I love the theme of the laundry because it brings together two motifs to intertwine in the story and the movie of Brokeback Mountain--the garments that stand in for absent characters, and the water that carries both the story and the lives told about in the story in its flow.
In the story, the first reference to the laundry is during the embarkation of the sheep, Ennis and Jack, and all the trappings to go up the mountain, "flowed up the trail like dirty water." This was also nicely pictured in the movie. Next, in the movie, when Ennis is away from camp, Jack is cleaning Ennis's shirt in the stream, beating on it with a stick. But in a larger metaphorical way, being on the mountain and subjected to its natural forces puts Ennis and Jack "through the wringer" so to speak. For instance, a hailstorm sends Ennis and Jack to the shelter of the tent, and the sheep get mixed up with another herd, their paint brands worn and faint, and Ennis has a hard time sorting it out. Yes, that's happened to me on wash day too!!
Another example is when a storm is coming and Ennis and Jack have to bring the sheep down off the mountain. The mountain "boils with demonic energy," "the wind combed the grass," and Ennis felt he was "in a slow-motion, but headlong, irreversible fall." He is disoriented by the events and by the mountain itself. At the end of the trail, the foreman Joe Aguirre notices that everything is mixed up. "Ranch stiffs never did much of a job," he remarks.
Down from the mountain, the boys separate, but their clothing signals how much they identify with each other and pine for each other. Ennis's wife Alma is like a modern-day Ophelia, always scrubbing her husband's old shirts on a washboard but never able to wash away the memory of Brokeback that made him distant and distracted. Hint to Alma, line drying shirts in the bitter euphoric air with the hot sun striking down is apt to bring back memories of another time and place.
Ennis and Alma move to an apartment above a laundromat, and this is where the reunion occurs. The laundry is the place of transformation, a cauldron that acts as a crucible for long-buried passions to come to the surface. When Ennis is introducing Jack to Alma, he is overwhelmed by the smell of Jack, "the intensely familiar odor of cigarettes, musky sweat, and a faint sweetness like grass, and with it the rushing cold of the mountain." Away from the laundry, now, the smells continue at the Motel Siesta, until they refresh by skinny dipping in the stream the next day.
A change that occurs with the laundromat is the electrification of Ennis's thoughts, just as the washing machines that appear in the story are now electric. These references are plentiful during the reunion scene--"his shaking hand grazed Ennis's hand, electrical current snapped between them," "a hot jolt scalded Ennis."
This is the place where Ennis so tenderly says to Jack, "I sure wrang it out a hunderd times thinkin about you." In case we weren't sure whether the laundry theme was significant, we now know.
As the years go by, Ennis stays "as lean as a clothespole" and his never-changing wardrobe is noted, while Jack's transformation into a Texas dude is also pointed out. Their trips to the high country are a series of discussions of waterways and drainages. When Jack scoops up some icy stream water to drink, Ennis cautions that he might get a fever. At their last meeting, the years of things unsaid and now unsayable rise like vast clouds of steam. Suddenly a clothes hanger appears as a metaphor, being used to unlock a car door and then straightened back for its original use. This clothes hanger will appear again, and once again will unlock the truth.
As Ennis is climbing the stairs to Jack's room, he remembers the gruesome story that Jack told of his dad pissing on him when he was a child of about three or four, and how he was forced to mop up the mess, take off all his clothes, and wash them in the bathtub. It was also Jack's first revelation that he was different from his dad and other men. But when Jack washed Ennis's shirt in the stream when Ennis was away, it moved him so deeply that he took Ennis's shirt away and created a shrine out of the two shirts in his closet. In the story, Ennis discovers Jack's shirt, hung on a nail, then Ennis's blood on the shirt, and finally, Ennis's "plaid shirt, lost, he'd thought, long ago in some damn laundry..."
In the movie, the clothes hanger on which both the shirts are hung presses into Ennis's face like a question mark, as he embraces them and breathes deeply, hoping for a scent of Jack.
At the end of the story, Ennis is washing horseblankets, then goes to a gift shop to buy a post card of Brokeback Mountain. At the end of the movie, he is left with Alma, Jr.'s sweater, which he folds carefully and stows in the closet with the two shirts. The clothing dutifully stands in for absent people, silently speaking out for them, even to the point where Ennis is speaking to the shirt, saying "Jack, I swear." The tears, and the water, and wringing have had a powerful effect on Ennis and have worn him down to his essence, like the powerful effect that water has on an impassive mountain.