So fan fiction may annoy her, but is she so coldhearted as to be, not even slightly moved by how many people's lives have been touched and in many ways vastly enhanced by BBM. I remember at the time of the press junkets, she was fullsome in her praise of the film, even saying Heath became Ennis.She seemed so genuinley pleased by the film and the reactions to it.
I recall similar praise she had for the film. Now I remember as well some friends who lived in Lander (not too far from Riverton) who moved back to Rochester who said the entire state of Wyoming was up in arms about
Brokeback Mountain when it was published and released as a movie. So I also have to wonder if at least some of the problem Proulx has comes from the locals who have hassled her since the movie was released. A lot of anti-gay religious people have loudly protested her on a regular basis, and there have been some drive-by incidents by her home (and in many parts of Wyoming, the police simply don't respond to calls after 2am unless it is something very serious). So the wanting to left alone MAY have more to do with her notoriety with the locals.
One other thing I am dwelling on today is just how she is getting this supposed avalanche of BBM rewrites "gay men" are sending her. I presume the vast majority of her mail is coming in care of her agent or publisher, not being sent to her home. Any agent or publisher can easily filter out the annoying mail and forward things she would find relevant or pertinent. I am coming to question in my mind whether she is really spending her free time reading fan fiction stories sent to her. More plausible is if her agent or reps told her people were doing this, and she anecdotally trashed the idea, but how does one get forced to endure fan fiction? Is this something the warden of Gitmo needs to be told?
Frankly, I suspect most people are writing their stories and publishing them online, not purposefully trying to send them to her and her agent and publisher are the ones more up in arms about it.
When I started BetterMost, I found it frustrating that often people would dwell far more on the story instead of the message of the story and taking that energy felt from the impact and using it to provoke some positive changes in one's life. That is what I tried to do. But I've learned to relax about that because everyone's interpretation and "message" doesn't fit into my preconceived notion of what the story should mean. The very sense of community built on the story is a positive change.
Proulx doesn't like people changing the ending. I don't like people only dwelling on every teeny tiny factoid about the film and forgetting about what the story says and the impact it has. As soon as I realized why people do those kinds of things, and realized that positive change doesn't always come the way I might expect it to, I stopped getting bent out of shape about it. I hope she can do the same.
And I frankly wouldn't have read one thing she wrote had it not been for
Brokeback Mountain.
The Shipping News turned up here in one of the local movie art houses (where they show the obnoxiously dull independent Victorian love dramas set in the 19th century and impenetrable foreign films) and just from the previews, I dismissed it as boring and not worth my attention. To me, a western story of any kind would be an anathema. The very thought the first vacation I would take with John in 20 years of our relationship would be to fly to Calgary and spend 10 days in the Canadian Rockies would be the most ridiculous concept ever... until I spent time with BBM and got to meet so many people from here who shared my love for it. So she changed my life forever with a short story. That's near impossible for Mr. Cynical Me - so if she managed to have that kind of impact on me, it's no surprise she would stun a significant readership who saw her original story, and floor the entire world when that story became an amazingly successful film.
