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

Life and this movie are messy

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Mikaela:

--- Quote ---I'm really interested - any other messy things can you think of in this beautiful movie?
--- End quote ---

Those wet sheep that (especially) Jack keeps carrying in his arms, dragging around or holding on to on his horse in scene after scene on the mountain - I've been thinking to myself that they must give his clothes, his blue shirt in particular, a very distinct patina of greasy stains and harsh smell.

Not that the boys would notice it much, they'd be so used to it. Or if they did, they'd think it smelled of making honest money, I suppose. Just like the Del Mar bedroom's smells and noises, right after Junior is born, reminded Ennis of life's continuance. I've always loved that in the story.  :)

Jack did sure notice the cat piss smell, though....  ;)

And yes, I'm a city girl, I can't deny that.....



--- Quote ---Anyone remember a time when someone spit when they were happy or cheerful, as they might easily do in real life?
--- End quote ---

It struck me that the counterargument to this one might be: Anyone remember a time when they were happy and cheerful? There are so relatively few of such scenes that it kind of makes sense that the infrequent spitting, even if completeyl non-symbolic, would happen in tense or unhappy scenes. :-\
I've not changed my opinion - I still feel certain the spitting is there for entirely intentional reasons. But this discussion has nevertheless opened my eyes to there being no certainty in that. 

nakymaton:
Truth is... I could never keep straight who was a bucket and who was a coffee pot; that symbolism never worked for me either. I think the bucket-kicking/coffee-pot-dropping was also more to give a sort of rhythm to scenes; many of the background actions in the movie (whether water flowing or people riding horses or wind blowing) have a continuous feel to them -- they are the sort of thing that could lull a person to sleep easily. Many of the themes in the score have a flowing sort of feel to them, as well. Things like kicking a bucket or help pull the audience's attention toward Ennis.

That's what they do for me, anyway. They set a time and place, and they give the characters things they can interact with.

As for dirt: I'm not going to get into a symbolic discussion of dirt. I happen to like dirt; to me, dirt = real.

fernly:
Far as symbols go....I've heard more than one writer at readings or seminars respond to a question about a symbol by saying something like....no, in that particular case the symbol wasn't intentional, but sure it works that way and they wish they had thought of it consciously.
I'm in the camp of believing a lot of the symbols in the movie were intentional (Jack using the axe and Ennis the saw, for example). There are plenty that I don't think were (the water sloshing out of the buckets as Jack carries them, for instance) but they still make sense to me personally, and the analysis y'all have done on them has certainly enriched my experience of the film.

Meryl:

--- Quote from: latjoreme on July 12, 2006, 01:10:27 am ---Now, obviously there's plenty of room for argument. Nobody knows what the filmmakers' intentions were, and we can read all kinds of things all kinds of different ways. And it's even possible that sometimes it really does mean nothing, that something's just there because it's there.
--- End quote ---

When something is working and the juices are flowing, many, many things can fall into place that are just "right."  As Jeff Wrangler pointed out so tellingly a few posts above:


--- Quote ---Tell you what. The truth is, sometimes I feel that if someone sat down and deliberately planned everything in this film in which someone somewhere has seen symbolism or significance, we'd still be waiting for the film to be made.
--- End quote ---

I tend to agree with this poster over at IMDb, nonon99 99, who wrote this in my "Brokeback and the Number 3" thread:

Often the creator himself doesn't know more about his work than us do. Artist who has sufficient traning just creates automatically in a way he feels comfortable with, as Ang Lee said 'I do it from my heart'. But that the artist isn't conscious doesn't mean systematic things in a work do not exist. This phenomena always happenes in classical music. Academic music analysist will figure out the structure, harmornic system, etc of a piece of music in a very meticulous way while the composer himself is more guided by his ears. This is a mystery of all great arts.

I'm sure the final product is a combination of Ang Lee's genius and meticulous attention to detail and what nonon said, that much of it is unconscious.  This film feels like it has bubbled up out of the mass psyche to speak to an infinite number of aspects of soul and heart.  It is a mystery, and I think that none of us are sorry about that.  It gives us so much to explore and discuss and wonder at!  Thousands and thousands of posts, and we're no closer to a consensus, other than that there's a whole lot there to love.  :)

Front-Ranger:
I think we have to go back to the original story. Annie Proulx wrote that the story went through more than 60 edits! That's a lot of edits for a short story! Watching the movie, I noticed some things that looked like they might be symbolic: the colors, the pickup trucks, the star on the barn door, soup and beans, etc. When I went back to the story to see if they were there too, sure enough, I found almost all of them! Some motifs are more fully developed in the story than in the movie and vice versa. But you can definitely see the director's mind at work. He and his team (I'm thinking Diana Ossana was very much involved in this too) sat down with the story and diagrammed it out, with instructions to the wardrobe people, the props people, the set designer, etc. as to how the themes could be carried out in their respective areas. The script shows this process in evolution--it has some themes that are less developed than in the movie and other themes that were discarded later.

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