BTW, anyone who wants to read the short story, here it is.
This is how the telephone call with Lurleen appeared in the short story:
Later on, he goes to meet Jack’s parents. This is another excerpt from the short story:
So was it an accident, or was Jack murdered? No one really knows, do they? But let me tell you something…every once in a great while, during hunting season, someone manages to shoot himself with his own shotgun while climbing over a fence. They always shoot themselves in the mouth or the chest, never the leg or hand. Never mind that no sane hunter would try to climb a fence with a gun in his hand, let alone with the safety off. And everyone knows the guy committed suicide but everyone goes with the polite fiction of “hunting accident”.
Make of Jack’s accident/murder what you will, but if some gay kid can get murdered in Wyoming in 1998, what do you think they did to gay men in 1983?
Have you considered that incidents where hunters accidentally shoot themselves in the leg or hand don’t make the newspapers? Leading you to the false impression that it’s “always” in the face or chest.
Wow. When they said it was based on a short story, they weren’t kidding. That really is short.
I just saw it tonight. My will to live should return by Tuesday. Good movie, but… oy.
I just assumed that it was Jack’s father-in-law who had him killed, either because he figured out he was having a gay affair or because he simply hated him that much and knew his daughter was miserable. I also assumed that Jack’s father intentionally mentioned the other man just to goad Jack, and having just read the story where the father’s even more of a bastard (the “piss” scene- glad they left that one out) I still think it.
So what do you think was the meaning of the final scene with Alma Jr.? Was it just filler to get to the last line (it’s not in the story) or was it meant to state something about the characters that I didn’t understand. I’m wondering if there are cut scenes with her due to the end and the “can I come live with you?” (also not in the story). I was half afraid she was going to reveal she was a lesbian and he’d give her a “don’t marry that man but be true to yourself” speech, but thankfully they steared clear out of that “too Hollywood” an ending.
I think it was meant to show an internal change in Ennis. After realizing what he had lost in Jack, he was more keenly aware of what his children meant to him. I think that on some level, Alma Jr’s invitation was perhaps her last attempt to connect with her father and Ennis’ last chance not to lose her. He was finally willing to make an effort the tear down the emotional wall which (he now realized) had never really protected him at all.
Speaking of “gay movie” and Celluloid Closet, there’s a scene in that documentary where Harvey Fierstein is recalling critics who praised Torch Song Trilogy and said “It’s not a gay movie, it’s a movie about a man who happens to be gay”. His response, to them and on CC, was “Fuck you! It is too a gay movie.”
To a large degree that’s how I felt about Brokeback Mountain. It is a gay movie. That doesn’t mean that straight people can’t be moved by it or that its themes are all limited to gay couples (marital unhappiness, not being able to live openly with the one you love, social pressures based on ignorance/prejudice, etc.), but it is unapologetically gay- the characters are gay (or at most bisexual, though I think that’s situational) and many aspects of their relationship are unique to same sex relationships.
Strangely, while I have no problem calling it a “gay movie”, I’m sometimes irritated by what’s filed in the GAY LITERATURE section of bookstores. Annie Proulx has been married three times so it’s probably safe to say she’s straight, but this story is very bullseye in its empathy and portrayal of two gay men who love each other. Does that make it “Gay Lit”? I would say “No”, not anymore than Capote’s Christmas Memory, which is about an asexual loving relationship between a misfit child and a misfit old woman, would be gay lit just because Tru was a flamer. As a movie of course it’ll just be filed in the “New Release” and eventually “Drama” sections of video houses.
It’ll be interesting to see what the LoC subject headings are for the movie, though. For the book of short stories it’s simply
- Wyoming–Social life and customs–Fiction. *
but for the movie it’ll probably be something like
Sheep herding- Wyoming- personnel- anal sex between. Color.
I think Ennis’ daughter was just like pa. “You don’t say much, but you get your point across.” I agree it was an internal change for Ennis. “Fuck the job, I’ll attend your wedding.” It’s what he’d finally decided to do with Jack, but too late. And yet, he did anyway - “Jack, I swear.”
I wonder if she wasn’t more Ennis & Jack’s daughter, even though that’s not possible.
PS- Not that it matters one way or the other, but just as a matter of curiosity, does anybody know if Larry McMurtry is gay? He was married a long time ago but has been divorced for 40 years and has never remarried. Diana Ossana is referred to as “his longtime writing partner” but I’ve never read anything to imply the relationship was more than professional. I’ve always thought it cool that books as different as Lonesome Dove and Terms of Endearment came from the same author.
So where would you put The Front Runner - one of the weepiest, Gay love stories of all time. It makes Brokeback Mountain seem like a comedy in comparison. (Hope it is made into a film someday - they almost made it with Paul Newman years ago, but the subject material was too “iffy” for Hollywood back then).
Patrica Nell Warren wrote that book, and at a book reading she said she originally wrote it with Lesbians as the main characters, but realized there was more money in Gay male fiction so she changed the characters to men. I can’t think of anywhere else but GAY LITERATURE to put that book.
Just in the FICTION/LITERATURE section. Personally, the only thing I’d keep in a GAY/LESBIAN section would be non-fiction works on specifically gay/lesbian themes.
OTOH, if I were designing a GAY LIT course, it would deal exclusively with the theme of the work regardless of the orientation of the writer. I just don’t believe in GAY LIT as a bookstore section. I’ll admit it’s not a logical position, it’s just a peeve.
Anthing that makes Brokeback Mountain seem like a comedy is something I don’t even want in my house lest it depress the very wallpaper and carpeting. I think Brokeback should be shown in a film festival with Sophie’s Choice and Leaving Las Vegas as a punishment to repeat criminals. (All were great movies [except Leaving, but seeing them all in one day would make Richard Simmons and Tony Robbins help each other cut their wrists.)
I have never heard such rumblings, though my ear is only laid sporadically to the tracks.
He’s an author that has been followed and cherished by my extended family for many years, both for his novels and his screenplays. It was actually one of the more significant selling points I had when trying to convince my mom and my uncle to go see BBM.
“You know…Larry M. co-wrote the screenplay…”
almost audible sound of points being applied to my column “Oh really?”
What piss scene?
From the short story:
The author actually wrote, “You want a know…”? I realize that a colloquialism is being mimicked, but that’s what “wanna” is for.
Maybe Proulix was trying t convey that the ‘t’ was pronounced. “Want a know” could be a purely phonetic rendering.
Just saw the film yesterday with the Ms. and am completely baffled by the knee-jerk reaction of the religious right, who obviously have not viewed the film. At any rate, I thought the performances were spot-on. I’ve known Montana cowboys and Heath Ledger nailed it (no pun intended). I did think the story dragged in places, so some further editing would have been welcome. The only distraction to the film was the morons who tittered throughout at scenes that could not be construed as amusing by the densest among us. Overall, Ledger deserves a solid shot at the Oscar as does Mr. G.
:dubious: Maybe. If so, why not, “Want t’ know…”? As written, it looks like the sort of error found in phrases like, “for all intensive purposes” and “it could of been raining.”
Two men have sex in the film. Period. The end. That’s enough to make it a terrible and sinful and repugnant movie in and of itself.
One of the most irritating things about this movie is that the people who most need to see it (people like my mother, who are not rabidly bigoted against gays but more “genteel homophobes”) are the ones who never will. It stars two of the hottest guys in pictures and yet really can’t be said to be a sexy movie because it’s about emotions rather than sex.
The famous “spit” scene (btw, backtracking a long way- not to divulge TMI, but a lot of boys figure this one out when masturbating, so it’s very conceivable Ennis would have known) was one I didn’t find arousing in the least. The kiss Ennis and Jack share when they meet again after four years I thought was one of the best acted kiss scenes in the history of Hollywood, the way that (at least as I interpret it) neither of them means for it to happen or sees it coming but it’s an explosive force neither can resist.
But the flashback scene, when both actors are fully clothed and there’s nothing sexual but Ennis and Jack have a moment of tenderness as Jack is sleeping standing up… oy. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen anything remotely that moving or real or emotionally powerful in a movie about two gay men. THAT is when I thought ‘Ledger needs to dust off a space on the mantel’. Ferklempt.
You’re right, of course. We had a discussion this morning about why men are squeamish about man-on-man sex scenes, but not about women with women. Women don’t seem to be all that troubled about women sex scenes either. A complicated subject for another thread.
I fall in the group that gets uncomfortable with explicit male homosexual scenes in films, but this movie was so much about powerful emotions that the sex was really incidental, and brilliantly edited.