Author Topic: Why the Lie?  (Read 52335 times)

Offline nic

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Re: Why the Lie?
« Reply #40 on: May 29, 2006, 08:58:10 am »
Interesting thread.  But I hope it doesn't turn into the mythicial "were they gay" thread on the DC board, except it would be the "was Ennis <insert suitable indubitable euphemism verb> while thinking about Jack in the 4 years before the reunion" thread LOL

On that matter, I'd say the general concensus is that the euphemistic version is what was intended but as with so many other aspects of the story, readers/viewers can have a spectrum of interpretations and the resulting discussions can be very illuminating.  There are many questions I still haven't come to my own conclusion about, which is frustrating as I have an unquenchable need to. 

Yes, these concepts are from TOB. Sorry to talk in shorthand, though I don't want to go over things if people are already familiar with them. The threads were long, but as briefly as possible here are some of the main points:

Tar-spreading scene: The guy Ennis is working with reminds Ennis in a negative way of Jack (he's neither cute nor fun), and also of how Ennis himself could very well wind up in 20 years. Ennis is wearing a blue plaid shirt (Jack's colors). The big clue is the other guy says something like "the wife said I would break my back working blah blah blah" and it's those words that trigger Ennis to stand up and look wistfully off to one side into the distance, as he always does when thinking of Jack.

This may have been picked up before here or elsewhere - the fact that Ennis looks off to one side when thinking about Jack.   Apparently when you are remembering something you subconsciously look off to the side of the brain where memories are stored.  Conversely if you are lying you look off into the other direction as that is the side of the brain concerned with imagination.  Unfortunately I don't know which side is which!  I wonder if it works when Ennis when he is lying to Alma - I'll try to remember to check it out on next viewing.
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Offline nakymaton

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Re: Ennis keeps remembering Jack during the four year interval
« Reply #41 on: May 29, 2006, 10:10:37 am »
I like even more that you picked up on "Broke back's and weak minds run in the family" reminding Ennis of Broke-back - actually I think he says "bad back's" but I might have miss-heard this.  Thanks for pointing it out though! :)

Isn't it "strong backs and weak minds"? But before that, he says "...says I'm gettin' too old to be breakin' my back shoveling asphalt." So the reference is there.

I'd never caught that before.

(Has anybody seen "Surf Party"? I haven't, and don't know anything about the movie. Did the early version of the screenplay posted somewhere on the net have a different movie? I thought that "Hud" was shown in one of the early screenplays... and I haven't seen that, either. I'm curious about reasons why the screenplay changed from the early drafts to the one that was originally filmed. Especially for the reasons why some of the details changed.)
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Offline silkncense

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Re: Why the Lie?
« Reply #42 on: May 29, 2006, 10:13:51 am »
David -

Although I don't agree with ALL the interpretations, I also viewed the bar quote the same:

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The bartender sees Jack get rejected.  So when the Bartender then says :" Ever try Calf roping?"  I take that he is telling Jack "try sticking to picking up girls"  


Tiawahcowboy - I just asked this on another thread but since you brought the subject up here & you have such an issue with how your "ID" name is addressed, why didn't you stick to TJ?  Or Joe Allen Doty???
"……when I think of him, I just can't keep from crying…because he was a friend of mine…"

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Re: Why the Lie?
« Reply #43 on: May 29, 2006, 10:53:45 am »

Tiawahcowboy - I just asked this on another thread but since you brought the subject up here & you have such an issue with how your "ID" name is addressed, why didn't you stick to TJ?  Or Joe Allen Doty???

Whom are you talking about?  Who is "TJ? "Joe Allen Doty?" In regard to the latter, I heard that he has relatives in Tiawah. I do have a membership in one of his Yahoo Groups about cowboys.

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« Last Edit: May 29, 2006, 10:56:27 am by tiawahcowboy »

tiawahcowboy

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Re: Why the Lie?
« Reply #44 on: May 29, 2006, 11:31:27 am »
Tar-spreading scene: The guy Ennis is working with reminds Ennis in a negative way of Jack (he's neither cute nor fun), and also of how Ennis himself could very well wind up in 20 years. Ennis is wearing a blue plaid shirt (Jack's colors). The big clue is the other guy says something like "the wife said I would break my back working blah blah blah" and it's those words that trigger Ennis to stand up and look wistfully off to one side into the distance, as he always does when thinking of Jack.

Oh, they are spreading (hot) asphalt, which is a mixture of pitch (contains a petroleum based black tar) sand, and fine gravel. They are putting an asphalt surface on a dirt road. I have worked for the county highway department and we did patch pot-holes in the roads which had an asphalt surface.  I looked at the scene in the movie and they are putting that directly on top of dirt without the roadbed even being properly prepared with a layer of coarse gravel. In the movie, Ennis works on the highway crew BEFORE he moves to Riverton; but, in the AP story, AFTER he moves to Riverton, he has a full-time job with the highway crew and works on a ranch on the weekends to pay for keeping his horses there.

Oh, I think that one of the reasons that Ennis looks to the side while the other guy is yakkin' is that he is wishing that he was somewhere else and did not have to listen to the guy. I have met guys who will talk to anyone who has ears whether the other person wants to listen or not.

Drive-in scene: The woman in the movie is emerging from a trailer, a reminder of Aguirre's trailer. There was some talk of what the actual movie is onscreen, which I missed, though I think that may be significant, too. (Starboardlight, if you read this, weren't you in on that discussion?) And Alma grabs Ennis' hand and presses it to her pregnant belly in a way reminiscent of Jack's grabbing Ennis' hand in TS1.

Well, it is like this, that ain't in the book, the drive-in movie scene, that is. I have known women who got married just so they could have babies and they did want their husbands to put their hands on ther tummies. As far as the reason the scene was added to the story, one will have to ask those who were involved with the making of the movie.

In the book, there is absolutely nothing really romantic in the relationship of Ennis and Alma.

Quote from the book which has some details about the birth of Alma Jr.

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In December Ennis married Alma Beers and had her pregnant by mid-January. He picked up a few short-lived ranch jobs, then settled in as a wrangler on the old Elwood Hi-Top place north of Lost Cabin in Washakie County. He was still working there in September when Alma Jr., as he called his daughter, was born and their bedroom was full of the smell of old blood and milk and baby shit, and the sounds were of squalling and sucking and Alma's sleepy groans, all reassuring of fecundity and life's continuance to one who worked with livestock.


That "all reassuring of fecundity and life's continuance to one who worked with livestock" makes me think that Ennis's attitude toward the situation was he and Alma might have as well have been keeping house in a barn. And the birth of a baby girl was, to Ennis, like the birth of a filly to a mare. We do know (according to the book) that Ennis called his horses and his daughters "little darlin'." He must have just called Alma, "Alma."

Offline silkncense

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Re: Why the Lie?
« Reply #45 on: May 29, 2006, 11:41:21 am »
Tiawahcowboy -

Well the title of this thread is certainly appropriate.  Why the lie? 

The ENTIRE last paragraph with spelling & grammatical errors was previously posted under either the ID "TJ" or "Joe Allen Doty."  If you want, I will try to have the previous posts checked to refresh your memory.

Quote
tiawahcowboy
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All I know is what I read in the papers


      Re: what possessed Jack to take that shirt in the first place?
« Reply #26 on: May 28, 2006, 06:21:29 pm »   

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Quote from: opinionista on May 28, 2006, 06:08:13 pm
It's funny because in Spanish Del Mar is a girl's name. It's usually a middle name, as in Maria del Mar.


Yep, an' thar's a whole passel of Hispanic men who have "Maria" as first name. John Wayne's and Pat Robertson's legal first names? Marion. I used to know a woman whose first name was spelled "Marion."

In my life, I have known men named, Sharon, Shirley, and Sherrill.  Sharon Parks was a great big country boy and nobody fun of his name. Shirley Rogers McKenzie preferred to be called "Roger;" his mother name him after a male Cherokee relative whose full name was "Shirley Rogers." Sherrill Booker told people to just call him "Booker." 
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Offline delalluvia

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Re: Why the Lie?
« Reply #46 on: May 29, 2006, 11:50:02 am »
While this is not a regular message board run by an ISP, according to internet etiquette, it is rude to shorten the a person's "ID" name. I could mess with your Spanish name and say something accordingly.

Go right ahead.  People shorten my ID name all the time here and on other boards as well and it's not considered 'rude' nor do I consider it rude.  I like to make it as easy as possible for people to address me.  It's not their fault I chose the name I did.

[shrug]

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I am not an authority on all men;

Well, then there you go.

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but, I am old enough to know quite about a bit about them.

Heh, so am I.  For some men, they're not that hard to figure out.

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What makes you an authority on male sexual activity.

Never said I was.

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All men are not alike when it comes to sexual preferences; not every guy masturbates.

Of course not, but we're talking about Ennis.  And since he's a fictional character we can only assign him what sexual preferences the author gives him.  The expression used by the author 'wrang it out' can mean more than one thing, so many people take that as a euphemism.  And since stats say that 92% of men masturbate and Ennis seems to be a regular guy, liking and having sex with both men and women...[shrug].  I'd say the odds are Ennis is a very sexual guy, so masturbation would be right up his alley.  No rational reason to believe he engages in two forms of sexual activity, but would abstain from something as personal and simple as masturbation.
« Last Edit: May 29, 2006, 01:10:11 pm by delalluvia »

Offline opinionista

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Re: Why the Lie?
« Reply #47 on: May 29, 2006, 12:22:27 pm »
Quote
To "wring" and to "wring out" (or as Ennis says in past tense "wrang it out)," is the act of trying squeeze out an answer to why something happens which seems to have no answer. The expression has no connection with masturbation.

Oh most definately it was referring to Masturbating.    Think of how the word was used in the book.   "I must have wrang it out a hundred times thinking about you".
Doesn't everyone fantasize about their dream partner when playing with themselves?  ;)


I agree with DavidinHardford, in the short story Ennis was definitely referring to masturbating. They were talking about sex at that moment.

From the story:

"I like doin it with women, yeah, but Jesus H. ain't nothing like this. I never had no thoughts a doin it with another guy except I sure wrang it out a hundred times thinkin about you. You do it with other guys, Jack?" "Shit no", said Jack, who had been riding more than bulls, not rolling his own.

Now that I have brought the above quotation from the story, I ask you guys, is Proulx implying that Jack had sex with other guys while away from Ennis? I'm not quite sure I understand what the author means with Jack riding more than bulls not rolling his own. 
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Offline starboardlight

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Re: Geocities?
« Reply #48 on: May 29, 2006, 12:33:56 pm »
Hot damn Starboardlight, how did you do that???  Is there really an archive for the IMDb threads?  Cool, who has access to it??

J

Several of us started saving threads that we liked to our hard drives. When the trolls started to delete the threads on the board, we got together and compiled our archives together. Someone was kind enough to host this archive. We can only use it to read what had been posted. We can't really interact with it anymore, in terms of adding posts. It's a nice resource for reading what others have said and theorized about the details of the movie. Here's the link to the archive. Enjoy. ;)

http://www.geocities.com/bbmarchive/
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Offline starboardlight

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Re: Why the Lie?
« Reply #49 on: May 29, 2006, 12:41:02 pm »
all this arguing about "wrang it out" is funny. tiawahcowboy, you're certainly entitled to interpret the phrase how you like, but I don't understand why you're so adamant that other read it the same way you do. In literature, metaphors are very common. An imagery can be used to describe something even though they nothing to do with one another. When Shakespeare wrote "A rose by any other name" he wasn't talking about flowers. He used the phrase to describe Romeo and Juliet's love in the face of family conflict. A phrase can have a surface meaning and many under layers of meanings at the same time.
"To do is to be." Socrates. - "To be is to do." Plato. - "Do be do be do" Sinatra.