First, to goadra for "Your folks just stop at Ennis?":
Second, about the one shot deal: I just had a sudden realization of why I interpret it as Ennis saying "this happened once, and won't happen again." Let's just say that I'm projecting, and although I know that at some level I'm always projecting my own stuff onto the characters, in this case I now know exactly what I'm projecting and why. (Though, just to play devil's advocate for a bit, what if Jack interpreted the statement followed by the 2nd tent scene to mean that Ennis had changed his mind about the "one shot deal," or that he didn't really mean it? Then Jack's actions that last day might make more sense. Maybe??
Oh, hell, maybe I'd better just accept that I'll make any excuse necessary for that pair of pretty blue eyes and give it up.
)
Penthesilea - the elk/moose confusion makes sense. I think "elk" describes different animals in American and British English, though I can never remember which animal also lives in Europe. The British colonists mis-identified half the large hoofed mammals in America, I think... though there aren't elk (wapiti) out East now, and I don't think there were back then. Moose, white-tailed deer, caribou/reindeer, but I don't think there were elk. But I can never keep the history and the biology straight. Anyway, digression there...
So here's a question, especially for you story fans (Mel?). How much of this emotional/psychological stuff is there in the story, and how much is fully developed only in the film? Of course, the basic plot is certainly all there in the story. But I'll have to say that when I read it, I do not get as vivid a sense of how much Ennis' father's actions and attitudes emotionally damaged his son. I read it more simply: having witnessed Earl's awful fate, Ennis quite understandably considered it too dangerous to live with Jack. But I admit I don't fully appreciate the story as much as I should or could, so maybe I just didn't grasp this aspect in enough depth.
Well, part of Mikaela's brilliant post (
) deals with the contrast between the way Ennis appears to like his father, and the horrid experience his father subjected him to. The horrid experience is there in the story, but the contrast isn't, because none of the characters are as likeable as in the movie. (Not even Ennis and Jack, I think.) Annie Proulx just doesn't write likeable characters very much; she seems to have a really unsentimental (to say the least) view of human nature. (In fact, I think she's said that Ennis and Jack were the first of her characters that she fell in love with... and even then, only after she saw the movie. ! BTW, Katherine, I get the impression that AP is quite a Heathen herself after seeing the movie.
) So perhaps it doesn't carry as much emotional weight because I didn't necessarily expect for a parent/child relationship to be anything better than mildly dysfunctional in one of AP's stories?
On the other hand, the story has another description of an incident that left Ennis emotionally damaged: the description of learning to punch K.E. comes right before the description of Earl and Rich's fate.
Dad says, you got a take him unawares, don't say nothin to him, make him feel some pain, get out fast and keep doin it until he takes the message. Nothin like hurtin somebody to make him hear good.
That's not the same sort of abuse as taking a child to see a murdered man, but, geez. "Nothin like hurtin somebody to make him hear good?" And that's the explanation for Ennis's "dirty punch" -- the punch on the last day on the mountain. Between those two lessons, yeah, I think Ennis was pretty emotionally damaged. That's where I've gotten the idea that Ennis was trying to beat his own sexuality (and his love for Jack) into submission when he hit Jack... and every other time Ennis got into a fight, too.
It's not the same thing as the tension between loving a father and being emotionally abused by him, though.