RouxB - I think that's why I love Annie's quote & philosophy so much. She wrote the story & is not adamant that people believe or interpret every line in a specific way. If she'd wanted that, she would have written the story specifically.
As we have seen from the various boards, there are gay and straight, male and female that are on differing sides of many questions, issues and opinions expressed regarding this film.
I for one find that only part of it's beauty.
Right, silk. What I particularly like is that our opinions rarely, if ever, correlate with our genders and/or orientations.
Well, a lot of my opinions in these discussion forums (and Yahoo Groups) are related to my gender, male, and my sexual orientation, which is exclusively homosexual. My opinions/observations are also based on my own world view of simlar situations which all of the characters of the Short Story and Movie experienced. I have known many people who were/are just like the Brokeback Mountain characters.
I do say that if a person who was male and exclusively homosexual in his sexual orientation had written the story from his own experiences and world view, he might have given the reader the answers to some of the unanswered questions which we are asked or read in Annie Proulx's original short story.
But, while Annie Proulx was a resident of Wyoming when she wrote Brokeback Mountain and has even admitted that she is a heterosexual woman in her own writings and interviews related to the original story, she wrote the story as though she were an observer and did not understand everything which she saw. Her gender and sexual orientation were important to the purpose of her story, too.
George Catlin was a famous artist who travelled the West and visited lots of tribes in the North American Continent. Much of his sketches, small painting and even larger works of art were done like a tourist with a camera. While his works do show exactly what he saw happening, he did not always understand what was going on in the activity of the scene. I had read that in more than one book discussing Catlin and his work.
Tulsa, Oklahoma has Gilcrease Museum. It has lots of Catlin's original works and only displays selections from the Catlin collection due to limited space. One day I was at the museum doing my own tour of the museum and I overheard a tour guide say almost the same things I wrote in the above paragraph.