Would you feel the same about the movie ? , would you change it , if so how ?,
I have often wondered if the setting of the movie changes anything, here in a big city in the uk it would as same sex relationships are not uncommon , but as everywhere certain groups still challenge what they see is different , and they don`t understand. Would it of been easier for Ennis and Jack or the same , i have heard that a lot of small towns are still very `Old Fashioned` and stuck in their ways and ideals , is this true for you, ? let me know i`d love to hear your thougts , and soz if this has been covered already. xxx kaz
First of all, IMO people who claim that nothing has changed since 1963 have either been asleep for four decades or are in throes of historical ignorance that is truly frightening. You don't even have to go back to the beginning of the story to see that -- I've talked with some people that I'd swear think indoor plumbing didn't exist in the 1980s.
In 1963 in the US, homosexuality was considered to be a mental disorder. It was totally acceptable, legally and socially, for same-sex couples, especially men, to be arrested if there was any evidence of a sexual relationship; they didn't even have to be caught at anything. And it was a virtually taboo subject anyway: movies that had any reference to same-sex relationships at all, such as
The Children's Hour and
Advise and Consent, had to be very cautious about language and keep their references very obscure. The only appearance of a homosexual in a 1960s movie that I can recall is a scene in
Advise and Consent, and the character very much conformed to the stereotype of "queers" back then - pale, flabby, living in a dark urban hovel; much like something you'd find under a rock or a rotted log.
The film has a scene in which Ennis is watching television, and there's a TV in his trailer in the last scene, so we can assume that he does see some of the outside world through that window. And there would have been no gay people in the window in the early 1960s. Zilch. Zip. Zero. None., and that would have started to change by the 1970s. Were there, and are there still, stereotypes of gay people on TV? Sure there were, and are. And you still see stereotypes of blacks, women and various ethnic groups too, but the changes, frustratingly slow as they have been, have been happening all along. And of course, from the 1970s on, issues about gay rights and AIDS would have been part of the TV scene that Ennis watched as well. That doesn't mean that he wouldn't still have had the same fears and lack of self-acceptance but he would have had some exposure to the social changes. It's easy to dismiss TV as just entertainment, but IMO Pauline Kael had it exactly right in her summary of its cultural impact on the last half of the 20th century: about equivalent to the impact of the Roman Catholic Church in medieval Europe.
And Ennis wouldn't have had to be watching TV to be exposed to some of the social changes that had taken place since he was 19. Riverton of 2006, or even the mid-1990s, would have been a very different place from Riverton of the 1960s. Since the mid-century, many ranches near towns in Rocky Mountain states have been bought by developers and carved up into large-lot subdivisions with the homes referred to as "ranchettes" and other similar euphemisms. And they aren't being bought by people from towns like Sage and Lightning Flat; they're bought by people from urban and suburban backgrounds. Riverton would have still been a fairly small community but unless Ennis became a recluse after Jack's death he would have had more and more contact over time with people who did not have rural backgrounds.
I grew up in big cities and suburbs, but in 1995 my husband and I moved to a small town about 50 miles southeast of Kansas City: population 2,500 in the city limits, about 3,000 counting the surrounding rural area. Is it a very conservative culture? You bet it is. But the people here see the same cultural changes going on that everyone else does, and it isn't just because the town is close to a big city. I bought my full-screen edition of Brokeback here in our combination dime store/Radio Shack outlet, it's for rent at the town's independent video store and at a convenience store and the local library system has a copy. That sounds like a small thing, but as someone who remembers the 1960s fairly clearly, I can tell you that movie or book with sympathetic gay characters would have been the center of a censorship firestorm even in the big cities. The big dramatic changes in societies are as often as not the end product of social changes that take place in just these tiny steps.
And, you can bet that Alma wouldn't have been quite so naive. She would have suspected some things based on their sex life, and would have been quicker to notice that when his old "fishing buddy" is coming to visit he spruces up like he's going out on a date. Alma might not have been exactly worldly, but if this story was taking place today she wouldn't have had to see her husband and his friend kissing on a stairway to start getting a clue.
IMO, Ennis would have had the same problems if he was born in 1963 or 1983 instead of 1943, but after his meeting with Jack he couldn't possibly have been in that much denial about it. Maybe they still wouldn't have had that sweet life together, maybe they would; but they both would have had a radically different view of their situation and their sexuality. That doesn't mean they wouldn't have encountered a lot of homophobia in Wyoming today but they would have been aware of many more alternatives.
