
We see, in Ennis, a real reluctance – an inability, really – to make a home. There are only two exceptions – on the mountain with Jack, the camp becomes a home of sorts (which is why Ennis is so traumatized when it is taken away a month early), and at the very end, as he puts those oh-so-evocative numbers on his mailbox, Ennis makes some small movements toward making a home for himself. But that of course is after the completion of the Jack-intervention.
Other than that, Ennis’s early life is characterized by the loss of homes (his parents’ ranch, his home with his brother and sister) and his adult life is characterized by his refusal to try and make what Alma poignantly calls “a real home”. And what is home? It’s where you are centered; it’s where you know you belong. It’s your place.
And it’s exactly what Jack, too, ends up lacking.
Think of him driving back and forth to Wyoming, three four times a year, always with the hope that Ennis will give in and agree to make his home with Jack. Because Ennis won’t, Jack is essentially homeless too. Yes, he has the house in Childress, and at one point he even tries to assert his ownership of it to LD. I don’t think he’s really successful, though. No matter how good a combine salesman Jack ended up being, that house was bought and furnished with Newsome money. And LD struts around as if he owns the place. That’s not Jack’s center.
His ‘daddy’s place’, is, perhaps, closer to being a real home for Jack. But, as we learn, it carries the association of Ennis’s refusal to join him there and build a cabin. That would’ve been Jack’s place – as it is, it was his ‘daddy’s place’, and the room he had as a boy is plainly too small – too limiting – for the man Jack becomes.
So, Jack becomes an itinerant, a nomad of sorts, driving the rodeo circuit as a young man, and then from Texas to Wyoming (to Mexico) as an older man. He wants a real home. He just can’t have one. The proof of that is what happens after he dies. Jack doesn’t even have one, real, centered final resting place! Half his ashes in Childress, half in the family plot, contrary to his own wishes. Even dead, Jack can’t be in one place.
2. The wound that never heals
Ennis’ fear becomes Jack’s reality. A fatal one, as it turns out. This is symbolically true regardless of whether you believe Jack was murdered or died in a freak accident.
Earl is a (possible) reference to Amfortas/ the fisher king and (as it is always called) the ‘wound that never heals’. By being taken to see Earl, Ennis is also wounded in a way that will never heal (at least, not on its own). The trauma marks him, changes how he is in the world, in a way that cannot resolve itself. Metaphorically, the flow of blood from this wound remains unstaunched.
But… who exactly is it that dies from an overflow of unstaunched blood? Not Ennis. Jack dies BECAUSE the flow of blood from his wounds cannot be staunched. He doesn’t die from a head injury or similar. He drowns, because the flow of blood from his wounds keeps flowing on and on. Peculiar, no?
3. the marked man
Ennis’s lack of self-acceptance manifests, in part, as self-consciousness. It’s obvious in his body language and, at times, his words (‘what the f* you lookin’ at?). Ennis feels that people are looking at him and thinking he’s queer…but they probably aren’t, are they? I mean, Ennis looks ultra-masculine, he’ll beat up anyone who looks at him funny, he would probably never even think of being with a man other than Jack, he has no interest in fashion (apart from the sideburns), and he’s dating a sexy blonde waitress.
Jack, on the other hand…he’s the one that sets off the gaydar, and it’s been happening ever since the early rodeo days. What Ennis paranoidly fears is the reality Jack lives.
4. separation and loss
Ennis knows what it’s like to lose the ones you love, to lose your family, to miss them and to be unable to get them back. Ennis never expresses that, though. But Jack does, after Ennis inflicts on him a parallel loss: “Tell you what… sometimes I miss you so much… I can hardly stand it”.
5. ‘what in hell ever happened to August?’
They each lose an August – Ennis in ’63, when he needed that extra month with Jack, but Aguirre said bring ‘em down and Jack weathered the news with distressing (for Ennis) equanimity, as though he didn’t really feel strongly the loss of THAT August. He loses one later on, though, and he does feel it – far more than Ennis does, seemingly.
The Point(s):
Love is alchemy. Love is transformation. For Ennis to become different, Jack had to become different too. For Ennis’s wounds to be resolved, someone else had to be willing to bear them. That is the core of the Christ story, of course; Christ took on whatever it was that was wrong with humanity, out of love. And his willingness to take it on was redemptive… and sacrificial, of course. A very ancient idea, I think, one that might pre-date Christianity.
Jack takes on and lives out the very things that are wrong with Ennis. And Ennis is healed. We aren’t allowed to see that in any very overt or conclusive way, but we see powerful hints.
Ennis is putting the numbers on his mailbox, making a home for himself. (And, as someone on another thread pointed out, the numbers add up to 8. August.)
Ennis is coming out of his isolation. He goes to Lightening Flat (discovers he really had been offered a home on ‘daddy’s ranch’) and risks being stared at. He’ll go to his daughter’s wedding, where he’ll almost certainly be stared at.
And he makes a vow to Jack. We don’t know what it is, but it’s more than he was ever able to do before.
Empathy is the point, too. If love is a drive toward empathy and complete identification with someone else, what more complete manifestation of that can there be than to take on those very characteristics that most define the person you love. “Nelly, I am Heathcliff!” says Catherine in Wuthering Heights. Can we see some of the same drive toward complete identification in Jack’s taking on of those very things that distinguished him from Ennis at the beginning?
Jack changes… and then Ennis changes. And we know this partly because Ennis, in small ways, starts doing the same thing that Jack did. Well, really, he does it twice. At the beginning, on the mountain, he takes on what I believe to be Jack’s punishment. I think that the conditions Aguirre sets for the herder are so harsh (esp. no fire on those cold nights – in that open little tent) that they amount to a punishment, and that Aguirre has it in for Jack, who worked for him last year and ‘let’ numerous sheep die. In that instance Ennis becomes Jack, so to speak. He changes roles to put himself in Jack’s place.
After Brokeback, though, he doesn’t do so again until the very end. He switches the shirts, so that he takes on Jack’s role once again. In this case, the role is that of nurturer and protector – something he’d been unable to do since Brokeback, since the lost August cemented his identification with loss and deprivation.
And with empathy, ultimately, two can become one- again, rather like the shirts. This drive toward identification culminates in wholeness with another – is that how BBM defines love?
Re: It's because of you I'm like this, Ennis!
by littlewing1957 (Tue Oct 31 2006 08:28:42 )
Wow, Malina, as always, a thought provoking, beautiful post. Thanks for sharing.
Re: It's because of you I'm like this, Ennis!
by jaaguir (Wed Nov 15 2006 07:26:35 )
UPDATED Wed Nov 15 2006 07:31:50
I don't know how but I didn't catch this thread until today.
I guess this is some kind of culmination of the points you've been elaborating on other threads.
Great. I wish I could add something. These last days I wished I could forget all about brokeback, but then I would have never read things like this.
Re: It's because of you I'm like this, Ennis!
by Dancing_Bear (Wed Nov 29 2006 07:43:35 )
I didn't catch this thread until just now either - awesome post Malina-5... you always get me to see things with new eyes...
Thank you!
Re: It's because of you I'm like this, Ennis!
by daphne7661 (Wed Nov 29 2006 08:38:53 )
UPDATED Wed Nov 29 2006 08:40:08
Oh, malina, you give me so much insight into this masterpiece and how unbelievably parallel it is to real life. I've been afraid to read this post of yours for some time. I just knew it would make me think too hard.
I know this sounds funny, but, through your posts, you have taught me so much about love -- something I'm not sure I've ever been any good at. Certainly not because I don't have the depth and capacity of it to give (because I do, just as I believe "Ennis" to be even more "passionate" than adorably affectionate "Jack"), but because I've never really learned how or liked myself enough to trust it -- for some specific personal reasons, with which I really need to deal. It is time.
No wonder I love "Jack" so much! I'm much more of an "Ennis" than I thought.
...Nice to know ya, Ennis del Mar...
Re: It's because of you I'm like this, Ennis! (REPOST)
by malina-5 (Wed Apr 4 2007 00:13:04 )
oh, I am so flattered to see one of my posts reposted!
I had a sort of odd idea just now as I was responding to something else. And it is really, perhaps, sort of an addendum to this original post. I don't know if it'll make much sense to anyone, though.
In the lake scene, it occured to me that they are pretty much speaking each other's words/sentiments.
"I can't stand this anymore" - spoken by Ennis, but isn't that where JACK is at? The situation - their couple of 'high altitude f ucks' a year - that is a situation that Ennis made, a way in which it is comfortable and, well, possible for him. Jack is the one who is at the end of his rope and 'can't stand it anymore'. But Ennis says it.
And Jack's "I wish I knew how to quit you". Yes, I guess Jack does wish that... I guess he does, at least at that moment, but... isn't Ennis the one who perceives himself to be subject to a strange and uncontrollable compulsion, 'this thing', like a bug that has bitten him and that he cannot now shake?
I don't know what that means exactly - it was just an idea that popped into my head - I don't know what it means, except as it pertains to empathy and transference and being so close to someone and so taken out of oneself that personas and identities start to meld and become shared or, at least, transformed by the experience of the other. Brutal. But it also means, to me, that in one sense (although of course we want so much more for them) the point is not to speculate about how J + E could have or should have been together, but to acknowledge that, in a very true sense and despite everything, they WERE.
...beauty's religion
And its Christened me with wonder
