Author Topic: Four Years Out  (Read 2545 times)

Offline Shakesthecoffecan

  • BetterMost Supporter!
  • BetterMost 5000+ Posts Club
  • *******
  • Posts: 9,566
  • Those were the days, Alberta 2007.
"It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear."

Offline Shakesthecoffecan

  • BetterMost Supporter!
  • BetterMost 5000+ Posts Club
  • *******
  • Posts: 9,566
  • Those were the days, Alberta 2007.
Re: Four Years Out
« Reply #1 on: December 03, 2009, 01:07:42 am »
There were 54 songs in that movie!  :D
"It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear."

Offline Brown Eyes

  • BetterMost Supporter!
  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 10,377
Re: Four Years Out
« Reply #2 on: December 03, 2009, 01:14:22 am »
This is a cool idea for a thread Tru!  I'll take a look at those links in the a.m. (it's almost time for 40 winks for me tonight).

I have a dim memory of discussions about how wikipedia was treating BBM way long ago towards the beginning of the Brokie phenomenon.  It'll be interesting to see where things stand now.

the world was asleep to our latent fuss - bowie

Offline delalluvia

  • BetterMost 5000+ Posts Club
  • *******
  • Posts: 8,289
  • "Truth is an iron bride"
Re: Four Years Out
« Reply #3 on: December 03, 2009, 02:15:15 am »
Funny how the Wikipedia article indicates Jack was killed with a tire-iron.

That's the only link I got through, but I will be reading the rest later.

Marge_Innavera

  • Guest
Four Years Out: Epiphany
« Reply #4 on: January 04, 2010, 11:51:24 am »
Since tomorrow is the traditional date for the Feast of the Epiphany, this would be a good time to re-read the "Brokeback Epiphany" sermon from four years ago:

Epiphany on Brokeback Mountain
by Dr. David Jenkins

Quick on the heels of Christmas, Epiphany takes its seat between the Slaughter of the Innocents and Ash Wednesday. It’s a skinny season of immensely hopeful proportion. During these brief winter days of Epiphany we celebrate the surprise - no, the shock, like the first lightening bolt from an unexpected storm - of the manifestation of God’s good news to the gentiles.

It is doubtful that Annie Proulx, author of the 1997 short story, Brokeback Mountain, ever imagined her story could be an apt sermon illustration for an Epiphany homily, let alone provide the narrative for the triumphant movie, but I’d like to make a case for it. For those who have yet to read the story or see the film, here is a brief summary.

In 1963, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, teenage cowboys in Wyoming, get jobs herding sheep for the summer. Ennis is desperate for a job and Jack is scratching his itch to “be somewhere, anywhere else than Lightening Flat,” his remote hometown. Sheep herders have always been despised by cattle ranchers, a history not lost on the author who casts these discarded “pair of deuces going nowhere” as shepherds. We worry from the opening scene that nothing good will come of them.  

The two boys on horseback and their sheep dogs drive the thousand ewes high into the Rockies where the dense beauty, isolation, and raw power of Nature propel the action. As Ennis and Jack guard the sheep, they are hailed on, snowed on, rained on, and struck by the kind of lightening that charges companionship with love and sex. There they discovered Brokeback Mountain, a harsh place of belonging, “a place both empowering and inimical,” claims the author, a landscape of surprise.

"Over the next twenty years, Ennis and Jack married strong women, raised children, worked rodeos and ranches, sold farm machinery, and after two decades of occasional “fishing trips” near Brokeback to rekindle their fire, the story comes to a tragic halt. The scene shifts from the verdant mountains to the desolate flatlands. The years of emotional and physical isolation, the internalized homophobia, the denial of self, and the denial of love, converge like rivers flooding the grief-stricken plains. All that we see and feel is desolation."

(excerpt)

Dr. Jenkins is a professor at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University, in Atlanta.  Read the whole essay at the Covenant Network of Presbyterians.