Why the Lie?

[Front-Ranger]

That's a good observation, Amanda! On the topic of bookends, I've been trying to figure out how and where to start a bookends discussion. You did it originally, so maybe you're the best one to start again. Me, I've been fixated on two scenes: One, where Alma asks Ennis to use "protection" and Two, where Jack is looking for his blue parka for protection from the cold. Are these bookends or not, in your opinion??

[Brown Eyes]

Whoa, Lee, that's a wild suggestion about "protection."  Yeah, I guess in a way it could be a kind of bookend.  Some bookends are really major and visually obvious... like the long-long distance shots of the trucks moving across the sceen against the backdrop of the mountains but in opposite directions at the beginning and end of the film.  The paper bags are also some really obvious bookends from the beginning and end of the film.  I honestly haven't read the old, old imdb "bookends" thread for a long time (that I started back when I was "amandazehnder" at imdb). I'm honored to note that the old thread is now in the archives!  But, I think it all started with the paper bags.

I'm sure that there are very, very subtle bookends too.  The parka/ "protection" idea is a new one.  I wonder if this might figure into the Jack vs. Alma issue in terms of competitiveness... or in terms of pitting one against the other in Ennis's affections, etc.?

[serious crayons]

I like the protection one, Lee! 

I didn't reread all of your thread, either, Amanda, mainly because I'd just been participating in an extremely long bookends thread on imdb. There are some incredibly subtle ones on there -- a few that I'll have to say seemed like kind of a stretch, but many that were pretty amazing.

I'll just throw one out, to whet your appetites, and also to brag that I guessed the correct answer to this bookend challenge that Casey Cornelius posed (the imdb thread is in the form of a game).

<< Scene: Jack tosses corncobs into a pot kneeling beside a flowing stream beginning to prepare a meal and is overjoyed at the sight of Ennis approaching. >>

Bookend: Jack stomps away from the flowing stream after a meal, exasperated with Ennis, who is washing the empty pot (and who subsequently loses his grip on it).

Some of what people called bookends were later deemed mirrors. When something happens in two different scenes -- such as Jack putting Ennis hand on his erection and then Alma putting Ennis' hand on her pregnant stomach -- they are mirrors, they decided, unless the second scene provides a sense of closure, as the truck and paper bags scenes do. But that's OK, people were throwing mirrors in there, too.

Your question about foreshadowing is interesting, Amanda. I think clearly there's lots of foreshadowing in the movie -- the slaughtered sheep, for example, and Jack washing his shirt naked in the stream. I don't know if the second one has a bookend, but the sheep clearly has its mirrors in Earl and, some would say, Alma's red-and-white outfit on the day of the reunion.

Maybe one way to revitalize a bookend thread would be to have people comment on the purpose or larger meaning of the bookend. For instance, the trucks/paper bags one could show that, having given up his chance at happiness, Ennis winds up 20 years later pretty much where he started. The corn cooking/pot washing scene shows how Jack's mood has deteriorated.

Just thinkin out loud! There are all kinds of ways to do it.

[Brown Eyes]

Bump
 

[Ellemeno]

Amanda, thanks for bumping.  I was behind the times with this thread.  Just read the last four pages. 

Jane, re the beginnings of the Pierre Tremblay board:  I so strongly want it known for sure that it was never meant to be exclusive.  I invited many IMDb BBM board regulars over to it.  If a person loved BBM, played well with others, had been around long enough that in our paranoia we didn't think they were a troll, they got invited.  And if we thought they could keep the secret off of the main board.

Bookends - I just noticed a new (to me) one tonight while nakymaton, Front Ranger, Meryl and I were watching it together in chat.  In the Signal bar, Jack and Ennis alternate glancing at each other without making eye contact.  In Ennis's trailer, Ennis and Alma Jr. alternate glancing at each other without making eye contact.

[welliwont]

Amanda, thanks for bumping.  I was behind the times with this thread.  Just read the last four pages. 

Jane, re the beginnings of the Pierre Tremblay board:  I so strongly want it known for sure that it was never meant to be exclusive.  I invited many IMDb BBM board regulars over to it.  If a person loved BBM, played well with others, had been around long enough that in our paranoia we didn't think they were a troll, they got invited.  And if we thought they could keep the secret off of the main board.

Ah Elle, that's just something  I made up in my head!   

[Brown Eyes]

Bookends - I just noticed a new (to me) one tonight while nakymaton, Front Ranger, Meryl and I were watching it together in chat.  In the Signal bar, Jack and Ennis alternate glancing at each other without making eye contact.  In Ennis's trailer, Ennis and Alma Jr. alternate glancing at each other without making eye contact.

Very cool.  Never noticed that before.  Jack and Ennis do this in Aguirre's trailer too. 

[Garry_LH]

Sorry I haven't read all of this thread, but I'm ah losing my train of thought, so... if this has been mentioned already...

Mostly crops, hogs, and cattle in my area of Missouri, so I'm not up on how folks look at, or think of, sheepherders. Or, how they would have looked upon them in 1963 Wyoming. All I got are fragments of history of how cattle men more than just disliked sheepherders. I'm wondering if it might have been a common joke among folks of that time and place to make assumptions about what herders did with one another over the lonely months up in those high pastures? (not to mention all the old sheep jokes as well)

Could it be Ennis didn't want Alma to know Jack was the man he had spent the summer with before they got married? We've already seen Ennis likes to do what Alma hates, as Mz. Proulx wrote. Might have naming Jack as the 'man' he spent the summer with herding sheep with been a bit too much information for Alma in Ennis's mind?  That knowing Ennis and Jack herded sheep together might have been the catalyst for Alma to put two and two together, this was the reason Ennis lied to Alma about how he knows Jack.  And for sure, Ennis coming up with the idea of Jack being a fishing buddy to set up future excuses for going off with Jack, to me, that would have had to be something Ennis had thought out before hand. Like, if Jack ever shows up again, what am I gonna tell Alma. (dang, I shouldn't be writing this early of a morning)

The level of denial, if not out right mental disconnect in the characters in Brokeback Mountain, is scary. More so, because I recognize it all too well.

Just a thought on all of the meaning of slang terms in the story and film.  1963 rural America was still rather isolated from the rest of the country. Even in the seventies, I could drive a couple hundred miles north into Iowa, and the use of slang was different enough I'd have to ask about it's usage. Even so, to me, 'wrang it out' was pretty straight forward in the context in which it was used. Which as with a lot of other words and phrases in American English, the meaning is more in the context of the discussion and inflection of the speaker rather than strict definition of words or terms. It's part of the reason I really wish this bit of dialog had been contained in the film.

“I wrang it out a hundred times thinking about you” At least for me as an old mid Missouri hick, it would be, I masturbated a hundred times with your imagine in my mind.

[injest]

yes, cattlemen hated sheepherders....one, their were a awful lot of foriegners herding sheep with their foreign ways of talking and doing things...two, it was thought that sheep ruined grasslands cause they ate the grass down to the ground whereas a cow tends to move around more and isn't 'as hard' on the pastures as sheep (and as everyone knows, cows are king in the American West)

combine xenophobia and myth and you have a lot of people saying anything to run down that other group...and as we know, accusing someone of being gay 
is the worst possible thing in some people's eyes...even TODAY...

so I can see that Ennis would not want to talk too much about where he had been that summer (or with who) although he HAD to have known before he went up there what the rumors were....which puts his nervousness and behaviour at the first of the movie in a different light!! Taking a job as a sheepherder was definitely 'bottomfeeding'...a job for foriegners...oh, crap, maybe I need to start a new thread to discuss THIS...puts a different light on Aquirre's behaviour too...the contempt he showed...

[southendmd]

bump