Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
getting hit hard by offhand revelations (story discussion)
Front-Ranger:
I love this! Especially the reference to a mountain of laundry!!
I'm sure there are many answers, Scott, but the one that works for me is the ancient custom of young men going up a mountain, or out in the desert to test their manhood or to undergo initiation rites. Let's see, I wrote about this somewhere else in connection with werewolves...let me unbury it for you.
Glad to see you thinking about the story again!! Does this mean you're no longer bored with it? If so, yay!!
Scott6373:
I don't think I was bored, I think, like so many others, it instigated so many profound changes that, after that whole process wound down, I had little interest in dissecting it anymore. This morning was truly a "random revelation"..it quite literally popped up out of nowhere.
serious crayons:
Oh, and one other thing: there is some Eden-like imagery associated with their time on Brokeback, so Ennis' headlong, irreversible fall suggests Adam and Eve's "fall."
Jeff Wrangler:
They had to be on a mountain because they had to be alone and isolated and pretty much inaccessible for what happened to them to happen.
And they never go back because Brokeback Mountain was their Eden, and once you are expelled from Eden, whether by God or by Joe Aguirre (in his order to bring 'em down), you can never go back. Ennis's sensation of being in a headlong, irreversible fall as he descends from the mountain is, I'm sure, intended to resonate with the Fall of Man from Paradise. :-\
Front-Ranger:
To me, the offhand revelations are so hard-hitting because they're the closest that Ennis and Jack get to telling each other the truth. The cowboy way is to speak in code, saying the opposite of what you mean, or, if all else fails, hide behind your hat and be silent.
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