I heard a different cover of "He Was a Friend of Mine" on the radio this morning. I don't know who did it; I got out of the car before the DJ talked about the set. But I noticed something interesting: some of the lyrics were different from the version Willie Nelson sings on the BBM soundtrack. Instead of a thousand miles from home/he never hurt no one, there was something about dying poor.
And that made me think of how I associate those lines "a thousand miles from home" with Jack. It's funny, because Jack died somewhere near Childress. But even though Jack lived in Texas all those years (and Ennis tells Alma "he's from Texas"), I don't think of Texas as Jack's home. Jack's home is Wyoming... though I'm not sure if it's Lightning Flat, where his parents will stay until the day they die, or Brokeback Mountain, or wherever Ennis happens to be.
This movie makes me think about the nature of home, about the things that tie people to a place or make them want to escape. Jack's relationship with home particularly fascinates me. In the story, Jack is "crazy to be somewhere, anywhere but Lightning Flat", and his whole life seems fundamentally restless, first traveling the rodeo circuit and then traveling selling farm equipment. And yet he's constantly drawn back to Wyoming. Yes, it's partly that he's in love with someone who is rooted to a place (though Ennis's relationship to the concept of home is also very interesting). But Jack also always goes back to Lightning Flat, and even seems to have a fantasy of returning to his childhood home and building a life there with the man he loves. (I say "seems" because, although we know Jack wants to live with Ennis, and we know what Old Man Twist said Jack used to say, but we never hear the whole thing from Jack himself.)
Sometimes it seems to me that what pulls Jack back to Ennis in those last years, when the dream of living together seems impossible and Jack is trying to find other ways to fulfill his sexual and emotional needs, is something like the thing that keeps bringing people back to the place where they grew up. Like in some way, Ennis isn't only a person but can also be a metaphor for Wyoming, for home.
And it's interesting that I view Ennis as being rooted to a place, because Ennis has no family home to return to. The bank sold his parents' ranch. Ennis and Alma stayed in an apartment in Riverton because it was an easy place to leave. I don't know who owned the little house where Ennis lives after the divorce, or who owns the land under his trailer at the end, but I suspect they are rented (down payments being hard to manage). And in the prologue of the short story, Ennis lives in a trailer on the ranch where he works, and has to move when the ranch is sold out from underneath him. Ennis doesn't have a home to escape from, and yet he is the one so tied to a particular place that all the traveling he ever did was around the coffee pot looking for the handle.
And then there's the line in the story about how Ennis and Jack never go back to Brokeback Mountain (in that great sentence quoted by Andrew in another thread). It's like: "you can't go home again."
There's something about it that just makes me feel lonesome. Not quite sure why.
