Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
Broken in Two
southendmd:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on May 22, 2017, 10:52:28 am ---A nice summation! But what does it have to do with "Broken in Two"? ???
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I'll venture a guess: at one point, Jack plays a bar of "He Was a Friend of Mine" on his out-of-tune harmonica.
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: southendmd on May 22, 2017, 12:36:41 pm ---I'll venture a guess: at one point, Jack plays a bar of "He Was a Friend of Mine" on his out-of-tune harmonica.
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Ah! Good one -- very subtle. But would Jack even be familiar with a Dylan song the year after it came out? Would Wyoming radio stations even play music by Village folkies? Or is that one of those things that the characters don't notice but Ang wants us to notice?
By the way, I looked up the Dylan version on YouTube, then clicked on a link to the Willie Nelson version in the right rail. I glanced down at the comments and this was at the top:
--- Quote ---My20GUNS 2 years ago
When I heard this at the end Of Brokeback Mountain, i started to cry, and I sat through the entire credits sequence, almost no movie is capable of doing that.
Frostbitt 9 months ago
I watched this in the Theater and have not seen it since. Perhaps someday I will revisit it. I was to heartbroken. When he visited the family and got the shirt out of the closet, I had a lump in my throat that hurt and my eyes steamed. This film was very powerful indeed. Someday, someday, I will revisit it. but not yet.
Alexis Han 5 months ago
My20GUNS I cried so hard all through the credits sequence as well
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Then I looked up HWaFoM on Wikipedia. It seems Dylan did not write the song (its origins are a little hazy in the description, but definitely Western). "The version recorded by Willie Nelson was used in the film Brokeback Mountain and inaccurately credits Bob Dylan as the songwriter," says Wikipedia.
southendmd:
Yes, the song--at least the tune--goes back to at least the 30s. I once found a recording of "Shorty George", an early version of HWaFoM.
So, perhaps the tune was very familiar to cowboys. Kinda like Ennis humming "The Streets of Laredo", before coming on the bear.
A little aside: an early version of the screenplay includes directions for various old Western songs to be placed in particular scenes. The titles often cleverly related to the action, one way or another. Of course, I can't think of one right now... I did take notes once. They are all different from what ended up in the film--like "It's So Easy", D-I-V-O-R-C-E", etc.
In Tucson, I asked Larry about it. He said that, while there were musicians in his family, the music was Diana's contribution!
Front-Ranger:
A little trivia about Bob Dylan that I gleaned. It turns out that Dylan does NOT come from Dylan Thomas. So, who inspired Bob Dylan's last pen-name?
southendmd:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on May 23, 2017, 12:58:02 pm ---A little trivia about Bob Dylan that I gleaned. It turns out that Dylan does NOT come from Dylan Thomas. So, who inspired Bob Dylan's last pen-name?
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"According to Daniel Mark Epstein in his biography, "The Ballad of Bob Dylan," the switch from Zimmerman to Dylan began back when Dylan was 17 or 18.
As the front man for of his rockabilly-blues garage band, The Golden Chords, Bobby Zimmerman was the typical James Dean-posing rocker, playing high school talent shows and trying to impress the chicks. Even at that young age, Dylan had an amazing natural sense about the importance of image for entertainers. He groomed himself accordingly: it was all about the look and the appeal. Paramount to all, was the name.
At the time, wrote Epstein, “He was a great fan of Matt Dillon, the sheriff of the television series "Gunsmoke." In 1958, he confided to his high school sweetheart [Echo Helstrom] that he planned to devote his life to music, adding that 'I know what I'm going to call myself. I've got this great name—Bob Dillon.' That was how he told new friends to spell his (assumed) last name. He also told them that Dillon was his mother's maiden name (it wasn't), and that Dillon was a town in Oklahoma (it isn't).”
With the name Dillon fully intact, Epstein goes on to assert that the spelling shifted to Dylan in Dinkytown. Bob began plumbing the depths of world literature, “reading the poetry of Pound and Eliot, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg; the novels of Kerouac and William Burroughs and Dylan Thomas, rebaptizing himself Bob Dylan.” "
https://www.thoughtco.com/how-bobby-zimmerman-became-bob-dylan-1322036
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