Report your use of Brokieisms in so-called "real life"

[milomorris]

Ennis and Jack were 19 when they began, 39 when Jack died.  Except for the first summer and their deepening love for each other, they had to "make it on a couple of high-altitude fucks once or twice a year."  When Jack died they were only 39, but Ennis faced a meaningless future, his life was going nowhere, and with all his hangups his prospects of finding a new Jack were remote indeed.  Ennis did not lack "wisdom" to "stand it:"  Given his whole being, he could do no other, except perhaps to sink into absolute despair.  He really was doing the best he could.  (And I will not comment on another man's courage.)

We're looking at different points in the BBM story, and talking past each other. When I refer to Ennis lacking the "wisdom to know the difference," I'm talking about the time when Jack was still alive. Ennis couldn't see the possibility of the life Jack wanted for the two of them.  Nor did he have the courage to change something that he very well could have.

And no, I don't have a problem evaluating another man based on his courage. That is one of the many factors that men use when assessing each other. And not only is it an important factor when men are building relationships between each other, but it is a key factor in the dynamic between Jack & Ennis. Jack was far less risk-averse than was Ennis. And this, IMO, contributed greatly to Jack's frustration with Ennis and their situation. This difference in courage is clearly visible during their final argument. Ennis is still at a loss for a "better idea," and Jack maintains that he had one once.

And you are right. After Jack was gone, Ennis did indeed have the wisdom to "stand it." We'll never know if the alternative of suicide ever crossed his mind, but I tend to doubt it.

[x-man]

Nor did he have the courage to change something that he very well could have.

And no, I don't have a problem evaluating another man based on his courage. That is one of the many factors that men use when assessing each other. And not only is it an important factor when men are building relationships between each other, but it is a key factor in the dynamic between Jack & Ennis. Jack was far less risk-averse than was Ennis. And this, IMO, contributed greatly to Jack's frustration with Ennis and their situation. This difference in courage is clearly visible during their final argument. Ennis is still at a loss for a "better idea," and Jack maintains that he had one once.

I try to use "courage" in the way that Hemingway defines it as "grace under pressure,"  NOT as successfully triumphing over everything in ones psychological makeup.  To ask courage of Ennis, as you seem to use the word, is to ask the superhuman.  You and I actually do not disagree about much at all here, but where we do is the core of my argument--that Ennis was doing the best he could while the dark forces that shaped his personality simply would not permit him to act otherwise.

Yours is a very existentialist understanding of the world.  It seems to be, formally put, that "existence precedes essence."  This is just a way of summarizing the idea that we are free to act any way we want to in the world, and only later after looking at the pattern of our behaviour, do we come to some conclusions about human nature.  In the case we are talking about here, like everyone, Ennis is free to act in total freedom, to choose to do anything he wants to do, however unique or novel.  Indeed existentialist writers go on to speak of our being condemned to be free, that we must act freely, and we do not have the luxury of pointing to a nonexistent human nature as an excuse not to act.  They would tell Ennis he is a coward in not acting to "fix" his situation with Jack.  All he has to do is go ahead and act; everything he has done or not done before does not count.  So, to be courageous, Ennis could simply choose, if only he really wanted, to settle down and live openly with Jack.  This is an appealing and at first liberating way of looking at the world.  But I don't think the world and our actions within it are as Camus and Sartre would have us believe.  To a great extent we are prisoners of our own worldviews, and our choices are limited.  Courage--grace under pressure--is our acting valiantly within that worldview.  This may not be as optimistic, but I think it more accurately describes the world as it really is.

"Come on, Jack, lighten up on me," Ennis pleads.  And Jack did seem to realize Ennis' plight:  After the final argument, and Ennis had fallen on his knees and he was embraced by Jack (to mix story with movie) "...somehow...they torqued things to almost where they had been, for what was said was no news.  Nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved."  As much as the blows in the final argument hurt, they were on one level an exercise in button-pushing on both sides.  I believe Jack knew this, and he never "quit" Ennis as another topic site suggests he did. Jack accepted in Ennis what he could not change, his comments to his father about Randall not withstanding.  Even the night before the final argument Jack already knew the way things would always be between them and was reluctantly content.  Jack said, The truth is, sometimes I miss you so much I can hardly stand it."

It is in the face of this way of looking at things that I wrote that I will not evaluate another man's courage.  Where you say "courage" I would say "seeing things as clearly as one possibly can, and then to act bravely."  The degree to which a person can do that we can legitimately look to in evaluating them.  I say again that Ennis was acting as bravely as he could--and so was Jack.  Jack's advantage was that he could see more clearly than Ennis.  Shawn Kirchner's BBM song illustrates this, having Jack sing to Ennis "You can't see in your shadows what I can see in the sun."  Ennis did not "choose" to be in the shadows.  The anguish in his face in the final argument tells us he would join Jack in the sun if only he could.

Ennis is the tragic figure in BBM.  However valiantly, he struggled against forces stronger than his own.  The limited forces he could marshal were just not enough, and he was to remain "nothing and nowhere."  Please do not judge him too harshly.  Ennis was simply not free to "choose" to be rid of his emotional baggage and the way it dragged him down.  None of us are.

[Front-Ranger]

Very thoughtful points, milo and x-man. What is courage anyway? In this story, Jack might be thought to be the courageous one, although perhaps he was just more headstrong and impetuous. Ennis may be thought to be the cowardly one, although he was perhaps more circumspect and with more modest ambitions. His rodeo career was cut short the first time he was thrown from a bronc, but Jack got back on the bull time after time until he was literally brokeback (with two busted "vertebrates"). Stand it, or fix it, both require courage, I feel. In the end, I think that's why Ennis, standing before the closet altar and the entwined shirts, uttered the oath "Jack, I swear..." 

[serious crayons]

Interesting conversation, Milo and x-man! And x-man, that's one of the deepest analyses of the psychology behind Ennis' predicament I've seen, and that's saying a lot (having spent about two years discussing every imaginable facet of the film, or so I thought, in minute detail, with some brilliant posters).

Also, if you buy the idea that your parents largely shape your adult character and outlook (which in real life I don't, but that's irrelevant here, in any case it's a venerable tradition in literature, if nothing else because it serves as a convenient and powerful way to represent a character's formative experiences of the world), then Jack and Ennis were raised to be very different people. Ennis' upbringing taught him that homosexuality was the ultimate shameful transgression, an offense so great it justified death by torture. Whereas Jack's parents, at least in the movie, tacitly acknowledged their son's sexual orientation and tolerated it. Contrary to some assumptions based on his off-putting personality, Old Man Twist isn't particularly homophobic. He knows where Brokeback Mountain is all right, but is disappointed in his son for failing to move back to help with the ranch -- even if it meant leaving his wife for a male partner!

Ennis grew up in terror of giving away any clue about his sexuality. Jack grew up not worrying about that so much. Their relative views of the world's rules and dangers were shaped accordingly.

So if Ennis and Jack had done the exact same thing (moved in together for the sweet life) it would have required a lot more courage on Ennis' part than Jack's.

[Jeff Wrangler]

Contrary to some assumptions based on his off-putting personality, Old Man Twist isn't particularly homophobic. He knows where Brokeback Mountain is all right.

Isn't it funny? Maybe some distance was required, but it really only comes to me now that the reason I disagree with you about Old Man Twist's lack of homophobia is because when I hear him say that he knows where Brokeback Mountain is, I hear the same contempt in his voice that I hear in Ennis's when he tells Jack that he knows what they've got in Mexico for boys like Jack. In other words, it's not what he says, or what he doesn't say, but the way he says what he does say. I know homophobia--hatred and contempt for "queers"--when I hear it.

But let be, let be. We both know by now we're not going to change each other's mind on this point. 

[x-man]

Regarding the serious crayons and Jeff Wrangler postings above:

Guys, you both make assumption that John Twist (and the mother) knew about Jack's being gay, and according to each of you, did or did not accept it graciously.  What am I missing?  Why can't the father be telling Ennis, although scornfully, that since he knows where BBM is doesn't need Ennis' help?

It seems to me that the evidence is very suppositional.  1.  From the story, the "knowing look" by the father.  Proulx never hints at what he might "know."  2.  From the movie, John Twist does seem to give added emphasis to the "Tell you what, I know..." line, but never elaborates.  3.  When Jack returns to the family home after the first summer, to "go back up to my daddy's place, give him a hand over the winter"  he most likely talked at the dinner table, etc., about Ennis all the time, and told them he wanted to return to BBM to repeat his experience of the first summer.  4.  At some point Jack must have told his mother NOT to wash The Shirts.  Mothers obsessively was their children's clothes.  At some point in the 20 years she "kept his room like it was when he was a boy" she would have found the shirts and, given all the blood, would have washed them, unless she had been warned specifically not to.

A knowing look that is never explained, Jack's talking about Ennis all the time, the warning about the shirts: is it really enough to suggest that the parents knew they were lovers rather than just good friends?

I wish I could see more to it than that the father did indeed know where BBM was and did not need help.  If I were going to be persuaded by anything, it would be the shirts--a very romantic gesture by Jack to be sure, but is it really enough to alert the 2 parents, who were not the most sophisticated people in the world?  And it was 1963, not 2013, after all.  I am really asking this as a question--is there anything more to it than what I am suggesting?

By way of a personal note, that we are reaching back to 1963 is important.  When I was 19 I lived in a place far more enlightened than rural Wyoming.  I was living on-and-off at my parents' home.  But I had a lover (in personality he was Jack, but otherwise he was Ennis to my Jack--JW, you know what I am saying).  I very frequently brought him home to sleep in the "guest room."  We always slept in the same bed, and my parents were not stupid.  They must have known it, but they didn't ask, and I didn't tell.  They were far more worldly than the Twists, but in 1958 you had to be pretty brave to take on the uproar that coming out would cause.  I wasn't up to it, and neither were they.  So it is hard for me to comprehend Jack's parents, given when and where they lived, knowing and tacitly accepting Jack's sexual orientation, especially since they never saw the two together.  In my own case, years later when I again infrequently saw my parents, I simply talked as if they knew, and they did the same.  Alma's reaction to knowing about Ennis was far more the "enlightened" order of the day back then.

[Jeff Wrangler]

A knowing look that is never explained, Jack's talking about Ennis all the time, the warning about the shirts: is it really enough to suggest that the parents knew they were lovers rather than just good friends?

I wish I could see more to it than that the father did indeed know where BBM was and did not need help.  If I were going to be persuaded by anything, it would be the shirts--a very romantic gesture by Jack to be sure, but is it really enough to alert the 2 parents, who were not the most sophisticated people in the world?  And it was 1963, not 2013, after all.  I am really asking this as a question--is there anything more to it than what I am suggesting?

I wonder whether you're not giving rural Wyomingites enough credit, x-man? Remember Ennis's story of Earl and Rich? Ennis says he was about 9 years old when Earl was murdered, which would place that event in about 1953--and the clear implication, the reason Ennis tells Jack the story, is that Earl was killed because he was known to be queer.

"They" say parents always know. If your parents knew without you telling them that you're--ahem--queer, don't you suppose Jack's parents would know?

That "knowing look" says about it all to me. Jack's father knew exactly what went on up on that mountain. And then he had to listen to Jack prattle on about leaving his wife and moving back to Lightning Flat with another man?

Incidentally, maybe you've mentioned it elsewhere and I just haven't seen the post, but otherwise this seems to me an appropriate place to suggest you get yourself a copy of Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay. Annie Proulx' essay, Getting Movied, included in the book, is priceless. She discusses the lives of rural gay men with whom she is acquainted, and also rural homophobia.

[Jeff Wrangler]

And you are right. After Jack was gone, Ennis did indeed have the wisdom to "stand it." We'll never know if the alternative of suicide ever crossed his mind, but I tend to doubt it.

I don't think it did, either, whether one is talking about the story or the film. In both genres he's still got family. He's not alone in the world--and the film gives us an ending that shows him being more open to "being there" for his daughter when she wants him.

In her essay Getting Movied, Annie Proulx mentions the high rate of suicide among elderly single rural men, but she also discusses the importance of family in the lives of rural people, and Ennis still has family.

[x-man]

JW, I took your advice and ordered BBM: From Story to Screenplay.  I had put off getting it because I saw it criticized here in BetterMost.  Thanks for the suggestion.

About the main issue, I like what you say, but it leaves me with more questions: 

Rich and Earl.  Ennis seems to say that Earl was murdered just because he was living in the same house with another man, and no women on site.  "Two guys livin together?  No way."  Rich and Earl would have come out of the 30s and 40s when homophobia was just as rampant as it was in the 50s (1953 you suggest).  The two old men  would have had a built-in caution about appearing queer in front of other people. I  can't imagine them holding hands in public, or behaving like Ennis and Jack did at the reunion.  Did their ranch house have only one bedroom?  They would have been smart enough to have a second fake bedroom.  Would  small things like an embrace secretly  witnessed by a cowhand gradually add up in the minds of the "rural Wyomingites" you mention to a reason to murder?

My parents knew/suspected I was "ahem, queer" because I did queer things like bring my lover home all the time, to sleep in the same bed all night, often wake up late, show up for breakfast together, and then take off in his convertable for a day of adventure.  I never talked about girls and took no interest in them.  Now that I look back, I practically hit my parents over the head with it.  You ask that, if my parents knew without my telling them, wouldn't Jack's know about him?  Not if he didn't do anything queer.

Jack lived a more isolated life.  Did he have any boyfriends before Ennis?  I would think that Ennis was the first, except that it was he who initiated the the first encounter in the tent.  So what was it that first alerted the Twists that Jack was queer?  Or do you believe that it was only events after the first summer that did it?  You never do say what told John Twist what his son was doing on BBM.  Are you saying that we must read backwards from his talking about Ennis all the time, and his "prattling all the time about leaving his wife and moving back to Lightening Flat with another man?" 

Early on we learn that the first time for the two young men on the mountain was actually Jack's second summer there.  There is no suggestion that there was a previous Ennis.  The passion of the first night did seem to catch them both by surprise, but Jack was quick to turn over on his stomach.  He knew what to do and how.  (Say, do you think they ever learned how to do it face to face?)  Serious crayons points out that settling down together would have required more courage from Ennis than from Jack.  She might say that this could be as a result of Jack's not being as fucked up emotionally as Ennis, rather than his having prior experience to bring to the tent.

These are many questions revolving around a few issues.  I am willing to change my mind here--convince me.  Sorry this more rambling than are my usual.  This is because I am still asking questions chaotically, rather than making rhetorical points.  I would, at this point, add a happy bear face, but I don't know how to do that.

[Monika]

Jack lived a more isolated life.  Did he have any boyfriends before Ennis?  I would think that Ennis was the first, except that it was he who initiated the the first encounter in the tent.  So what was it that first alerted the Twists that Jack was queer?  Or do you believe that it was only events after the first summer that did it?  You never do say what told John Twist what his son was doing on BBM.  Are you saying that we must read backwards from his talking about Ennis all the time, and his "prattling all the time about leaving his wife and moving back to Lightening Flat with another man?" 

Early on we learn that the first time for the two young men on the mountain was actually Jack's second summer there.  There is no suggestion that there was a previous Ennis.  The passion of the first night did seem to catch them both by surprise, but Jack was quick to turn over on his stomach.  He knew what to do and how. 

Thanks for an interesting post, X-man! I´m gonna try and address this part, since my interpretation is that Jack does have previous experience. Here is why; In the short story, Annie Proulx mentions early on that it was Jack´s second summer on the mountain. Given the fact how short the story really is and how economical she is with words, I figure that sentence must be there for a good reason. And I think the sentence was left in the story to suggest that Jack has some previous experience and Ennis hasn´t (this being his first "summer" and all).
I also tend to think that´s how Diana Ossana/Larry McMurthy/Ang Lee chose to interpret it given how the first tent scene played out in the movie with Jack seeming to know what he was doing. Annie Proulx also hints at this during that scene, letting Jack be the one that initiates the encounter.

I tend to think that Jack hadn´t had any previous boyfriends per se, but had had at least one previous sexual encounter. But I  do think that when it came to the emotional impact of their time together, he was just as unprepared as Ennis. Brokeback Mountain left both of them shell shocked, and neither one ever fully recovered from it.