Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
TOTW 01/08: Do you think Jack was murdered or was it an accident?
Penthesilea:
Howdy BetterMostians! :D
Our first TOTW in 2008, and therefore we start counting anew. We now have TOTW 01/08. Next week will be 02/08 and so on.
The topic this week is truly a classic. Souxi suggested to talk about it again. Many thanks to Souxi for her suggestion! :)
Heavy stuff this week... This topic used to be a can of worms long ago with people getting very emotional about it (over on IMDB, back in the old days...). I hope time did some healing for us, or at least we've gained some distance from those emotionally agitaded times following the our first experiences with BBM.
I combined the TOTW with a poll. So if you don't want to get into the debate, you have the opportunity to make your opinon known with a simple click. We'd love to get as many votes as possible, to have a broad base for an overview of the BetterMost Brokies' take on the question.
Edit to add: We'd also be interested in whether your perception regarding the question has changed over time. So tell us about it, if you want :).
And some additional info about the poll: you may select two possibilities, because some aren't contradictory with each other.
Do you think Jack was murdered or was it an accident as Lureen described it to Ennis?
Photo courtesy of Eric. Thanks Bud!
moremojo:
I tend to think Jack was murdered, but cannot know this for sure. In fact, both film and (especially) original story are deliberately ambiguous on this point. This becomes part of Ennis's tragedy, in that he will forever be haunted not only by Jack's death, but by an unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) uncertainty as to how it was encompassed.
I do find it striking that, whether an accident or homicide, a tire iron was the agent of death.
Wayne:
:o Congrats on your 3,oooth post Moremo! :D
Yeah I think we are not supposed to know... Proulx wrote it to be deliberately ambiguous, in the same way it was and would always be for Ennis. This is part of the pain he has to deal with.
I tend to think it was the tire iron, but I hope it was the tire. I don't know ... :-\ :'(
souxi:
Well I voted..."we are not supposed to know", in other words, I think we have to make up our own minds. I think the flashback we had in the film of Jack being beaten with tire irons, could have been one of two things. It could have been what really did happen to him, OR, it could just have been Ennis believing his own worst fears had been confirmed. IF it was tire irons, I,d be inclined to think LD had something to do with it. I wonder if he ever knew that Jack had been seeing men. He always hated Jack right from the start. No rodeo fuck up was ever going to be good enough for his precious daughter was he? So if it was that, I,d say he had something to do with it. Whatever did happen to Jack, the film didn,t so much upset me as make me mad. Sure the ending was very sad, but it made me mad, because two people, who happened to be men, couldn,t be together simply because they knew the rest of the world wouldn,t be able to mind their own damn buisness, and leave them in peace to live their lives. :'( :'(
That my two pence worth anyway.
louisev:
Accident. All references to Jack's death are either from the narrator "Ennis didn't find out about the accident until months later" or from Ennis's point of view, which is referred to in a hallucinatory way. Ennis had absolutely no way to "know for certain" that it was a tire iron. However, he was certain that living openly with another man would lead to his and/or Jack's certain death and the comment by Jack's father about Jack planning to leave his wife and move in with "this other fella" fit his paranoid conviction. It was a measure of Ennis's paranoia that he so wilfully believed in Jack's murder.
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