Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
Double meanings: Lines that can be taken more than one way
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: latjoreme on May 31, 2006, 08:40:00 am ---But I'll be interested, too, in what others say.
--- End quote ---
Sorry, "others," but I waited around, you never replied, and I got impatient and had to post again myself! (My username should just be "threadhog." And has anyone else ever been egocentric enough to quote themselves?)
Kidding. ;D I do still await your reactions to the Ennis/Jr. scene and other previous issues.
But I just happened to be glancing around Dave Cullen's forum for the first time ever, and I saw a brief discussion of another interesting line, and got curious to see what you guys would think. When Ennis says "I can't stand it no more, Jack" what exactly is it that he can't stand, and why?
I guess the simplest answer is that he can't stand the "it" that "you can't fix," that is, the social rules that he previously said "you gotta stand." I'd also like to believe he's saying he can't stand them being apart, that he misses Jack too much, especially because it goes along with him clutching Jack's jacket. But he also might mean, "I can't stand the contradiction I'm living -- in love with a man, but unable to deal with being gay." Most pessimistically of all, he could mean, "I can't stand going on like this, this relationship with you is tearing me up and I wish you would quit me." (That one I don't really believe, but maybe some people do.)
Mikaela:
That line *is* open to a lot of interpretations, isn't it? Once you manage to not just bawl your heart out over it, of course..... Not that it's alone in that respect.
I *think* it probabe that thematically it is intended as an obvious bookend to the reunion scene when Ennis tells Jack when they hook up again that you've got to stand what you can't fix. It's the caption line and motto for their entire hidden relationship. Now, 15 years down the lane, Ennis is saying he *can't* stand it anymore - that leaves open the possibility that he finally might be wanting to have a go at actually *fixing* it? At least, it does indicate a breaking point, the end of the continuous story arc, an impending change.
All that is film technique, though - I don't think it was what Ennis himself meant. I think his words came from a painful and only half-understood realization that the tension on him from the two lives he was living was becoming absolutely unbearable - that those two lives had pulled so far apart that he couldn't manage to maintain the compartmentalization any more - the stress had created cracks and now everything was crumbling under the tension.
The side of him that loves Jack and wants to be with him is under immense stress because the relationship is suddenly openly tenuous and under threath. A break-up can't be ruled out..... not after Jack's Mexico admission and all the bitter and disappointed rest of what Jack says leading up to the "I wish I knew how to quit you". Not after Ennis's own words in response, spoken in fear more than anger. But Jack is Ennis's whole life, his love - in direct contrast to what Ennis says out loud, Ennis would be nothing *without* Jack. The prospect of losing Jack is beyond frightening to Ennis.
At the same time, the homophobic and "pretending to be straight" side of Ennis has been driving Ennis's actions towards that loss. That side has been demanding more and more of his mental resourcesl - putting more pressure on him every day. The increasing fear that people *knows* weighs on his mind and makes him go against his own deepest wishes and desires, makes him deliberately see Jack more seldom than before. I can't find any other explanation for him sitting silently when Jack says his "sometimes I miss you so much...." line, for him keeping to his decision to cancel the August meet even after that. It would have moved a rock to cancel every other appointment and obligation! And the Ennis of the first few years relationship would have quit his job and gone to meet Jack in August. Ennis uses the child support as an excuse, but to me that's what it is - an excuse. I think in a way the homophobic part of him has subconsciously been forcing him towards a breaking point. Which finally arrives when Ennis says he can't stand this any more: He can't live both lives. He'll have to chose...... Though when he says that, I don't think he knows or sees all of that or the having to choose at all clearly yet - he's just completely emotionally worn out from it all and can't take any more and says os as he breaks down. But his realization will be gradual over the next months - I think he's well on his way to it, and to even making his choice, when he meets Cassie at the Bus Station cafe.
tiawahcowboy:
This is not in the original story; because after Jack says, "I wish I knew how to quit you," Ennis stood as if heart-shot, face grey and deep-lined, grimacing, eyes screwed shut, fists clenched, legs caving, hit the ground on his knees. Ennis is not quoted as saying anything else after Jack got out of his own truck and he tried to guess if it was heart attack or the overflow of an incendiary rage, Ennis was back on his feet and somehow, as a coat hanger is straightened to open a locked car and then bent again to its original shape, they torqued things almost to where they had been, for what they'd said was no news. Nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved.
Annie Proulx did not write a thing about them touching when they were in the trailhead parking lot. Other than the one time when Ennis kissed Jack that one time at the 1967 reunion where he thought no one was watching, Ennis did not touch Jack in a public place again where he thought people might see. [Oh, the scene with dialog where Jack shows up unannounced after Alma's divorce from Ennis is not a story original.]
So, in the way that I read the original story, they just drove off without saying anything further after Jack's last "Ennis?" and then Ennis just assumed that Jack would agree to meet him again in November.
While people refer to this scene in the movie as the "lake scene," their trucks are parked in a trailhead parking lot by a lake.
Exact quote of Ennis's line in the movie, "I just can't stand this anymore, Jack."
I just have to guess what the screenplay writers and the movie script people meant here.
I say that maybe Ennis cannot stand the fact that his soul and body wants to be with Jack because he is actually in love with Jack. But, he has got it fixed in his stubborn mind that because of the hand which other people dealt him and he cannot trade cards so to speak, he can't fix it, he just has to stand it although it is making him miserable.
I find that movie scene where Ennis did show emotion and cried odd in the fact that Larry McMurtry told Time Magazine interviewer that men don't understand emotion.
--- Quote ---http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1151802,00.html
One of the main things you added to the story was women.
In a lot of your work, women turn out to have far richer interior lives than men.
I have always argued that if you want to learn something about emotion, you have to ask women. That's why I've had three women characters who've won Oscars--[for] Patricia Neal, Cloris Leachman and Shirley MacLaine. I've always thought that for my interests, emotionally, I have to seek women to talk about. Men don't talk about emotion. They don't understand it.
--- End quote ---
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: tiawahcowboy on May 31, 2006, 04:02:08 pm ---Exact quote of Ennis's line in the movie, "I just can't stand this anymore, Jack."
I just have to guess what the screenplay writers and the movie script people meant here.
I say that maybe Ennis cannot stand the fact that his soul and body wants to be with Jack because he is actually in love with Jack. But, he has got it fixed in his stubborn mind that because of the hand which other people dealt him and he cannot trade cards so to speak, he can't fix it, he just has to stand it although it is making him miserable.
I find that movie scene where Ennis did show emotion and cried odd in the fact that Larry McMurtry told Time Magazine interviewer that men don't understand emotion.
--- End quote ---
Oh, you're right, Tiawahcowboy, it is "can't stand this." I don't know if I've heard the "just" but I'll listen for it next time. Nice to see you discussing the movie (as opposed to the story) now and then!
And your theory makes sense about why he says it.
As for Larry McMurtry's quote about men not understanding emotion -- a lot of people would argue that just because Ennis expresses emotion doesn't mean he fully understands it. In other words, I don't think McMurtry was necessarily saying that men are unemotional.
tiawahcowboy:
--- Quote from: latjoreme on May 31, 2006, 04:37:22 pm ---Oh, you're right, Tiawahcowboy, it is "can't stand this." I don't know if I've heard the "just" but I'll listen for it next time. Nice to see you discussing the movie (as opposed to the story) now and then!
And your theory makes sense about why he says it.
--- End quote ---
I discussed both of them in the same post, right? I actually prefer to discuss the movie opposed by the story as far as the movie itself is concerned. In certain Yahoo Groups, one of which was especially for those who had read the original story but had not yet seen the movie, we did not have to "argue" about the movie at all.
When it comes to why certain no-name characters in the original story had to be given names and lots of movie scenes, I can only theorize about that, too. Annie Proulx had no such person named "Cassie" who worked at a bar in Riverton. She had no one working at a Riverton bar in her story.
--- Quote from: latjoreme on May 31, 2006, 04:37:22 pm ---As for Larry McMurtry's quote about men not understanding emotion -- a lot of people would argue that just because Ennis expresses emotion doesn't mean he fully understands it. In other words, I don't think McMurtry was necessarily saying that men are unemotional.
--- End quote ---
Well, it's like this McMurtry does seem to be from the "Old School," which actually began after the start of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1890s, when boys began to be taught that it was unmanly to even show emotion in another guy's presence. Real men kept their emotions to themselves and just tuffed it out. Anthony Rotundo in his book, American Manhood, mentioned how in America the attitude men had toward themselves and other men changed. If you were to read some of the correspondence between men who were definitely just best friends before the Industrial Revolution, you would think that they were love letters because they used lots of terms of endearment in them.
And, if you read what I copied from Annie Proulx's story, you will see that Ennis himself quickly put himself back in check as far as his emotions were concerned. Jack could not figure out whether Ennis was having a heart attack or throwing a raging fit. And by the time Jack got out of his truck, Ennis acted like he had not even been upset at all.
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