Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
A Ninth Viewing Observation
Front-Ranger:
Good question, and welcome back, BBM victim. For some reason, people equate the outer furniture with the inner furniture. I remember my aunt talking to my mother one time about a visit to my aunt's sister (another aunt). Apparently Aunt #1 was concerned about Aunt #2 who lived in Boston alone, so Aunt #1 rounded up another aunt or two and went off to visit. They were very impressed to find Aunt #2 living in a well-furnished apartment. But, when Aunt #2 went out of the room they snooped around and found that all of the furniture was new and still had price tags on it! This says to me that Aunt #2 was so concerned about keeping up appearances that she probably went into debt to give the facade that she had a prosperous and reputable life. That's just one aspect of furniture.
The other thing is what Ennis says next. He says, "When you don't got nothing, you don't need nothing." Which means, exactly, that when you lose the wish to win other's approval with your material trappings, then all of the other materialist cravings fall away. Ennis had truly learned the meaning of life, which is to love and be loved. And, that's it. :'( :-*
Yes, I did see Manchester By the Sea. Yes, Lee is a real Ennis-like character, scarred by the experience he went through when he was young. I don't know if I could say more about it without spoilers. Another similarity is, of course, the presence of our own Michelle Williams, as a mother again.
BBM_victim:
Hey, Front-Ranger!
Hope you're doing fine :).
Thanks a lot for your story! It's really funny how i have not encountered this furniture issue anywhere else in my own personal life. This is probably also the reason why it stands out for me so much.
I wonder whether Ennis cared about materialist stuff at all. I think he never really pursued any of his own wishes or dreams. Did he have any at all? Meeting up with Jack seems rather to be a necessity which kept him alive than a "pleasure" event. Like eating after you have almost starved. Hope you get what i mean.
I don't know whether marriage and having kids was any dream of his - i actually doubt so. I think he was just fulfilling the norm, acting like he was supposed to be. I think he never had enough courage to even think about what he actually wanted in life. The man was living on auto-pilot and only felt truly alive when being with Jack. That's how i see it.
So, maybe the furniture thing was also kind of sign of his "awakening", giving up keeping appearances, living how he truly felt instead of fulfilling other people's expectations. What do you think?
serious crayons:
I find this conversation fascinating because I once interviewed a furniture-less man.
This man had done time in prison, I'm not sure what for, but he'd been out for some some years and had spent that time trying to help his son, a young teenager, straighten up. The dad could see the boy was getting into trouble (and with it, potential danger) -- skipping school, failing classes, hanging out with questionable kids. The dad tried to get the kid to follow the rules with various tactics, including some that sounded overly harsh to me, but he obviously loved the boy and was desperate.
I was there because the kid, at 14, had been killed in a gang-related drive-by shooting.
The kid's mom, by the way, mostly refused to talk to me, which I'd never blame a grieving parent for doing. But she did say, very vehemently, that her son was a good boy and would never get into any kind of trouble.
The dad was very nice and open to talking and seemed to speak from the heart.
When I interviewed him, we sat in the living room of his apartment on those folding aluminum lawn chairs with the nylon webbing. They were just about the only things in the room.
BBM_victim:
Hey serious crayons!
Thanks for joining in :) and thanks for your story, too :).
Well, but apart from the fact that his son was killed and he possibly felt guilty for it (which is horrible enough, of course) what do we know about his living arrangements? Maybe he was about to move or just moved in? And was his apartment consisting of only one room? Have you seen the others if there were more?
I have another story - still when i was a student ;p. I lived 6 months in Finland with my (Japanese) boyfriend (now husband) because i studied one semester at the university there. It was in a small town, kind of "in the middle of nowhere", you had to walk 15min through woods to get to the next supermarket. The apartment we lived in had two rooms and a kitchen (again, a build-in one). One room was supposed to be the living room, the other one the bedroom. But it was all too big for us. We spent most of our time in the bedroom where we had all our belongings and the living room stayed completely empty till the end. When we had guests we cooked for we spread some blankets on the floor and did kind of a picnic in the living room, but nobody felt funny :D.
Again, maybe it was the lack of money, maybe just the fact that we stayed there for 6 months only, or maybe we are some sort of "spartan" people, who don't need much to be happy [hey, is that what Ennis meant in a way??], but it never crossed our mind that furniture - or lack of it - might tell anything about our mental state.
When i think about it, i have a work colleague, who moved to Singapore for 1 year and he arranged one whole container for his belongings, where he also shipped his bed. When i asked him whether he cannot buy any beds in Singapore he said "That's my bed. I can't live without my bed."
???? I still don't get it.... But i guess it's only me...
Corax:
When I had finished university, I moved into a small flat in the center of the city. Since I didn't have much money at first, I didn't buy much furniture. I had a bed, a weird closet ( the one some people use in the attic as a second closet) and some cushions that I used as sofas. My parents were always bugging me to buy representable funiture. Me and my friends liked it that way though. It was okay.
Some years ago, friends of mine moved to the U.S. for 2 years. They brought almost all their furniture to Boston. It was a very big shipping container that was full to capacity. Like BBM victim I asked them why they didn't intend to buy things there. They told me that they wanted to be surrounded by THEIR furniture. I really didn't get it, especially since they didn't sell their house and came back twice a year for holiday.
When they moved back to Germany, they had two shipping containers, a big/ normal one and a small one. The small one included a car, a motorbike and three bikes. Funny
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