If I had never known the existence of a Brokeback Mountain short story by Annie Proulx, when I saw the movie, I would say that it was a very great movie. I was disappointed that some important things did not show up in the movie and disappointed that some things showed up which I felt were not even important to the story.
But, I am reminded of the discussions of the university classes where we read stories based on the lives of real people and sometimes "arguments from silence" would be brought in regard to what might have happened or might not have happened. And, we talked about what might have happened if the people in the stories had met certain people who were alive at the time, too.
Well, I see that there is more truth from real life in Annie Proulx's original short story. But, it becomes difficult to discuss Brokeback Mountain when talking (and or writing) about both the story and the movie's final production script.
In the short story, all of the actual conversation where the characters are talking "live' with each other takes place when Ennis is actually in the scene. Lureen is the only person outside of Wyoming who actually has a live conversation and that is just because she answered the phone when Ennis called Jack's Childress, Texas number. But, when she is talking the read knows absolutely nothing about how she looks while talking. The reader only knows what Ennis about the tone of her voice, polite but cold as snow.
In BetterMost here, we have been talking about people no matter what their gender or sexual orientation can show understand and even talk about emotion; but Larry McMurtry said this about why he added women to his screenplay, "I have always argued that if you want to learn something about emotion, you have to ask women. That's why I've had three women characters who've won Oscars--[for] Patricia Neal, Cloris Leachman and Shirley MacLaine. I've always thought that for my interests, emotionally, I have to seek women to talk about. Men don't talk about emotion. They don't understand it." Time Magazine, Sunday, Jan. 22, 2006
If you want to learn about emotion, you don't have to go to a writer who is a man who and he makes himself a liar when he writes about women understanding emotion and that is why he added them. How can a writer claim that men don't talk about emotion and don't understand it, be a man who writes about women's emotions?
Annie Proulx has her characters mention no-name people, almost in passing sometimes with only a few words said about them, and yet those people are in several scenes supposedly important to the screenplay and the movie.
Oh, we know that Lureen had a father and he owned a farm machinery business because Jack mentioned him. But, Jack only talks about how the man hates his guts and had, in so many words, offered Jack money to get lost.
In a single sentence, Ennis mentions a woman who works at a bar and nothing really came of it. And, in response to that, Jack, also in a single sentence makes a joke about some thing he had going with a rancher's wife iin Texas. IMO, What Ennis said in that sentence was a retelling of what he had said in 1963, "I'm not no queer." And, Jack's response in 1983 to what Ennis said was his 1963 agreement, "Me neither. Nobody's business but ours."
More to be added later . . .
