Merci beaucoup, yes thanks very much optom !
Your post is marvelous ! I can see you as a professor... in an university, here by your dissertation-like explanations! These are great, by you !!
Just to outline as you say:
Seen from that perspective, Ennis is like a an orphan who is removed from the only environment he has known and taken under the nurturing wing of Jack. Slowly little bubbles of happiness start to arise to the surface,originally based on the simple bonding by the camp fire.
.........
Optom and to all too, do you think, therefore, that one can be actually be removed, to use your expression what he had known as sadness in his youth, to an area of happiness such as Brokeback Mountain becomes for Ennis ?
And is that likewise (a bit maybe too) for Jack ?
In a way, I say yes; in another way, I think no, considering my own life. As examples, when I was in Los Angeles or Quebec City (as well as in other places), I was sad... and became sader when I watched (in Quebec City) often during days: the clip of this Brokeback Mountain movie; why ? - likely because I yearned for such love as Ennis and Jake had - and I did not have my former lover-buddy anymore since he was now in heaven (had died) !! And, I remember that every time I went before his death: to my pal's place ( his house/his home), he and I... were happy !! So, my question is, do we have to be somewhere else in order to be happy ??
Ennis and Jack are always somewhere else ?? !!
Au revoir,
hugs!
It is not the place per se, that you have to be removed from,but the sitution.Being alone and missing a departed lover,is just as miserable in a 5 star hotel as it is in a shack. It is people, not places that we derive our love from. How many times do people say, and mean, I would be happy living in a tent with nothing as long as I had you.
Ennis was removed from the place where he first experiences love,ie BBM. It is not however the mountain,glorious though it may be,that he misses,it is the love.
He descends the mountain and is physically sick, because he has left behind his love.
BBM, in all its majesty, is a symbol for the true scale of their love for each other.Just as in the early days of any new love,everything is new and wondrous.It is clean and fresh like the mountain springs.In particular, first love is pure,just like the mountain air.
I do not think it is a coincidence that just as Ennis starts to thaw, and see the capacity he has to love, which almost certainly takes him by surprise, what happens.The snows come early, and everything freezes, including Ennis, who cannot even commit to another summer on BBM.He has not been given long enough to fully embrace what he has discovered.
So, like a child who first learns to start articulating their love for family members,is thrown into despair and confusion,should those members be removed from them by death,so is Ennis thrown into a spiral of confusion.He is metaphorically falling, as he physically descends the mountain.He has already fought with Jack, in much the same way a younger child resorts to fighting, when they lack the vocabularly to verbalise their feelings.
Equally just as a child who loses something they love.or is refused something they want, may scream until they are sick, so does Ennis show us the depths of his loss.
Had you,Artiste, found a new love,after the loss of your old love,although some places would still hold bad memories for you,the new love would allow you to flourish again in any environment and also help banish some of the more disturbing memories.We only associate with places, because we relate our experiences to those places.That was where I was happiest, or that is where I was most miserable.But the places are interchangable,the lovers are not.
Sometimes we are doubly lucky and the place we were happiest, was also a place of great beauty.That is not always the case though,Some of my most treasured memories, are of a dark and dingy working mens pub,close to where I worked, but the love of my life was sat next to me.
Conversely, some of the most stunning places I have ever been, hold no great place in my memories or heart.They are just pretty places I have visited,and I can look back on them with complete emotional detachment.
So I do think, that if you give and receive true love, you can to a greater extent, be removed from some of the sadness that precedes that.For myself,once I found real love,it allowed me to throw off many of the shackles of my past,the rape,alcoholic husband etc. I hated those people,but as love is merely the flip side of hate,once you flip to the love side, the hate side diminishes considerably and can in fact disappear completely.
Ennis simply did not have enough time, away from his past,which was filled to some degree with hatred, at the base of the mountain, to assimilate and nurture the love he found at the top of the mountain.There are so many expressions and descriptions of love which involve the giddy heights,just as losing love is often referred as plunging to the depths.BBM is a powerful representation of both of those states.
For me, LIfe will always be about people,not places.
