So I just got done seeing it for my I've-seriously-lost-count (I'm guessing around 20th) time on HBO, and here are the new things I've come away with:
1.) DavidInHartford was right - Jack would vote Republican. I got that from this line "Why bother earning it? - if the taxes don't eat it up, the inflation will." Taxes = Democrats. Why did I never see that before? In general? I've wondered for years why my blue collar brothers are such Republicans - why anyone who works basically minimum wage and barely squeaks by would vote Republican - and I got it answered for me tonight. Jack would vote Republican because he sees the Democrats as eating away the money he makes in taxes. Ennis, if at all, would vote Democrat because he secretly sides with them for pulling for the "little man." David was right.
2.) Brokeback Mountain is my Cry Therapy. A coworker goes to Busch Gardens in Tampa every year to ride about the scariest roller coaster in the world. Over and over and over again. Why? So he can scream his lungs out. And feel fresh and new afterwards. Brokeback Mountain is the only thing, just about, in this world that can make me cry. Not cry - weep. I still take a low dosage of antidepressants since the bout I had with post-partum depression five years ago - I've tried to wean myself off of them three times, now, and it keeps coming back. But the thing about SSRIs is that they make something in your brain kick in just when you're about to cry - and - stop it. Must be a substance all straight men have in their brains naturally. So, just when I've been at my most vulnerable in my everyday life - fighting with my husband - at my wit's end with my 4-year-old - feeling like a failure at my job - I haven't been able to squeeze out a single tear. But Brokeback makes me weep. Even after nineteen or some odd viewings. I need Brokeback.
3.) The Shirts. OK. How THE HELL can anyone not be moved by the friggin' shirts??? It must be homophobia and nothing else. Otherwise, I don't get how you can come to a point in a movie where you see that someone has carried a torch FOR TWENTY FUCKING YEARS to the extent that they have spirited away their love's shirt and kept it hidden in a childhood closet, covered over with their own shirt from that same period, and not be reduced to a PUDDLE OF FUCKING TEARS. What is FUCKING WRONG with you? I'm sorry, but again, I have the diagnosis: Homophobia. You CANNOT get past the fact that these are two men instead of a man and a woman, can you? Allow me to turn all those hackneyed premises on their ears for a moment and ask you this: If this were a story about a man and a woman and say... a notebook... would you not be equally as moved? Morons.