do we all have components in our psychology that are both reserved and also outgoing? sure, and we evolve over time.Agreed, and Ennis and Jack represent all kinds of complementary attributes that are usually found in various combinations and degrees in most people. For example, I see Jack as exhibiting both masculine and feminine qualities (whereas Ennis strikes me as emphatically masculine), and as such, represents a more psychologically integrated persona than does Ennis. I believe that most people have both feminine and masculine elements in their makeup, and can see themselves reflected as such in the character of Jack.
May I say that I see Ennis as you say, and he becomes more like Jack... in some ways!!Absolutely. We see Ennis learn from Jack's personality over the course of the film, and incorporate those lessons into his own life. Note Ennis's tender gesture towards Jenny in the Thanksgiving scene...mirroring the similar gesture that Jack bestowed on Ennis in the second tent scene and tried to in the post-divorce meeting. And above all, there is Ennis's loving sacrifice of much needed income for Junior's sake at the very end...suggesting that he has learned from Jack that love is the most important thing in life.
Agreed, and Ennis and Jack represent all kinds of complementary attributes that are usually found in various combinations and degrees in most people. For example, I see Jack as exhibiting both masculine and feminine qualities (whereas Ennis strikes me as emphatically masculine), and as such, represents a more psychologically integrated persona than does Ennis. I believe that most people have both feminine and masculine elements in their makeup, and can see themselves reflected as such in the character of Jack.
Absolutely. We see Ennis learn from Jack's personality over the course of the film, and incorporate those lessons into his own life. Note Ennis's tender gesture towards Jenny in the Thanksgiving scene...mirroring the similar gesture that Jack bestowed on Ennis in the second tent scene and tried to in the post-divorce meeting. And above all, there is Ennis's loving sacrifice of much needed income for Junior's sake at the very end...suggesting that he has learned from Jack that love is the most important thing in life.also a good point that I had not thought over, yes they did learn from each other as all good friends do.
It just occurred to me that Jack may have imbibed some of Ennis's mannerisms as well. I'm thinking of the Childress Thanskgiving scene where Jack finally blows up at L.D. after years of belittlement...very much the kind of response one would expect from Ennis in similar circumstances.
Every human being is an Ennis PLUS Jack, as in the BM movie??
Yes??
Your posts will be liked... as you please!!
Hugs!!Hugs to all Ennis'-Jacks!!
Every human being is an Ennis PLUS Jack, as in the BM movie??You can say that twice and mean it!
Yes??
Your posts will be liked... as you please!!
Hugs!!Hugs to all Ennis'-Jacks!!
..........
Identical twins walked divergent paths
Documentary at gay film fest chronicles pair's tough teen years, one brother's sex change
Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic
Saturday, June 16, 2007
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When Alex and Mark Farley were growing up in Missoula, Mont., in the 1980s and '90s, they were inseparable. The crew-cut identical twins played together, attended school in the same classrooms, swam in Flathead Lake together at the family's vacation home.
"They had always been perfect children," their mother said. Then things started to happen -- lots of things, most of which are revealed in a documentary to be screened Sunday at the Frameline gay film festival.
The boys were 11 years old when their parents, Scott and Jenny, divorced. That followed a six-month period when Scott had lost his real estate job but continued dressing for work, driving off somewhere in the car every day and pretending that nothing had changed. Within a year of the divorce, Jenny was living with another woman. Their mother's relationship, which continues to the present day, is "a life partnership" but not a sexual one, according to the Farley twins, who now live in San Francisco.
Alex came out as gay in seventh grade. His brother acknowledged his own homosexuality later on. By then, the boys often fought with each other and their father, sometimes violently. Alex and Mark fell under the sway of a 17-year-old gay disc jockey, who once raped a 10-year-old boy in their presence. The twins used drugs, all kinds of drugs. One night they drove up to a bluff above Missoula, fitted a rubber hose over the car's exhaust pipe, and tried to breathe in enough carbon dioxide to die together.
"I thought no one loved us," Mark says in the half dreamy, half disarmingly blunt documentary "Red Without Blue." The title refers to the color-coding the twins' parents imposed on the boys' clothes when they were young.
After the suicide attempt, the boys were sent first to drug rehab and then to separate boarding schools and had virtually no contact with each other for two years. When they graduated, Mark returned to Missoula to start school at the University of Montana. His brother moved to Colorado to attend Naropa University. That's when Alex began morphing into Clair, dressing and self-identifying as female. The sex-change surgery took place five years later, in October 2006.
"During those two years I was away from him," Clair said of her twin brother in a recent interview, "I started to create an identity that wasn't connected to Mark. It was a fight to do it, but once I'd set my mind on it, I knew it was something I had to do, something very positive."
Clair, sporting a long, slender necklace and electric-blue tights under a pale blue dress, sat in the living room of her brother's San Francisco apartment, an airy space on a quiet street near Duboce Park. Mark, whose artwork adorns the apartment's white walls, sat nearby on an adjacent couch, dressed in a maroon velour top. Red and blue.
The twins get on well these days. They see each other several times a week -- "more than that," insisted Mark -- and speak by phone almost every day. Both are soft-spoken and reserved, almost demure in their becalmed physical presence and concise gestures. The family resemblance is strong. So is the sense of their having survived a stormy passage in their lives and made it safely to the far shore.
The harmony was hard won. When Alex first announced his intention to become Clair, Mark felt hurt and betrayed. "You don't like me because we look so much alike," he tells his twin at one point in the film. "Part of who we were was lost." Mark's flinching glances at his twin are sometimes even more telling than his words.
Now, Mark said in the interview, he's at peace with Clair's decision. "I've definitely evolved. My initial reaction was that Clair was trying to remove herself from me and the twinship we had. I didn't understand what she was going through and what the process was about." He paused and looked over at Clair. "Her decision to make the transition forced me to look at myself. I began to realize how unimportant these binaries of gender really are. I've been able to get in touch with the feminine side of myself and also the more masculine side."
Brooke Sebold, a first-time filmmaker who co-directed "Red Without Blue" with Benita Sills and Todd Sills, believes that this story goes beyond gender issues. "It's about opening doors," she said in the joint interview with Mark and Clair. "We knew we weren't going to be making an objective, CNN-style documentary. We knew it was going to be an intimate family portrait, which meant the Farleys had to help us make the film."
The project didn't start out that way. Initially, it was going to be told exclusively from Mark's point of view. The idea of a more layered film, with multiple points of view, came later. Sebold mentioned the confessional independent film "Tarnation" as a model.
Sebold and Mark Farley met in 2003 when she moved into an empty room in a shared apartment in the Upper Haight. The new roommates hit it off right away, and Mark began telling her tales about his past. Sebold, who had just graduated from Brown University and was eager to start her directing career, thought she had no interest in documentaries. But Mark's family story touched several chords in her. Like him, she felt very close to her brother. And like Clair, Sebold had once thought about gender transition herself. "I thought I was supposed to be a man," she said. That idea faded for Sebold at age 12.
Asked if she would do interviews and participate in the film, Clair agreed despite being "a private person" and a "homebody," as she described herself. "I didn't really understand the purpose of sharing and this intimate information, a lot of it not very flattering. At first I was doing it for Mark, as his sister and to support what he wanted." Only later, she added, did the film become "a way to advocate for what transgender people go through in this society."
"Red Without Blue," which will also air June 25 on the Sundance Channel, takes on some of its most fascinating depths and textures when it comes to the twins' parents. Scott, whose early interviews with Sebold focused stubbornly on the boys' sunny childhoods, eventually opened up. He's seen struggling to account for the turbulence that came later, his eyes brimming. "Maybe this is just a phase," he says hopefully of Alex's dressing and acting as a woman. In a later, sweetly touching scene, he visits Clair on campus at Sarah Lawrence College, where she finished her undergraduate education.
The mother, Jenny, refused to acknowledge Clair's new name and identity for a year. In one of the most devastating lines in the film, Jenny remarks airily of Mark and Clair, "I don't think of them as my children. They're young people I know."
Jenny has since recanted that line. There's a dinner scene late in the film with Clair and her mother grinning warmly at each other. Things have turned out well, it seems. Mark, whose early romance with a man named David is portrayed in the film, is still living with him now. He's had work in a gallery and holds down several art-related jobs. Clair has a job she likes at a social service agency in San Francisco.
While "Red Without Blue" moves toward resolution and openness, it also leaves the viewer with the sense of a family's potential for treachery, deception and damage. Secrets, said Clair in the interview, "were part of our family dynamic for a long time. Keeping our sexuality secret, our drug abuse, the molestation and all of that -- we learned those tools from our parents. That stuff gets passed along."
Asked about the sexual component of their own relationship as closely bound gay twins, Mark talked about "going through puberty with another person who has a body that's a lot like yours. I definitely found myself attracted to men from an early age. I knew that largely because Clair and I had such a close relationship."
Clair looked down at her lap and delivered a succinct reply to the same question: "I don't really have anything to say about that."
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To see the film
"Red Without Blue" screens at Frameline31, the San Francisco International Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Film Festival, at 5 p.m. Sunday at the Victoria Theatre and at 2:15 p.m. Wednesday at the Castro Theatre. The first Sundance Channel airing will be 9 p.m. June 25.
For more information, go to www.redwithoutblue.com. For Frameline information, go to www.frameline.org/festival/.
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Thanks optom!
Your post is beautifully detailed!!
It is great to read it!
Be assured that I will re-read it often.
More please...[
hugs!
You can say that twice and mean it!
Before seeing hte movie and not long after I was Ennis. Hunnerd percent!
BUt now, I am Jack.
I was locked inside myself scared of what would happen if I unlocked the closet/prison i had constructed for myself.
Upon seeing the movie, I recognized myself as Ennis and I saw what was in store for my life. I made the necassary changes.
Now I am Jack. I see all the possibility. I see how things can be.
They may never be that way but I see and I try. Before I never would have tried.
If things don't work out the way I want I will have no regrets as I made th effort!
Thanks you Ennis for showing me the way!
You think Alma and Lureen is like a combination, like Ennis and Jack are??
Each person contains both genders though and sometimes they separate, sometimes they unite ecstatically.as what a member said.