Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum

"Did your foks run you off?"

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TJ:
The following is based on my own impressions of the original story as contrasted with the movie. Don't consider me to be a know-it-all. I just know a lot about a lot of things. Before I got my head bashed, I was a whiz at trivia. When it came to quiz shows like "Jeopardy," most of the time, I not only knew the question for the answer on the board; I also knew more about the topic, too.

The initials "AP" here refer to Annie Proulx who wrote the original short story.

Probably repeating myself ad infinitum, but, in the way that I understand Annie Proulx's original story, Ennis Del Mar's older married sister lived in Casper and his brother, K. E., lived in Signal, Wyoming in May 1963.

So, their sister moved to another part of the state and K. E. was living IN or NEAR the same town or wide place in the road where Aguirre's trailer was.

So, why did the screenplay writers/movie script people have Jack ask that somewhat silly question in the movie?

I really believe that the reason that Ennis knew about where to apply for the job in the first place was that it was a local job and if you really know how the job was set up, Aguirre was the foreman (in the AP version) in charge of job assignments. Both of the guys were already hired before they showed up at Aguirre's place.

The marital status of K. E. is not mentioned by AP. He might not have been "the (heterosexual) marryin' kind," and he might have been homosexual in his sexual orientation.

In the end of the AP story, Ennis Del Mar was "living" IN a drafty trailer on the Stoutamire ranch at Signal (or at least "Signal, Wyoming" was in the mailing address). He wasn't living in a trailer house parked in a rural trailer park as in the movie scenes.

twistedude:
TJ: I wish you wouildn't set the short story up against the movie so much. They are two different works of art. And the screenplay is yet a different woirk of art from the movie.

It never occurred to me that either Ennis or Jack were "run off," nor Ennis's brother. But that both were familiar with the concept of kids being "run off" by their parents, which, as the third poster suggested, was a not-uncommon thing.

When Ennis used the phrase "I was." when Jack asks him "You from ranch people?" it is interesting that the FIRST thing that occurs to Jack is that Ennis may have been run off, rather than the--seemingly more logical assumption--that his parents had died. Maybe death is not so common a thought among 19-year-olds, and maybe Jack has sometimes felt like he was being run off by the anger of his father--about whom  he has bad things to say(can't please my old man no way; always kept his secrets to himself,... never once came to see me ride)..the screenplay has even cut the sentence in which Jack says his dad "put him on the woolies' when he was a kid), But he still refers to his home as "my daddy's place," where he's going to give  a hand threough the winter. 

I just find it..interesting.

AP and AL had a big runsaround about the motel--first camp scenes, before she said he could shift a lot of stuff to this new scene. She apparently liiked the results. I wonder if she ever got over the removal of all the lines which refer to sex in her story which didn't make it to the movie..

TJ:
What is really odd is that I have seen so many conflicting versions of how Annie Proulx was or was not involved with the actual movie itself. And some of the conflict comes from Annie Proulx's own essays, print media interviews and live interviews.

I had read on her website that she argued for the keeping of the dialog of the story to remain intact; but, she was not at all involved with the movie when it was being shot.

http://www.annieproulx.com/brokebackfaq.html


--- Quote ---How did you feel on first seeing the film?

Knocked for a loop. I had no idea of what to expect as I had had no input into the making of the film beyond some conversation with Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry when they were writing the screenplay, and a letter to Focus president James Schamus and Ang Lee begging them to keep the language of the story intact. I did not visit the set. I feared the landscape on which the story rests would be lost, that sentimentality would creep in, that explicit sexual content would be watered down. None of that happened. The film is huge and powerful. I may be the first writer in America to have a piece of writing make its way to the screen whole and entire. And, when I saw the film for the first time, I was astonished that the characters of Jack and Ennis came surging into my mind again, for (hence the lie in Missouri Review ) I thought I had successfully banished them over the years. Wrong.
--- End quote ---

Rayn:

--- Quote from: julie01 on May 11, 2006, 09:53:46 pm ---TJ: I wish you wouildn't set the short story up against the movie so much. They are two different works of art. And the screenplay is yet a different woirk of art from the movie.

--- End quote ---

Yes, that's correct, Julie01, and I second that wish.  The story in the book is excellent and so is the movie. There is no comparative form for excellence.  Now, a person may prefer one to the other, but that's preference, not an assessment of excellence.

Rayn

TJ:
If I had NEVER read the book, I would say that the movie is a great movie with screenplay/script written by heterosexuals who don't know as much about homosexuals as they think they do. The added heterosexual stuff and the extra women came from Larry McMurtry and he admitted it in a Time Magazine interview.

But, Annie Proulx's approach to the story is from that of a woman who admits to be heterosexual and her writing is an attempt to understand what a homosexual man or men in Wyoming would feel and go through while in denial of his or their sexual orientation.

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