There are a couple of curious connections between Brokeback Mountain and the recently released movie with Colin Firth A Single Man, though I'm not suggesting any direct influence. One of these connections is that their chronologies overlap.
In A Single Man Jim, George's partner of sixteen years, has been killed in a car accident some time in 1962. Jack and Ennis first meet in 1963 and their affair will last for almost twenty years until Jack is killed, either in an accident or by a tire iron, leaving Ennis, like George, alone.
George and his partner Jim, unlike Jack and Ennis, have set up house together. This domestic arrangement started sometime in the fifties. Yet, although it is the nominally straight-laced fifties, their domestic arrangement draws very few adverse comments from their neighbours - indeed, the neighbours appear cordial and friendly. George, of course, is a professional - he's a college professor - and the two of them have made their home in the suburbs of Los Angeles which was no doubt decidedly more liberal than other parts of the country.
Their counterpart in Brokeback Mountain is not so much Jack and Ennis but Earl and Rich. Like George and Jim, it looks as though Earl and Rich have lived together for a long while, were known by their neighbours as a gay couple and, as such, could be the butt of sly jokes but nothing more. So what happened? What suddenly unleashed that murderous rage against them? Anyway, here is how the situation is described in the short story which the screenplay follows very closely:
There were these two old guys ranched together down home, Earl and Rich -Dad would pass a remark when he seen them. They was a joke even though they was pretty tough old birds. I was what, nine years old and they found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They'd took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp. What the tire iron done looked like pieces a burned tomatoes all over him, nose tore down from skiddin on gravel.
So what happened? What changed more or less amused tolerance into murderous rage? Are we supposed to imagine that Earl and Rich did something - though it's hard to imagine anything they could have done or said that would have provoked such violence against one of them at least. Or are we to see Ear'ls murder as an indication that, no matter how placid society's surface may seem, as far as gays at least are concerned, murderous hate can at any time and unprovoked, just explode?
