Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
TOTW 12/07:Is Brokeback Mountain a 'universal love story' or a 'gay love story'?
Garry_LH:
There is no doubt that Brokeback Mountain has hit a lot of folks in many diffrent ways. My first time, I got to the theater as the previous showing was letting out. Straight couples, of the age Jack and Ennis would be today, with this numb look of near drained shock on their faces. A few women completely falling apart in tears. A group of women, who I would have labled as the 'academic film going club, silent with looks of deep thought on their faces. A cluster of teenage girls, one of them gushing about how she thought Heath was just the hottest guy there is... And those lone men... Many of them looking more at their feet than the world. Like they were just trying to get one foot in front of the other to get out to their cars and pickups. Just hanging on, cuse men don't cry... especially in public, or at least not outside of a darkend theater.
I guess I too believe that that the closer a theatrical experience comes to the reality of our own lives, the more potential it has to move us far beyond what we could have imagined before we experienced it. Even as, such a masterpiece will touch the hearts of all who are at a place in their own lives where they will allow it's Spirit to touch their souls. What ever Brokeback Mountain is, it is a gift from Spirit for those that are ready to see, hear, and feel its power in their own lives. It is for me nothing less than sacred.
ifyoucantfixit:
I have only this short...it will be,,,heheh....thing to say..I think what makes it universal, is the universal truths it
shows. How all people can be affected in these kinds of ways that are depicted.
I so happens that the two protagonists are gay, which added an extra dimension, that the gay population could,
readily connect to. It I think is a universal story, with a gay core.
jstephens9:
--- Quote from: Garry_LH on October 28, 2007, 12:32:45 pm ---Am I the only one that feels a longing in Jake Gyllenhaal's Jack to put his feelings into words. Even as Jack knows, those very words would send Ennis running for his life.
--- End quote ---
Garry,
You have some excellent thoughts about the movie and the question. I wanted to answer that yes I did feel the longing in Jack to explain the feelings in words to Ennis. But instead, he had to make things seem as less threatening as he could. I believe he feared that by going too far he would destroy what they did have. It wasn't even a quarter as much as what Jack wanted, but it was something. Feelings to preserve what you have with someone can many times lead to not telling them completely what is on your mind.
Bucky:
I think Jack and Ennis' love story is both a universal love story and a gay love story. I think that when Jack and Ennis worked for Aguirre on Brokeback Mountain that both of them had experienced lonely childhoods with dads who were unfeeling and Ennis had no parents at all after a certain age and had to be raised by his sister and brother. Somehow Jack and Ennis had found in each other something special that they both understood. On Brokeback Mountain they could be themselves and love openly but after they came down from Brokeback Mountain reality had set in which was harder for Ennis to cope with it seems to me than Jack. The reality was that because society was as it was that their love could never be so Ennis married Alma and Jack eventually married Lureen. Yet their feelings for one another on the inside was as strong as ever and in reality they loved each other more than anyone else even though Ennis spent enough time trying to deny it. It was a strong love but a forbidden love and after Jack died Ennis spent a lot of time in regret for a life time of denying that he loved Jack and what might have been.
Artiste:
More news ??
Or is it a hate-crime story because these, one or more are gays (homosexual or bisexual men)?
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