Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum

Why the Lie?

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Brown Eyes:
So, this is a relatively straight forward question.  Why does Ennis lie to Alma about how he knows Jack?  When she asks whether they had cowboy-ed together (by the way I love the use of the word cowboy as a verb!) he says, no, that they were fishing buddies.  Why doesn't he want her to know they had worked together?  I truly don't understand the reasoning here.

nakymaton:
I've wondered this, too. Maybe it's partly that Ennis occasionally says things that don't quite make sense when he's flustered and thinking about Jack. ("He's from Texas." "Texans don't drink coffee?") It makes some sense that he tells Alma that Jack rodeos, but I'm not sure why he thinks of fishing. (It certainly sets up the later trips, but I don't quite see why Ennis thinks of it in the first place.)

On the other hand, there's the whole water/love metaphor thing...? (And passion/rodeo, maybe? If you really stretch and squint at it?)

Aussie Chris:
Hmmm, I don't know.  At first I thought (flippantly): because it was in the script!  I wasn't actually going to say that but I couldn't think of a good alternative.  Seems somewhat 'clever' of Ennis to predict the metaphor that he was to use for his trysts with Jack over the next 16 years.  He could just as easily said "an old work buddy" and no one would have been the wiser, but "fishing" as a metaphor would not have come up and we'd need something else in the script to introduce it.  My thought, it was just a short-cut in the script to establish the metaphor.  Happy to be wrong about that though...

Brown Eyes:
Well, even if they were cowboys together they could still be buddies.  And it would still make sense that they might want to hang out and go fishing, etc. in the future.   Does Ennis worry that there is a perception that two cowboys up alone on a mountain might have gotten "too" cozy?  Is he that worried about perceptions?

Meryl:
In thinking about this, I decided it makes sense that Ennis wants to distance Alma as much as possible from Jack because he felt guilty/confused about the relationship from the very beginning.  As he and Jack got closer and closer to each other on the mountain, wouldn't Ennis have been thinking about Alma and wondering what it was going to be like living and making love with her?  When he returned to her after that summer, he probably said very little about Jack because he felt he had done something with him that she would most definitely have been hurt by, had she known.

Over the years before Jack reappeared, Ennis kept him as his guilty secret, "wringing it out" in private to feel close to him again.  When the postcard came, probably all sorts of alarm bells went off in Ennis's subconscious.  God forbid Alma should get an inkling of what he and Jack had been to each other while working together for those months.  The lie popped out as a matter of course.

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