Just stopped in at the main board a few days ago and saw an interesting thread about the timing of the flashback. The thing that really caught my attention was the focus on what was/was not/might have been said between Jack and Ennis (mostly from Film, but I suppose Story could fit in here) between Jack's "Damn, you, Ennis" when Ennis is clutching him, and Ennis driving away.
If this is already a thread on here, pardon me and direct me to it! I'm still not so on top of everything here.
If this was done to death sometime between late November and now on the main board or at Chez Tremblay, I missed it - and while I admit the possibility, I find it unlikely.
Third disclaimer: I'm going to copy a post, with the poster's IMDB screen name, here. If this is impermissible for some reason, would one of the lovely moderators gently tell me so? Thanks gang, as always I am really interested in your thoughts. Here's the post:
amandazehnder (Wed Apr 12 2006 19:12:48 )
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whiteorchid32, I agree that Jack mostly looks hurt and frustrated. I'm also quite struck by how pale and worn-out he looks during this scene. In the story Proulx notes that "what they'd said was no news. Nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved." And, that they managed to "torque things almost to where they had been..." And, this is the sense that I got in the film too. They would go back to the status quo.
I'm increasingly convinced that the importance of the timing of the flashback has to to with positioning Ennis's last line in the flashback "see you in the morning" as the last line of dialogue that we actually hear between Jack and Ennis (even though it's out of sequence in the actual chronology of the film). Unbearably bittersweet and ominous.
So what really go me about this was the fact that the last line of dialog we hear between Ennis and Jack is Ennis' "see you in the morning," unless, like I sometimes am willing to entertain, we take Ennis's final "Jack, I swear . . ." as a line of dialog between them . . .