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Ellemeno:
David Lister: Stop whingeing about your fans, Annie
Saturday, 20 September 2008


Brokeback Mountain is not a film crying out for a sequel. When one of the characters has died on screen, and the actor playing the other has died in real life, then it's best to leave well alone. So it does seem odd that Annie Proulx, the author of the story on which the film was based, should be saying that she has been bombarded with ideas from people wanting to change her story. That she says the ideas are "pornish" is perhaps not so odd. The bombardment has, of course, not happened just as a result of the story published in 1999, but because of the 2005 movie, and that is why I mention the film (starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger). It is the film rather than the original story which has inspired numerous fans to tell Ms Proulx how the pornish quotient could be increased.

She's fed up with it, and was quoted this week as saying: "There are countless people out there who think the story is open range to explore their fantasies and to correct what they see as an unbearably disappointing story. They constantly send ghastly manuscripts and pornish rewrites of the story to me, expecting me to reply with praise and applause for 'fixing' the story. They certainly don't get the message that if you can't fix it, you've got to stand it."

So what sort of story ideas, pornish and otherwise, have they been sending to Annie Proulx? The new Brokeback Mountain stories on fan sites seem to range from the almost poetic "With their eyes closed, they shared an intimate moment of united longing, pain and beauty that would take a place in eternity" to the far from poetic "Your eyes are like the stars. Your touch is like the sun" to the downright opaque "They painted beautiful, plunged creative. The kingfisher, silent, did not remove his belt".

And there's the one that seems to be sponsored by a clothing manufacturer: "Everything about Jack and his jeans disturbed and tormented Ennis that summer of '63 until all he could think of or see was blue."

One fan, whose own take on Proulx's short story runs to a mere 23 chapters, sums up his opus thus: "Ennis learns that Jack is still alive from Lureen. Finds him in a hovel off the banks of Rio Brave del Norte. He learns on his way that Jack was left blind." Ah. Looks as if there could be a sequel after all.

I suppose it's easy to be either amused or, if you are Annie Proulx, annoyed by Brokeback fans trying to "fix" her story. Whether she was more annoyed by the pornish elements or by the fact that they were trying to "fix" the story at all, it's hard to know. I suspect it was the fixing as much as the porn that offended her. But I think it is wrong to mock or berate the fixers.

Writing or even just wishing for a sequel or an alternative take on a work that one loves is a fairly natural desire. Robert Altman's brilliant 1992 film The Player, a satire on Hollywood, began with a series of film pitches at a studio. One of them was from a huckster urging a sequel to the sixties classic The Graduate, as the three stars, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross were all, then, still alive and working. Cinema audiences found this hilarious, but I thought it a terrific idea, and never understood why someone didn't go ahead and do it.

Wanting to keep a story alive is not an insult to its creator. It is a tribute. Annie Proulx has inspired these fans to want to keep her story alive. And while they would do much better, to use their creative urges to write their own stories with their own characters, they have been inspired by her to write. I think she should turn a blind eye to the pornish elements, and take it as a compliment that her story has fired so many imaginations.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/columnists/david-lister/david-lister-stop-whingeing-about-your-fans-annie-936189.html

Front-Ranger:
I think the reviewer has missed the point. The problem with these people who send their work to Annie Proulx is that they want her to respond or review it and praise them. Annie Proulx said to finish the story in your own life, not to escape your life by rewriting the story. Brokeback Mountain is not Star Trek, it is not escapism. It is an account of how things were and are, not how they should be or we wish it to be. All we got now is Brokeback Mountain, that is the truth that we must know, realize, and accept, and stand it, if we do not know anything else. "If you can't fix it you've got to stand it." Those are the last words in the story.

Front-Ranger:

--- Quote from: seriouscrayons on September 20, 2008, 12:16:57 pm ---Years ago, I read part of a book called Was. It was really compelling and interesting, but incredibly depressing, which is why I didn't finish it. In it, Dorothy was a clumsy, socially inept orphan who comes to live with Auntie Em and Uncle Henry in this tiny, bleak, gray, isolated house on the windswept Kansas prairie. Em and Henry are grim and taciturn. Henry starts molesting Dorothy. Frank Baum is her schoolteacher. He feels sorry for Dorothy and starts making up lovely escape fantasies about Oz to cheer her up.

This alternated with chapters about Judy Garland as a child and a man with AIDS in contemporary times.

But the Dorothy part was the most interesting. I could imagine it happening just like that. And it made me think of all the miserable, helpless kids growing up in bleak, isolated houses across the country and what their lives would have been like in the days before anybody ever talked about sexual and physical abuse. (Though of course, it still happens now.)

Well, way OT! Sorry. I just like to think of Oz as sort of America's very own fairytale (as opposed to the other, Old World ones). There are so many dimensions to it, endlessly interesting. There's also the one where the Scarecrow represents the farmer, the Tin Man is the working man, and the lion is William Jennings Bryan ...


--- End quote ---
You mean the politician?

Hmmm, I wonder if other epic stories got started the same way. I'm thinking of Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland, J. M. Barrie and Peter Pan, and C.S. Lewis and the Narnia books. Or like E. A. Proulx and.... Fascinating insights, friend serious!

Brown Eyes:

--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on September 20, 2008, 01:02:49 pm ---I think the reviewer has missed the point. The problem with these people who send their work to Annie Proulx is that they want her to respond or review it and praise them. Annie Proulx said to finish the story in your own life, not to escape your life by rewriting the story. Brokeback Mountain is not Star Trek, it is not escapism. It is an account of how things were and are, not how they should be or we wish it to be. All we got now is Brokeback Mountain, that is the truth that we must know, realize, and accept, and stand it, if we do not know anything else. "If you can't fix it you've got to stand it." Those are the last words in the story.


--- End quote ---

Well, I think the thing is that fanfic writers don't do anything to diminish the original story.  It obviously stand on it's own and I don't think any fanfic writers think they're competing with Annie or even "re-writing" her story.  My sense is that there's a deep reverence for the original writing.

Most good fanfic I've read involves people using BBM as a springboard for very different types of stories.  Or, they use narrative storytelling as a way to work out, think about and imagine different scenarios and problems that are suggested in Proulx's story or in the film

The film itself, I think, is the major bit of evidence that Annie's story was not the last word in the way people understand Brokeback Mountain.  McMurtry and Ossana's total adaptation of Proulx's story... with imagined new dialogue and characters that don't even exist in Proulx's story... really does seem to be the first bit of "fanfic" (as has been suggested elsewhere in this thread).  A character like Jimbo would be what people in fanfic call and OC or a character that's not found in Proulx's story.  And even Cassie is a work of fanfic-type imagination since she's hardly a mention in Proulx's story.  To create such a fleshed-out character as Cassie really did involve moving well away from Proulx's writing on the part of McMurtry and Ossana.

McMurtry and Ossana really do sound like "fans" of Proulx's story when they talk about it.  McMurtry sometimes sounds sort of jealous of Annie having written BBM... when he says things like "I should have written it." or "I wish I had written it."  And, in some respects he did... given the film.

There simply is no way for Proulx, or any author, to retain such possessiveness over a published story and especially one that's so popular.  

Wayne:
 :D :D  Knowing that the great writer Annie Proulx read and enjoyed my work and felt that it was equal to her own would be all the payment I'd need.

A brief excerpt:

Their love had been a sacred bond, beset on all sides not just by an unwelcoming world, but by their own fears and demons. He thought of Jack Twist putting his penis inside his butt and having sex with his butt and them being two gay guys together for hours.

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