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TOTW 13/08: Brokeback Mountain = The Wyoming Death Story

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loneleeb3:

--- Quote ---Jack: "...and then tell me you'll kill me..."

--- End quote ---

Still one of the hardest scenes for me to watch!  :'(

optom3:
To me the underlying premise of the whole story is death.What I mean by that is the death of dreams.In particular Jacks' dreams of a "sweet life"
He loses all his optimism en route, which is part of what is so devestating to behold. I think most of us have dreams for our future one way or another.When some of those dreams start to die,I feel a little part of us does too.
It is interesting when at the final meeting ,
the very last vestige of hope/dreams that Jack has clung on to,is seen to die, we discover that not long after he has physically died too.
What Ennis is then left with is just dreams.Albeit of a different type.He dreams of Jack when asleep and it is mainly that which seems to keep him going.The dreams also warm his day,unlike Jack who was permanantly cold at their meetings.
I find it interesting that when Jack is still alive he comforts himself by draming forward to some sort of life with Ennis.When Jack dies Ennis is in effect dreaming back to the time when Jack was still alive.

BlissC:

--- Quote from: optom3 on April 16, 2008, 12:13:33 pm ---I find it interesting that when Jack is still alive he comforts himself by draming forward to some sort of life with Ennis.When Jack dies Ennis is in effect dreaming back to the time when Jack was still alive.

--- End quote ---

That's a good point. Dreams play an important part in the story - and in a way the whole story's a dream because after the prologue we're reading the panels of Ennis's dreams. Even in Ennis's dream though there's death - "...but the can of beans with the spoon handle jutting out and balanced on the log was there as well, in a cartoon shape and lurid colors that gave the dreams a flavour of comic obscenity. The spoon handle was the kind that could be used as a tire iron..."


--- Quote from: Penthesilea on April 23, 2007, 03:37:22 pm ---...borrowed from Annie Proulx, who talked about "The Wyoming Death Trip" in her essay Getting Movied.

Reading people's interpretations of the sunken submarine Thresher mentioned in the story, in another thread today, the idea for this thread formed in my mind.
The story Brokeback Mountain is full of death and doom from the get-go on. Just like Proulx's trip with an interested film-crew in Wyoming (hence the headline).

--- End quote ---

There is no escaping from death in the story, and as I've said to a few people recently who've asked me about being a Brokie and the film, it isn't a love story at all, it's a tragedy, as F-R said, an "epic tragedy", and I think I recall AP herself describing BBM as a "Greek tragedy".

Reading "The Wyoming Death Trip" for the first time I found it interesting that she specifically talked about rural Wyoming and death (it reminded me with Jeff's comment about Jack cooking seeming so "suburban") and the way that in rural life death's a part of the way of life.

The story is very gloomy in many respects, and does concentrate on death an awful lot, but I wonder if the story's maybe not intentionally about death, but simply about the way of life and the cycle of life and death and how that's just a part of life on one level. The story's in many ways an ordinary story (I don't mean that the prose or anything about the story's 'ordinary' because we know it isn't) in that it's the story of two people who happened to meet - two people amongst millions of others. Maybe there are countless other people sharing a similar story (and certainly from some of the messages posted on the official BBM site I remember from not long after the film came out it would seem there are), and life and death and problems with life and marriages, and children, and work, and insecurities and dreams, and everything else are common to most people. What makes the story special to us is that we're given a glimpse of the emotions and the heartache behind the story, but there's sure to be more Jack and Ennises out there, death will be a part of life for all of them, as it is for all of us.

Clyde-B:
Chrissi, thank you for pulling all these references out of the story for us, that was a lot of work.

I have tried to read this story several times to figure out how Annie Proulx made it work, but everytime I try I get lost in the story and lose my purpose.

I'm glad you didn't!

We know from the very beginning of the story that something happened between Ennis and Jack Twist, because they are no longer together, but we don't know what.  What was the relationship between these two men, and what happened to Jack Twist were the questions that kept me reading.

For me, Images in a story, and the words knit together to make up those images, are like butter in the refrigerator.  They take on the flavor of the words and images surrounding them.

These images of death pile one on top of the other and have a kind of cumulative effect.  They give the story a gritty true-to-life feel, and they create an air of forboding that this is not going to end well.

The further I got into it, the more I wanted to it to end happily, but the more I felt it would not.  These death images fuel that sense of impending tragedy.

When Jack actually dies, the timing of his death is surprising, but his death feels inevitable.  I think all these death images contribute to that feeling of inevitability.

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