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

getting hit hard by offhand revelations (story discussion)

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Front-Ranger:
I echo Katherine's thoughts. Wow. Just wow. I'll forevermore look at the story a different way. Perhaps it has to do with me reading it without the prologue (but I doubt it). And here's my copy of the story that I carry everywhere with me, the pages dogeared beyond recognition and out of order, peppered with highlighted words, crossed out words, and notes, with coffee stains and wine stains and burns from being too close to a hot computer...now I think in your honor I will have to make a whole new copy from the original New Yorker pages that I keep enshrined by my bed, or better yet, get a copy that has the prologue. When I do, would you autograph it please??  :-*

Jeff Wrangler:
Bravo, Mel, bravo!

Jeff

Scott6373:
It's not the new revelations that are hitting me, but new layers of the same ones.  The implications of those precious moments from BBM continue to create new ripples in my understanding of who I am and where I fit in this world.  It's sort of like chronic fatigue syndrome...one day fine, maybe for weeks or months fine, then all of sudden, wham...I'm down for th count again.

Mikaela:
Mel, this is extremely perceptive and wonderfully written. Thank you.  :-*

I think it describes perfectly how (and why) I was reading through the short story back in November and in all honesty wondering a bit what the fuss was all about....... and then, how upon reaching the last page it hit me full force  like a freigth train. Whereupon I had to re-read obsessively and got the full impact of all those little deceptively unobtrusive half-sentences that give away the love and the full extent of the tragedy.



--- Quote ---In particular, the story about Jack's father abusing him during toilet training seems... I don't know. Like a deliberate counterbalance to all those emotional revelations, like Annie Proulx had to prove that she wasn't one of those sappy romantic woman writers...
--- End quote ---

I do find that little story very Proulx'ish. It would have fit directly into any other Close Range story. (I find several of them so depressing that I won't be re-reading them any time soon. I'm sure they're nothing but realistic and keenly observed, but there's such an overwhelming bleakness to the depiction of human nature). So I'm not certain she did it to specifically prove she's not sappy - I see it more as Proulx just being Proulx.

Plus, I see the peeing incident as a testament to the hardships (Ennis and) Jack endured and seemingly took pretty much for granted that they'd just have to endure during their formative years. Such a horrible abuse story, - and the anatomical difference was what made the most impression on Jack, not his father's horrible mistreatment of him.....?

I'm not certain of the placement of the abuse story in the narrative, if accepting that it had to be in the story at all. I think the film shows how much more of an impression, how much more tense the scene in the Twist household becomes without any detours to Jack's murder or to Jack's childhood. But I suppose it makes sense that Ennis would feel the need to be reminding himself that he *knew* OMT was a horrible bastard, so shouldn't be surprised he'd tell Ennis what he just did. Perhaps Ennis is trying to convince himself OMT was lying about the ranch neighbor specifically to hurt Ennis? Wouldn't hold it past a guy who could treat his little son that way.



--- Quote ---despite writing an image as powerful as those two shirts like two skins.

--- End quote ---

That *is* powerful. And then the film has managed to increase the power in several ways, I think. Not only in switching the shirts at the end (And I bow down to Heath for suggesting that), but in making Jack steal Ennis's shirt, and creating this 2-shirts symbol of his love for Ennis, as early as that last day on Brokeback.   As far as I read the short story, Jack preserved his own shirt with Ennis's blood as a memory - but then didn't steal Ennis's shirt to be able to create the symbolic "two skins " until some (much) later time. 

serious crayons:

--- Quote from: Mikaela on September 07, 2006, 03:43:49 pm --- So I'm not certain she did it to specifically prove she's not sappy - I see it more as Proulx just being Proulx.
--- End quote ---

I don't know if I see these as very separate things. I think Proulx typically goes out of her way to de-sentimentalize her prose, probably in all her stories but especially when they threaten to veer toward a tone that might otherwise be regarded as sentimental or sappy.

Another example is that sentence in the dozy embrace scene about Ennis not wanting to embrace Jack face to face (and believe me, I am not bringing this up in order to revitalize the debate over that sentence, which I am thoroughly sick of at this point, but ...). Here she's describing the sweetest scene in the story, and she undermines the mood with that sentence. She may have other reasons for it, but I think in part it's a deliberate effort to yank the prose back from the precipice of sentimentality.

BTW, Mel, I sure am glad I encouraged you to write this -- and even more glad that you actually did! You really have changed my view of the story. I still like the movie better, but I can now appreciate the value of those "seemingly offhand" remarks, and realize that in their own way they may be just as effective, at least in print, as the movie's more head-on way of depicting the same events.

At the same time, I also think the movie makes an effort to preserve some of that seemingly offhand approach. My favorite example is Old Man Twist. Just as you note in the paragraph about Ennis, you form an impression of him and then discover something significant and apparently contradictory about him practically as an afterthought. You get that OMT is a jerk, but only later do you notice, wait a minute, he's a jerk but he's not an overtly homophobic jerk.

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