Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
P.O. Boxes, Mailboxes and the No. 17
Brown Eyes:
--- Quote from: goadra on August 12, 2006, 05:16:21 pm ---And of course there’s this observation: “Brokeback Mountain consists of 17 letters”
--- End quote ---
:laugh: I love that one!
And, yes I've always thought it was sort of interesting that the numbers can be read as either regular "17" or 1+7 to equal 8. The mailbox and even the trailer (a move from the shack) do make this last bit of the movie seem like a new beginning of sorts. Either having a mailbox does make Ennis more of a hermit or it symbolizes the idea, at least, that he's keeping communications open with the outside world. I'm sure it must have something to do with Jack... because with the two of them some sort of connection or meaning about them as a duo is almost always the case.
:-\
Front-Ranger:
Okay, this is as far-fetched as all the others, but Ennis very carefully applies the one and then the seven, to indicate that he is one (all alone) seven days a week. ???
Mikaela:
--- Quote ---And, yes I've always thought it was sort of interesting that the numbers can be read as either regular "17" or 1+7 to equal 8.
--- End quote ---
I'm going to beat you all at being far-fetched: I like to read the 17 as 1+7=8. Because the "8" sideways becomes the sign of infinity. So the 17 really is a riddle, even a riddle within a riddle. 17 equals infinity, and what else equals infinity? The solution is "Jack and Ennis forever".
No, I don't at all think this is what was intended in the film. It's the explanation I favour even so. :-* :)
Andrew:
I have thought a lot about the 17 since an extended discussion on the DC forum about number symbolism, quite a while back. And most of it I was not enthusiastic about because discussions of symbolism so often go flying away from particular characters in a particular story. The only possible interest to me was, If Ennis was thinking about those two numbers as he put them up (whether or not he had had a choice in picking his address), what would they have meant to him?
And I don't think he was in school long enough, or was interested enough in written words, to count the letters in Brokeback Mountain, for example.
But what he was always aware of was time, how long tilll he could get free long enough to meet with up with Jack again, how long had it been since he had seen Jack. And that as he thought about their history together he had already counted up the years. And I think as Ennis was putting up those numbers, he was saying again to himself, Just like the seventeen years I was meeting Jack in the mountains! And I think the thought of that, the heft of all those years in spite of the brevity of each meeting, was a consolation to him.
I will include one other correspondence with the 17 which I am absolutely sure is PURE COINCIDENCE! Which I just came up with on my own. And I guess, shows how easy it can be to get numbers to perform tricks for you if you enjoy getting mystical about them. I am going to quote again the sentence from the story I cited in the thread, 'Annie Proulx, classic writer':
Years on years they worked their way through the high meadows and mountain drainages, horse-packing into the Big Horns, Medicine Bows, south end of the Gallatins, Absarokas, Granites, Owl Creeks, the Bridger-Teton Range, the Freezeouts and the Shirleys, Ferrises and the Rattlesnakes, Salt River Range, into the Wind Rivers over and again, the Sierra Madres, Gros Ventres, the Washakies, Laramies, but never returning to Brokeback.
To give a (to me, stunningly) concrete sense of the passage of time and of the epic dimension of their love, Annie lists 17 different mountain ranges and mountains in Wyoming, other than Brokeback Mountain itself, to which they never returned.
The 17 address is only in the movie, this list of names is only in the story. But though I highly doubt that she counted them, I think Annie would have wanted to come up with a list that was roughly proportionate to the number of years they met, and, along the lines of what I said in the other thread, convey in a single sentence what few other writers would have trusted themselves to get across in under a page or two.
Marge_Innavera:
--- Quote from: goadra on August 12, 2006, 05:16:21 pm ---Could anyone conclude something was going on from just a few postcards a year? I’m not sure. I’m also not sure they would have much more to say (or want to say) in letters or even phone calls, for that matter. Because the only purpose is to arrange to see each other, “Fish should be jumping” says “Can’t wait to see you” just as well. Everything else could be said when they’re together.
--- End quote ---
On every viewing, it's seemed to me that Ennis' conviction that so many people "know" is a symptom of his insecurity and paranoia. Alma has known far longer than he thinks and by extension Monroe probably does too. But so many people think they can "tell" a person is gay based on stereotypes and since Ennis doesn't fit them -- and Jack has been in Riverton only once, I'd guess that there wouldn't be much speculation and what there was would die from a lack of visible "fuel."
In the case of the postcards, the text shown is pretty neutral; and why would people be peering through a window at his mail in the first place?
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