Ok, yeah, so I know I'm the biggest symbolism-basher on the entire board, just about. But I was quoting a story passage in another thread, and it struck me that, although there are symbols that are used the same way in both the story and the movie, there are some things that are used very differently.
Take beans, for instance.
So in the movie, "beans" become a sort of symbol for the things that Ennis is willing to live with, but Jack won't.
But in the story?
Around that time Jack began to appear in his dreams, Jack as he had first seen him, curly-headed and smiling and bucktoothed, talking about getting up off his pockets and into the control zone, but the can of beans with the spoon handle jutting out and balanced on the log was there as well, in a cartoon shape and lurid colors that gave the dreams a flavor of comic obscenity. The spoon handle was the kind that could be used as a tire iron. And he would wake sometimes in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy and release; the pillow sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets.
Alma was saying something about taking his friend to the Knife & Fork for supper instead of cooking it was so hot, if they could get a baby-sitter, but Ennis said more likely he'd just go out with Jack and get drunk. Jack was not a restaurant type, he said, thinking of the dirty spoons sticking out of the cans of cold beans balanced on the log.
They had a high-time supper by the fire, a can of beans each, fried potatoes and a quart of whiskey on shares, sat with their backs against a log, boot soles and copper jeans rivets hot, swapping the bottle while the lavender sky emptied of color and the chill air drained down, drinking, smoking cigarettes, getting up every now and then to piss, firelight throwing a sparkle in the arched stream, tossing sticks on the fire to keep the talk going, talking horses and rodeo, roughstock events, wrecks and injuries sustained, the submarine Thresher lost two months earlier with all hands and how it must have been in the last doomed minutes, dogs each had owned and known, the draft, Jack's home ranch where his father and mother held on, Ennis's family place folded years ago after his folks died, the older brother in Signal and a married sister in Casper.
So what do the beans symbolize in the story? I mean, they scream "yo! symbolism ahoy!" to me, and I'm pretty much deaf to that sort of thing. But I can't figure out for the life of me what they represent. I mean, there they are in the scene where Ennis feels like he can paw the white out of the moon, and then Ennis thinks about the beans before the reunion, and then they are this bizarre nightmarish image that spoils the memory/dreams of Jack. So what are they? Are they, I don't know, love threatened by homophobia (represented by the spoon, of all the crazy utensils to seem threatening)? Or are they something more subtle than that?