Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
lovable subtle details
David:
Exactly! Those shirts have been up there for 20 years. With Jack going up to see his folks a few times a year after visiting Ennis, you can be sure at some point he told his Momma about the shirts and that he didn't want them found by his father.
Or perhaps like any good mother, she was up in his room cleaning, maybe even took down some of the clothes in the closet to wash and found the shirts by mistake.
Either way, by the ffact she encouraged him to go up to the room and her smile when he came down with the shirts tells me she knew they were there and special to Jack.
serious crayons:
Also, it's a testament to her sensitivity that she knew right away not to wash the shirts or put them on two separate hangers (as some good moms might do), that she somehow grasped the significance of the symbolism, and put two and two together when Ennis showed up.
Course, she'd had a few other clues over the years, such as Jack's talk of bringing Ennis Del Mar up to the ranch. And maybe she recognized that one of the shirts wasn't Jack's.
But still. Not all mothers would think through everything that carefully. So I do think she meant him to find them.
TJ:
Many of the "lovable subtle details" of the finished movie product are not even found in Annie Proulx's original story.
Some of the movie's subtle details contradict Annie Proulx's own subtle literary details, too.
If I had never read the Brokeback Mountain short story before I saw the movie, I would have a different attitude toward what I saw on the big screen and I see on the DVD at home.
I don't dislike the movie's subtle details as such; I just feel that sometimes it is like seeing a right-wing "Christian" fundamentalists ideas about what they think is in the Bible on a movie/TV screen.
Since I did grow up mostly in the country and have lived in and been in houses just like Annie Proulx described the house on the John C. Twist, Sr. ranch, and there were even MAKE-SHIFT closets like the one in the book, and I knew people who were like the Twist folks, I just see things differently than many of the city folks in this BetterMost forum.
ednbarby:
--- Quote from: latjoreme on May 04, 2006, 12:38:39 pm ---Also, it's a testament to her sensitivity that she knew right away not to wash the shirts or put them on two separate hangers (as some good moms might do), that she somehow grasped the significance of the symbolism, and put two and two together when Ennis showed up.
Course, she'd had a few other clues over the years, such as Jack's talk of bringing Ennis Del Mar up to the ranch. And maybe she recognized that one of the shirts wasn't Jack's.
But still. Not all mothers would think through everything that carefully. So I do think she meant him to find them.
--- End quote ---
Even if he never told her about them, she would know that Jack would never wear a shirt like Ennis'. His shirts were always solid. When you watch the other stuff hanging there, there are a couple of coats and solid shirts. A loving mama would recognize immediately that it wasn't his shirt but another man's, and she'd have already known Jack was gay by her very lovingness and acceptance of him. Add to that, as you say, his talk of Ennis Del Mar, and she'd have it all put together.
serious crayons:
OK, here's an LSD (loveable subtle detail) that I don't recall seeing elsewhere, or at least not recently:
The little frown of concentration on Ennis' face in the motel scene that shows how closely he is listening when Jack is talking. (Compare that to Alma talking, when often he only half-listens.)
Then he asks Jack, "The army didn't get ya?" using the exact words that Jack had used when they left Signal. Suggesting that Ennis has gone over and over that sad conversation in his mind -- and perhaps worrying about the prospect of Jack's getting drafted -- for four years.
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