Well, there you go. That's exactly what I mean. Jane, I don't think you're at all alone in some of these thoughts. In my experience there are a number of people who would agree on many of these things.
Myself, I respectfully disagree with almost everything you say, but I've already explained that. Everyone is entitled to his/her own opinion. But there is one point I do feel compelled to dispute.
I am not lessening the horror of Ennis seeing at age 9 the tortured mutilated corpse of Earl, but Ennis is letting that horror rule and ruin his whole life! Yes it was horrible, unspeakable, criminal. It also is far removed (timewise) and unrelated to Ennis' present life, present circumstance. It has nothing to do with the place he lives now, nothing to do with any of the important people in Ennis's life now. Thirty-one years ago a crime was committed. Ok. Move on already!
I think you have to keep in mind is that the Earl incident is not something that Ennis experienced for five minutes, three decades ago.
He was nine. He was gay. Which he probably already sensed, at some level. So for the next however many years until his dad died, he lived in the same house with a parent whom he may have loved and was taught to respect and yet whom he presumed fully capable of
torturing someone to death for being the same way that he, Ennis, knew himself to be. His dad was implicitly saying, "This is what will happen to you, boy, if you ever have sex with a man." And Ennis knew his dad wasn't the only one who felt that way. In fact, gradually he came to believe
everyone felt that way. Yet, he also knew he was attracted to men. So he learned to repress and hide it. Years of repression and hiding in childhood and adolescence aren't, IMO, something from which you "move on, already," all that easily.
Then his dad died. As Mikaela has pointed out, if Ennis would have ever have been able to reject those teachings and realize his dad was full of shit, his death made it that much harder-- you're supposed to grant even MORE respect for the dead.
Unrelated to Ennis' present life and circumstance? Nothing to do with the place he lives now? Nothing to do with the important people in his life now? Probably just about
everyone Ennis has ever met, with the exception of Jack, more or less agreed with his dad, at least in the disapproval if not the outright murdering. As we were just discussing on another thread, even the radio announcer is telling a homophobic joke as Ennis is packing to go on a fishing trip with Jack.
Personally, I had a fairly normal childhood and adolescence. So I can't know firsthand what it would be like to live in terror as a child in my own house, fearing my own parent, or to try to overcome that later, or to be in love with someone even though I'd been taught that kind of love is so bad it deserves to be punished with a hideous death. I don't have any major demographic characteristic that would elicit vehement disapproval from pretty much everyone around me. So I can't say exactly what that would be like for Ennis.
But I think I can pretty safely say it wouldn't be particularly easy to "move on, already."
It's funny. Last night I had this same discussion with another Jackophile, except in that case she was arguing that Ennis could
never overcome his homophobia because it was too deeply ingrained from his childhood, and I was arguing that Ennis
should be able to unlearn his childhood teachings. I wasn't saying, "move on, already." But I was saying that, given the experiences he'd had in later life, he could eventually learn to transcend it.
Now I'm wondering if I didn't make it sound too easy, myself ...
