Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
Timeline discovery
Penthesilea:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on January 29, 2007, 12:26:22 pm ---No offense intended, Penthesilea. We'll just have to agree to disagree on this one--though I am finding myself agreeing with you that Ennis did come down for supper the night after TS1.
--- End quote ---
No offense taken. The world would be a pretty boring place if we all had the same opinions. And this board would long be dead if it were not for the movie's and story's subtlety and ambiguity - plenty of room for individual interpretation and discrepance.
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: Penthesilea on January 29, 2007, 01:12:31 pm ---No offense taken. The world would be a pretty boring place if we all had the same opinions. And this board would long be dead if it were not for the movie's and story's subtlety and ambiguity - plenty of room for individual interpretation and discrepance.
--- End quote ---
"Sure enough!" :D
nakymaton:
BTW... I wouldn't say that early drafts of the script tell us what "really happened," or that they necessarily fill gaps in the existing story. They tell us how the screenwriters changed their conceptions of the characters and the story through time. Some (most?) of the scenes were left out of the final version because they somehow clashed with the characterization or the progress of the story, or because they simply didn't feel right.
But I still think that the Ennis that we know from the movie really wrestles with his feelings as well as with Jack. And I think movie-Ennis cared a lot about Jack before the sex began -- ordering soup, for instance, and talking more than he had talked in a year. So my gut sense is that Ennis's feelings were probably tangled up from the moment he had sex with Jack. Combine that with Ennis's childhood memory of Earl's murder, and you get... well, you get a guy who probably couldn't take TS1 lightly.
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: nakymaton on January 29, 2007, 12:00:57 pm ---TS2 takes the relationship from the realm of "poking each other" and wrestling into something else, something that makes people watch the scene over and over on Youtube and so forth. So... could movie-Ennis have gotten to that point in one day? I don't know. I personally think it's a major emotional leap
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My feeling is that he was already at that point BEFORE TS1. That is, his feelings for Jack were simmering on some back burner of his brain, only partly acknowledged consciously, though perhaps subtly sensed by Jack. Ennis made himself think of his feelings as platonic deep friendship, as when he looks up at Jack on the mountainside, orders the soup, shoots the elk, speaks more than he'd spoke in a year. We do see some non-platonic thoughts try to sneak into his brain when he leans over to check Jack out as Jack is riding away. Then in TS1 -- in fact, in that particular moment in TS1 when Ennis goes from throwing Jack off to grabbing Jack's head -- the emotions suddenly move to the front burner, and Ennis lets himself confront the fact that his feelings for Jack aren't just platonic.
Throughout the next day, he mulls this over. As he wakes in the tent and then rides up to the sheep, he looks troubled and pensive, but not necessarily regretful. Even when he sees the dead sheep -- at first I thought it was supposed to be a sign that he'd sinned, now I think it's more a reminder of the dangers that could lie ahead. In any case, at this point, Ennis has to really deal with the fact that he's romantically and sexually attracted to Jack. He decides he'll go for it, but only with certain ground rules: one-shot thing, not queer.
But then, I think there's some truth to the notion that by "one-shot thing" Ennis ALSO means, at a deeper level, that he and Jack will be faithful to each other.
That's why I think TS2 happened that same night. By the time Jack showed up on the mountain, Ennis had already done all the hard work and come to a decision. Why, at that point, would he postpone acting on it?
Jeff Wrangler:
I'll give you this much, Katherine, at least you're consistent with your own interpretation of Ennis. :)
It won't surprise you that your interpretation is implausible to me because it's not consistent with my understanding of Ennis. If I've understood you correctly, you've more or less always thought Ennis was more self-aware and more self-accepting than I have--and I have a deeper faith in the human capacity for self-denial and self-acceptance than you do.
Now that I've really thought about the time frame for these scenes, assuming that all these events happened within one 36- to 48-hour period doesn't accord with my understanding of Ennis, and it also doesn't accord generally with my life experience-based understanding of deeply internally homophobic gay men.
As for when he finds that dead sheep, deep meanings aside, I think he looks--and feels--guilty, not because he had sex with Jack the night before, but because he wasn't where he was supposed to be that night--with the sheep, doing his job, not in the main camp, regardless of what he and Jack were up to--and look what happened.
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