How did living with this chronic deception affect them in the long term? How did it affect their sense of integrity? What were they feeling toward the people who cared about them, whom they were deceiving? Did they occasionally or even frequently consider coming clean with at least one person in their lives in Riverton or Childress? How could they bear the loneliness of not really being known by anyone?
Is part of what draws us to them the fact that we feel like we know them better than anyone else in their lives ever did (other than each other)?
Well, I'll pick up the "bump" while I'm posting today and add a couple of thoughts here.
The movie is about the closet. That's what comes through in every frame of it. Regardless of the differing interpretations of different aspects of it, this is what holds it all together as a cohesive work of art.
To say how Ennis and Jack felt is almost pointless to those of us who experienced the devastation of the closet firsthand. But the real value of Brokeback Mountain is that this is the first work of any kind which has succeeded in conveying that feeling to people who've never been in the closet.
Being gay, I've often tried to describe what it feels like to other people. I gave up years ago because no words could describe the closet. That bothered me. With all the books written on the subject, why didn't non-gays seem to "get it," the way we eventually got an inkling of what it's like to be black or Jewish, or some other minority?
The answer, I concluded as a result of the Brokeback Mountain phenomenon, is that gays were trying to describe the closet using the wrong medium! For us, writing about it or talking about it wasn't working. This was a problem that had to be shown instead. Film turned out the be the perfect medium to use.
As to the question of how the constant deception affected their integrity, what I can say is that the movie
shows us how it did. It doesn't tell us or write us -- it shows us. What it shows, I can assure anyone who's not gay, is dead-on accurate. To answer the next question, though, I don't think Ennis dared ever consider telling anyone. Jack considered it only because of the extreme effect the closet was having on his sense of self, which his sexuality was part of, but he paid for it with his life.
What's unique about the cruelty of the closet is that the person in it is totally isolated from his own family. The Thanksgiving scene showing Ennis sitting as a guest at his own family's table makes this point better than millions of spoken or written words ever could. At least if you were black or Jewish, you'd have a family to turn to. Gays don't even have that.
For many, the loneliness did become unbearable. That's why people would risk life and limb by revealing themselves, and that's originally what drove the concept of coming out -- the suffering of Ennis and the murder of Jack.
Today, the closet still exists, especially in third-world hellholes outside the West, but younger gays usually have it much easier that older ones. I think that's why a lot of them saw the movie as a sort of anachronism and didn't relate to it.
Poverty is a secondary theme of the movie, and many gays can't connect with the movie because they can't understand why the two couldn't just pick up and leave. They may perceive Ennis and Jack's experiences as overwrought, but the surprising thing about the movie is that for the first time, straight people could relate to suffering that intense just by seeing it. Perhaps in Ennis and Jack's pain they see aspects of their own lives. That is, maybe they have their own closets about particular subjects. That's possibly one reason we feel as if we know Ennis and Jack better than E&J's own families did. In fact, we did.
Ang Lee was able to universalize the problem so that all could see it.
