Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum

Possibly misguided mini-metaphors

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serious crayons:
We've seen all the everyday objects -- fans, buckets, coffee pots, water, snow, shirts, hats, colors, wind, hair, guns, trucks, elk -- can carry big metaphoric meaning. Because these objects keep reappearing throughout the movie, it's relatively easy to match them with their circumstances and figure out whether they fit the idea they're supposed to convey.

But I wonder about objects that appear just once or twice, but seem like they might have subtexts, too. It makes sense to me to consider these, given how many of those other symbolic objects could have easily been overlooked, and given how complex and detailed everything else is.

These one-shot things are almost impossible to prove or disprove, easy to imagine, easy to dismiss as imaginary. I thought I'd start a thread in which people can throw out ideas, however far-fetched, and argue over them. Here are a couple:

When Ennis drives up to the Twist ranch, he parks next to a dark, abandoned-looking, shell of a houselike structure. It's actually some kind of ranch outbuilding. But when I saw it, it made me think of the home that Ennis and Jack never had together.

When Ennis goes into Jack's room and picks up the little horse-and-cowboy statue, it's clearly reminiscent of the horse (no cowboy) he was seen carving on Brokeback. It's not the same one, yet it's too coincidental for there not to be a connection. So what does it mean? Does Jack's statue symbolize a life he'd envisioned as part of a couple (the horse and rider), while Ennis' statue represents his expectations of a life alone?

DeeDee:
I know what you mean.  What catches my eye each time I watch, is the fact that Ennis' apartment is right accross the street from the Elks lodge.

Each time I see it,  I wonder if it was purposely put there to remind us, or maybe even Ennis about a time when Jack was hungry and Ennis took care of him.

TJ:

--- Quote from: DeeDee on May 12, 2006, 07:38:14 pm ---I know what you mean.  What catches my eye each time I watch, is the fact that Ennis' apartment is right accross the street from the Elks lodge.

Each time I see it,  I wonder if it was purposely put there to remind us, or maybe even Ennis about a time when Jack was hungry and Ennis took care of him.

--- End quote ---

The reason that there is an Elks lodge across the street from the apartment in the movie is that the lodge actually exists in the town where the scene was filmed.

Penthesilea:

--- Quote ---When Ennis drives up to the Twist ranch, he parks next to a dark, abandoned-looking, shell of a houselike structure. It's actually some kind of ranch outbuilding. But when I saw it, it made me think of the home that Ennis and Jack never had together.
--- End quote ---

This house (annex?) is a shell of a house. I always assumed that this is the house Jack wanted to life in whith Ennis (lick this house and then the ranch in shape). They couldn't have lived together in Jack's childhood roomm, after all. And couldn't have lived together in the same house as mean old man Twist.
But in a neighbouring house - why not? At least for a beginning.
I don't know whether this thought is right. It's just my feeling.

TJ:
The John C. Twist, Sr. house on the ranch at Lightning Flat in the movie is not anything like the house in Annie Proulx's original story. The movie people found an abandoned house and other buildings where they were searching for possible venue locations and decided to use what they found. They had to do some work on the old house to make it look better in the movie.

So, attempting to read some kind of metaphorical meaning into some of what the viewer sees on the movie or TV screen might not have to do with anything at all.

Here is the book description of the Twist House and location.


--- Quote ---The ranch was a meagre little place, leafy spurge taking over. The stock was too far distant for him to see their condition, only that they were black baldies. A porch stretched across the front of the tiny brown stucco house, four rooms, two down, two up.
--- End quote ---


It was a little 4 room house and the upstairs rooms were probably attic rooms. KNowing how the history of houses were built and modified in the country in the Old West, including in Oklahoma, more than likely the original Twist house had just been a 2 room house when it was first built. Jack's grandparents might have owned it originally.

In the book when Ennis remembers Jack's father peeing on him in the bathroom and Jack being late to the bathroom so much, I also believe the bathroom was an add-on lean-to at the downstairs level of the house. I have seen and been in houses just like that.

Here is the book description of Jack's bedroom upstairs in the Twist house.


--- Quote ---The bedroom, at the top of a steep stair that had its own climbing rhythm, was tiny and hot, afternoon sun pounding through the west window, hitting the narrow boy's bed against the wall, an ink-stained desk and wooden chair, a b.b. gun in a hand-whittled rack over the bed. The window looked down on the gravel road stretching south and it occurred to him that for his growing-up years that was the only road Jack knew. . . . The closet was a shallow cavity with a wooden rod braced across, a faded cretonne curtain on a string closing it off from the rest of the room. In the closet hung two pairs of jeans crease-ironed and folded neatly over wire hangers, on the floor a pair of worn packer boots he thought he remembered. At the north end of the closet a tiny jog in the wall made a slight hiding place and here, stiff with long suspension from a nail, hung a shirt.
--- End quote ---


Notice the bedroom "closet" was not really a constructed closet with a door in the book.

From the way that Annie Proulx described the closet, I would say that it had been created from an opening in the wall of the bedroom and the closet itself was a part of the attic and not exactly IN the bedroom.

My opinion here is that in Annie Proulx's story the shirts were not in a real closet (just a poorboy's makeshift one) when Ennis found them and when Ennis puts the shirts on a  hanger in his own trailer at the Stoutamire ranch in Signal, he puts the hanger on a nail on the wall which he had already put the Brokeback Mountain postcard.

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