Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
I just realised why Cowboys don't dance with their wives!
chefjudy:
:) umm, no, kids are grown but I spend a lot of time reading this board and IMDb - I think I need to get a life! lol..................... maybe this is my life??
Sheyne:
Oh no... its a sweet life.. ;)
I divide my time between my boy (7 years old, smiles a lot), my computer and my class of kids at school...
Mine's a busy life!! :D
YaadPyar:
--- Quote from: kelda_shelton on May 17, 2006, 05:09:59 am ---
Lureen was far more wordly aware than Alma Sr.. I mean she was in some alpha beta deta blah blah thing. that in itself is evidence that she is more wordly wise..
--- End quote ---
To me, Lureen's sorority membership is very much social designatin, not academic ones. Especially in Texas at the time Lureen would have been in school. In a great twist of fate, my university degree is from Boston University (in Film, no less)! By the time I attended, the whole Greek system had pretty much died there, except for the African American student body.
But certainly Lureen was more worldly than Alma. She was educated, came from money, had herself been on the rodeo circuit, and was clearly someone who had goals and dreams of her own. We don't see any of that with Alma.
I don't get why everyone thinks Lureen is so awful. I don't think she tricked Jack into marrying her out of calculated ambition. How would that have benefited her in any way? She was more worldly than Alma, but just really a spoiled and protected little girl who got in over her head reeally quickly when she met Jack. And he did too when he met her. They did what a lot of couples did...had sex, got pregnant, got married. And then spent years just trying to make something work that never really did work since they were together for all the wrong reasons.
--- Quote from: Ray on May 17, 2006, 04:16:29 am ---
Fast forward now, (dizzy yet?), to the post "Deceased" phone call from Ennis when Lureen was so ice cold and seemingly rehersed in her response. She only releases when she truly understands who Ennis is. Do you think Lureen knew all along and she used that knowledge as an unspoken control mechanism.
--- End quote ---
I believe Lureen was desperate for the kind of attention and affection that brought her and Jack together in the first place. She wanted a husband who would adore and dote on her as completely as her daddy did, and instead she was with a man who was by nature caring, but mostly indifferent, and who put his mysterious friends before her. I think she was desperate for Jack's adoration, but too proud to say it, and too confused as to why it wasn't there to ever address her disappointment.
I don't know that she tried to control Jack - he didn't have trouble taking off to see Ennis, and left after Ennis's divorce with what seems like no planning, and then returned home with no obvious consequences to his marriage. But a lot of that we don't really know.
I think Lureen teased Jack to see what he would say and how he would respond. She used humor, even though not so funny, to try to understand how her man could be so uninterested. I see women do this all the time. Jokingly complain about their husbands to others in social settings, but what they are joking about is real pain, and they just need some small release and validation that what they're going through is real.
And I think she was so cold on the phone to Ennis in the realization that what she had always hoped was just her wrong-headed suspicions about Jack, were now confirmed to be a reality she didn't want to know about. I think she loved Jack - he's a very lovable guy. But her bitterness adn increasing hardness came from huge disappointment. Everyone's heart broke in a different way.
maggiesmommy GayLee:
just my imagination running away here, and HELL NO, i'm NOT mopping!!!! :-\ I have always thought that Laureen was a bit of a slut...i mean, cummon...she was doing the bone dance in the backseat with jack after a turn on the dance floor!! so. IMO she was used to shagging perfect strangers....i wonder if maybe she was already prego and was looking for a daddy for the baby?? she came on pretty strong....so our jack was vunerable, trying to fit the norm of the times and was just kinda swept up in it al, maybe even trying to forget ennis by going 180 the other way, maybe another man would have been too much of a reminderl...and, they (J & L) never really loved each other, he was the joke of their social circles, and i think just a means to an end for laureen..maybe she was having her own trists during the marriage, after the backseat "thing" she never seems really interested in jack....?? like i said...just musing..but will be late if i don't get going....
have a good day everyone!!
Jeff Wrangler:
I've suspected that Lureen's marrying Jack was an act of defiance against her father. Yes, she was "Daddy's girl," but that sort of thing cuts two ways emotionally. Her father was certainly a controlling person (she has to have the car back by midnight--remember that line?). But she's been to college, where she was a sorority girl, and she comes from a prominent family with money, and girls from that sort of situation in the mid-1960s just didn't marry dirt-poor rodeo cowboys who didn't have two nickels to rub together.
This is also why I've assumed we are supposed to believe that she got pregnant in the back seat of that car that night. It's 1966, seven years before Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in the U.S. While it's probably true that families with money always had "options" for daughters who "got in trouble," Childress, in the Texas panhandle, is more or less the buckle of the Bible Belt, I believe, so that an illegal abortion was probably not an option. That leaves a "shotgun marriage."
Pregnancy followed by a shotgun wedding would account for why L.D. Newsome dislikes his son-in-law so much, in addition to the fact that Jack is dirt poor and not successful. It's also the only way I really buy the marriage. I'm not convinced Lureen could have sweet-talked her father into letting her marry Jack just because she wanted him.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version