Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
Broken in Two
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Sandy on January 11, 2008, 12:10:42 pm ---Sorry for my random musings :laugh:
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Don't apologize, Sandy! Your random musings are always worth reading. :)
Front-Ranger:
--- Quote from: brokebackjack on January 11, 2008, 12:21:27 am ---In this case probably a coincidence. But that story is so well constructed---even the punctuation matters, very little IS coincidence. You got me very curious when you asked if it was a coincidence, VERY curious... I'm goin to ask about it.
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Yes, do! Here is something AP said in an interview one time:
--- Quote ---Geography, geology, climate, weather, the deep past, immediate events, shape the characters and partly determine what happens to them, although the random event counts for much, as it does in life. I long ago fell into the habit of seeing the world in terms of shifting circumstances overlaid upon natural surroundings. I try to define periods when regional society and culture, rooted in location and natural resources, start to experience the erosion of traditional ways, and attempt to master contemporary, large-world values. The characters in my novels pick their way through the chaos of change. The present is always pasted on layers of the past.
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brokebackjack:
I've never seen that quote before and it explains a great deal
optom3:
--- Quote from: ineedcrayons on May 07, 2006, 02:04:14 pm ---For me, the name also carries a suggestion of a failed effort. You break your back trying futiley to accomplish something; that is, you are destroyed by the struggle. Brokeback was the idyllic place that Jack and Ennis could never make it back to, much as they (both!) might have wanted it, and eventually the struggle destroyed them. Does that make sense?
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I agree so completely with you.Both men eventually become "broken" by the apparant initial idyll of their time on the mountain.Ennis's virginity is literally broken there.Their hearts are broken,portrayed so graphically ,by The wretching scene when Ennis leaves Jack, and so subtely by Jack and his silent pauses as he awaits confirmation that Ennis may return next year.
In the story Ennis admits that he knows what he has lost when he comes down from the mountain,so in effect they both inherently were broken by the summer.They try to recapture a fragment of what they once had in those glorious days,with their infrequent meetings,but never fully succeed.Only fragments of the carefree days are ever regained.They can never go back to what they once had,it is lost forever.
They never go "back" to broke back, and they never go "back" to those carefree times.Jack longs,in the book to go back to that time of the silent embrace,the memory of which still haunts him.When Ennis held him from behind.
In the end they like us they cannot turn back the clock.They grasp at straws in a vain attempt to salvage some vestige of what they once had,but end up broken by the whole experience.
Jack is literally physically broken,and Ennis becomes a broken shell of a man.
Maybe that is why both the film and story resonate so deeply with so many of us.We have been broken in so many different ways,and oh, how some of us wish we could rewind back the hands of the clock.
They remain forever broken by a love that will never reach its full and glorious potential, no matter how hard they try. and neither can I.mores the pity.This is I believe the genius of Proulxs' writing,there is something for all of us.That is unless you have been living in an emotional vacuum,in which case,you probably would not have either read the story,or viewed the film.
If I could have one wish,it would not be for fortune or fame,it would be to go back and change my actions,to mend my broken heart!!!!!
Front-Ranger:
Another instance of brokenness that occurs early in the story. Jack and Ennis sit around the campfire talking about the loss of the submarine Thresher and what it must have been like in those last doomed moments. Here's some info about the event.
--- Quote ---the USS Thresher (SSN-593), the first of the new Thresher-class 3700-ton nuclear-powered attack submarines. Commissioned in August 1961, she underwent extensive sea trials during ‘61 and ‘62. On April 10, 1963, after completion of a re-fit, she began post-overhaul trials. Accompanied by the submarine rescue ship Skylark (ASR-20), she transited to an area some 220 miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and started deep-diving tests.
At 9:13 a.m., the USS Skylark (a surface vessel assigned to assist Thresher) received a signal, via underwater telephone, indicating that the submarine was experiencing “minor difficulties, have positive up-angle, attempting to blow.”
Shortly afterward, the Skylark received a series of garbled, undecipherable message fragments from the Thresher. At 9:18 a.m., the Skylark’s sonar picked up the sounds of the submarine breaking apart. All 129 hands were lost—112 military and 17 civilian technicians.
The submarine community, the Navy and the nation were stunned. Thresher was the best of the newest. The ship was built at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine and was the first of a new class of submarine, designed for optimum performance of sonar and weapons systems
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