Love is a force of nature - the four elements: fire, water, earth, air.
All those elements are tamed, a poor copy, in their life apart from each other, but at their full strength when they're together:
- Fire: Lightning storms vs. electricity
- Water: Streams vs. water tap (faucet?)
- Air: Storm vs. fans
- Earth: beatutiful, wide landscapes vs. narrow houses, apartments and trailers
Just like their love is a force of nature: strong and uncontrollable ("this thing grabs onto us") for each other, but a poor copy, non-passionate, for their wifes.
Everything keeps coming back to the tagline.
I loved this so much I had to repeat it. All I can say to it is: Yes, yes, yes!
Katherine, thanks for explaining the electric carving knife analogy. Makes sense to me.
When it comes to the lack of lightning in the reunion scene, I completely agree with Mel about how the focus in the motel scene is very tight on Jack and Ennis. The focus on just the two of them, the outside world not visible, not making any appearance except through their words, is so effective that I hardly miss a brief opening shot from a couple of metres' distance to show the room in disarray and the guys on the bed. (Who am I kidding? I
WOULD have liked to see this.
) But that scene remains one of my absolute favourites in the film. It's so unbelievably intimate. Anyway, I haven't been wondering about the outside world being near to non-existent in
that scene - but I
have wondered about that in the preceeding kitchen scene with Ennis, Jack and Alma as the guys take off for their motel night. That would have been the place where that distant lightning like a white sheet might have made an effectful appearance. Then again, it might have made for too obvious visual symbolism, not the ambiguous kind favoured by Ang Lee.
I think in that kitchen scene, the film's focus is mainly on Alma and her reaction, much more so than in the story - and hence the lightning outside, as well as the electric currents snapping between Ennis and Jack has been removed altogether or tamped down in the film - to leave the focus on Alma's reaction. (Compared to the description in the book, I do think especially JG is underplaying the visible impact on Jack, so much so that it has to be deliberate from director and actor both.)
There's another part of the short story where lightning makes an impression - this time by
not being present. It's during Jack and Ennis's last "fishing trip" together. Never the optimist, Ennis keeps looking out for clouds and stormy weather - and eventually it comes:
"A bar of darkness driving wind before it and small flakes". But conspicuously, for once in this lightning-riddled story there is no lightning. And in the very same paragraph the batteries on the transistor radio die. Hence, electricity, both in its wild untamed and domesticated versions, are absent from the scene. And though the story tells us that even so the brilliant charge between Ennis and Jack still is there, it also says that the charge is by then darkened.... by the sense of time fllying. Though the sparks still fly, what they have left by then is just a camp fire, those sparks flying up with their truths and lies..... A camp fire that will die down soon enough.
The entire description of those last days, their last night together, has such a strong sense of foreboding, of light and heat dying and disappearing because the force, the power that feeds them is muted and dying down. Cold darkness is about to descend as a consequence.
It almost takes my breath away how much imagery and symbolism are packed into those few simple paragraphs.
