Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
TOTW 18/07: Do you think classic cowboy icons like the "Marlboro Man" were proto
Front-Ranger:
There are 24 pages of posts about a talk in Casper, Wyoming, on this subject, that included a talk by Annie Proulx!!
http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,4224.msg338761.html#msg338761
Front-Ranger:
From the book Cowboy by Linda Granfield:
--- Quote ---Cowboy is actually a very old word. It has been traced to Ireland, where horsemen were called cow-boys almost 2,000 years ago. . . . During the American Revolution...the word cowboy became ugly. . . . By the mid-1800s the word had returned to its original meaning--a hired man who works with cattle and performs many of his duties on horseback.
--- End quote ---
Brown Eyes:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on February 21, 2008, 11:36:38 pm ---There are 24 pages of posts about a talk in Casper, Wyoming, on this subject, that included a talk by Annie Proulx!!
http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,4224.msg338761.html#msg338761
--- End quote ---
That's awesome Lee! I'd forgotten about that thread. 8)
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on February 21, 2008, 04:28:39 pm ---and don't forget "inured to the stoic life" that's one a my favourites! No rhinestone cowboys, these!
Both Proulx and Lee, in the early character development stages, were driving home the point that Jack and Ennis were the underdogs of Wyoming society, which in itself represents the underdog of U.S. society. Jack and Ennis came from opposite parts of the state, travelling to the central part roughly where the Continental Divide is located, in a hardscrabble search for work. Ennis was an orphan whose folks kept their money in a coffeecan and drove themselves to their death. Jack's folks were in the doomed family farming industry in an area where even successful farmers earn only pennies of profit per acre, if at all. What's more, they were on the fringes of Wyo career paths, neither working in the oilfields or herding cattle.
Ironically, Jack and Ennis were closer to the real cowboys than guys who were actually called cowboys in the 1960s. Real cowboys had their heyday during only about two decades of U.S. history. They were young men, mostly unschooled, but some were universitiy students from the East who had fallen in love with that life. The students usually didn't last long because cowboying was a dirty, thankless job with low pay, long hours, much tedium especially during winter, discomfort, and a great deal of loneliness.
--- End quote ---
Well, it's interesting just how nuanced and complex the concept of a cowboy really is. Clearly the history of that concept or job or identity must be very complex decade to decade. At this point I'm really interested in learning more about it in a serious way.
I'm still particularly curious about the early 1960s in terms of historical significance.
It would be interesting to do some more thorough research on this. I've never thought too much about western history until BBM came into my life. And, while I've been interested in film for a long time (even in academics... I was a T.A. for two film-history courses in grad school) I've never focused much attention on the genre of the western. So, coming up with examples... again filmic/cultural, visual role models to compare with BBM through the course of this thread is really an interesting discovery. Meanwhile, my new copy of Giant is winging its way to me via Amazon and hopefully should be here by Saturday. I've seen both Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden but, ironically now for the context of BBM here, never Giant (I ordered a set of all 3 movies, so that will be a fun little film festival coming up) And, now I'm growing more curious about Ride the High Country too. So, BBM continues to expand my horizons, which is just so amazing.
Anyway... I just finished watching all the "bonus feature" interviews on the original BBM DVD and it was a really nice refresher about certain things. The interview with Diana and Larry is just so funny... they're both just so, so serious and keep finishing each other's sentences. And there's one place where they discuss BBM (very briefly) in terms of genre... and they said they feel BBM is "framed" by the western but, then Larry said he thinks of it as a drama/love-story more specifically. And, then when he was talking about his reaction to reading the New Yorker story he said something like (I'm paraphrasing) "I wish I had written it... the subject's always been laying there in the west, the attraction between cowboys."
And, this is very OT, but I'd completely forgotten that in one of the interviews Jake actually refers to Ennis and Jack as "yin and yang." I'm sure we've discussed this in the Yin and Yang thread... but somehow that had slipped my mind/ caught me somewhat by surprise when I was watching those bonus features just now. And, then there was this lovely thing that Heath said (again something I'd sort of forgotten about)... but which echoes so much of what we always say here... that he hoped Brokeback would present more questions than answers.
serious crayons:
For me, the quintessential Brokeback predecessor is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Like BBM, it's a revisionist, rather than classic, Western. And the homoerotic undertones are there, if not the actual sex. I loved that movie!
And more recently, there's 3:10 to Yuma. More of a completely classic Western, almost Shakespearean. Homoeroticism even more deeply buried. But I loved that one, too.
What is it with me and Westerns involving two handsome actors? Maybe I'd better order Ride the High Country, too!
:laugh:
Another interesting thing, and this has been mentioned on this thread, is the conflation of movies about cowboys with movies about outlaws and sheriffs. Westerns, to me, are really more the latter. And yet we think of them as being about "cowboys." Not all that many Westerns are about actual "cowboys," are they? Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove comes to mind, and probably a few John Wayne ones, and ...I'm grasping here; Westerns aren't my film history forte. But often they seem to be about keeping law and order in the Wild West rather than herding cattle.
Brown Eyes:
--- Quote from: ineedcrayons on February 22, 2008, 12:18:10 am ---
Another interesting thing, and this has been mentioned on this thread, is the conflation of movies about cowboys with movies about outlaws and sheriffs. Westerns, to me, are really more the latter. And yet we think of them as being about "cowboys." Not all that many Westerns are about actual "cowboys," are they? Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove comes to mind, and probably a few John Wayne ones, and ...I'm grasping here; Westerns aren't my film history forte. But often they seem to be about keeping law and order in the Wild West rather than herding cattle.
--- End quote ---
Yes, I think this is very accurate to note McMurtry as particularly being famous for the "gritty, realism" type of depiction of working cowboys and nuances of western culture in general vs. quick-draw/ high-noon/ sheriffs and outlaws types of westerns. [They mention this briefly in one of the bonus features actually! And, is sort of fresh in my mind at the moment. So, this is a super perceptive comment Crayons!]. My hunch is that this is why McMurtry himself resists the genre label of "western." And, this is where the concept of realism/ real life/ examples of real non-cinematic cowboys plays a huge role and is just as important to the construction of BBM as cinematic role models.
p.s. I just went and found a bunch of cool images from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and wanted to post them here, but my divshare account is not cooperating tonight (it won't let me upload the pics from my computer at the moment). So, I'll try and post them tomorrow night.
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