Approximatively one month ago, Maelakest posted the following at IMDb in an obsure thread. I reposted it in a new thread (as per the subject of this one) and it found an appreciative audience. I was going through my old posts early today and found it burried, but not deleted. It has again found a new appreciative audience. Thought I'd offer it here as my very first NEW THREAD. Hope it's in the right place.
When people call it a cowboy movie, they're talking about the stereotypical male pillar of masculine spittingness that the cinema cowboy is supposed to be, vs the REAL PEOPLE they are and the REAL issues the lifestyle/economic/sociocultural area entails (and I believe I know wherefrom I speak, having grown up in a place like Crouch Idaho where everyone was considered a cowboy, whether they were actually employed as a logger who rodeo'd on the side for money, kept sheep, horses, cattle, or just had a cowboy pickup and did odd jobs like tar-filling/roadwork for the county, construction, sweeping floors at the mercantile, selling firewood, or flagging for money to feed their families in an economically depressed area with little to commend itself culturally; and yes, tragically, a town where at least one boy per year in a class of no more than 20 committed suicide rather than be outed as gay or bi). They knew what the life REALLY was, but they still bought into the stereotype of the John Wayne cowboy. It doesn't matter which animals were looked after; that was the seasonal job they were doing. Their LIFESTYLE and CULTURE was that of the latter-day cowboy; not the old 1800's Louis L'amour cowboy driving Texas beef a thousand miles with ten other ole boys; there aren't any more of them left, or very few. No; the only people keeping even a vestige of this lifestyle going in the face of a changing world and the onslaught of people who've "gone country" after listening to a few hours of the pop-country played on the local C&W music station are the ones who are either stuck in an economically depressed area due to some family situation, or other inextricable concern, or those who wouldn't trade the life despite all it's hardships because they've found something to love in it (hardy souls and I'm impressed with them, though I got out the minute I could), or those who know their way of life is going forever but have never been more than thirty miles outside their hometown in their lives (and yes they do exist, I grew up with 600 of them), and know no other way and consequently are too terrified of the unknowns to try anything different. They know that the fact they have had the opportunity to learn few other skills ill-prepares them for a different world and life out there, and only a few are brave enough to do something that most of us couldn't face in their shoes.
Jack and Ennis are cowboys; the kind I knew and grew up with in a town much like 'Signal, Wyo'. Jack is a rodeo cowboy with wanderlust that's seen more of the world and finally gone good money in order to make a living, and therefore much more able to see other possibilities in life. Ennis, perfect product of his society...well, I've known a thousand Ennises; tough, softspoken mutes tragically unable to make sense of the incomprehensibility of life outside the tiny town they've trapped themselves in by marrying and having kids too young in a place with no future, stuck with nothing to look forward to but a string of personal failures imposed by a harsh, if not impossible environment. Having spent my life trying to get AWAY from just such a dream-crushing place, while watching "Brokeback" I always find myself torn between hating the depictions of that town and Ennis's life and urging him to break away as I managed to do none too soon, and understanding the stunted life he allows himself; because he lives in a trap he can't see his way out of. The amazing accuracy of feel and detail of that life (you can practically smell the dirty sock smell of the laundromat below, where no one can afford enough detergent to quite take that faintly bitter, odd reek out of the graying linens), not to mention the tragic intimacy of the trap in which he finds himself, the tragic, misguided nobility of these stubborn, hardy folk, is both abhorrent and yet nostalgic to those who've lived there. This is the first movie I've ever seen that gets it across so completely without being an "Urban Cowboy"/"8 Seconds" kind of trailer-park cowboy cliche. There are enough of those out there already.
This movie shows the haunting pain and injustice of one life of imposed traps; both the self-imposed and socially-imposed...but under the greater message is another; a slice of a doomed part of Americana, a failed section of what was once considered a large portion of the 'American Dream' gone horribly wrong. I saw the last of the true cowboys die in Crouch, Idaho a few years ago. All that's left now are the last generation of kids who have drug problems, drink too much, have dysfunctional families, and will never get out...and the greenhorns that moved in in the last ten years 'to get a piece of the great American West', who dress in cowboy boots and hats and learn to ride because they heard it in a Garth Brooks song; but were never taught to take those hats off at the door or wipe their boots, and never worked four hours from predawn before breakfast in their lives, much less gone hunting every year without thought of a trophy on the wall because there simply wasn't enough money to feed their kids more than one meal a day if that.
The Jacks and Ennises of the world are two sides of a faded, twisted, bitter remnant of a dying culture and breed; the one that got out and the one that never will; the one that managed to keep the virtues of the life, the lessons of it; the toughness...and the one that managed, through no fault of his own, to inherit too much of the stringy, malnourished part of the dream that starved to death long ago under its own weight. McMurtry and Ossana brought it to life with AMAZING authenticity; which is only right, since they are the sort who should know...for no one who hasn't experienced it firsthand ever will.
Jack and Ennis are cowboys. Maybe not of the type we've been taught about in the grand American mythos of the cowboy; no. These are what REAL cowboys are like...in the real world. The other kind probably never really existed; not as we imagine them now...or if they did once...they're long gone.
[Edited to make it a little more readable -- PMD]