[QUOTE=DrDeth]
No, there was no reason at all for them to be jerks. There was a good reason to keep their love for each other a secret, sure. But they didnt have to go out, get married and thus be a jerk to 2 women.
All they had to do is live as two confirmed batchelors (sadly likely seperately, but next door would be OK), who were close freinds. Sure, they’d have to occassionally visit a titty bar and gawk, whistle at a girls legs and so forth, but they didnt have to drag two decent women into their lives.
[/QUOTE]
Again, this interpretation says far more about your unfamiliarity with the truth of the situation than it does about the film. The pressure to marry and produce children was enormous. More importantly, homosexuality itself was seen as an aberration, not simply another way to go through life. To a very great extent, even men (as well as women, it goes without saying) who felt sexual urges toward the same sex shared the cultural belief that there was, essentially, no such thing as “gay.” Rather, it was simply a given that men were supposed to be attracted to woman, and any other urge was unnatural and, each man with such urges prayed, fleeting; a “phase.”
I’d hoped that Brokeback Mountain had been more successful in causing people who’d never been in that situation to really try to empathize, but clearly many people were not inspired to do so. Put yourself in that situation (I don’t have to; I was a gay teen in the seventies; I lived through it daily): merely in order to survive–not to mention in order to believe yourself worthy of joining humanity–you had to try, every waking moment of your life, to fit yourself into the mold that the society you grew up in told you daily was your only choice.
The point of showing the two men trying to make “normal” lives for themselves, and convincing themselves that they could love a woman as much as they’d loved each other during that “phase” that they believed they’d learned to control, was to demonstrate that it was the pressures of society that forced the two men to try to live a life that, ultimately, they discovered was a lie. Surviving that process, of putting every fiber of your being behind trying to live the way the world around you insists that you must, is so far from being a “jerk” that I really don’t know how to express my frustration that people still see such things so solipsistically.
Hence, no doubt, my peevish tone in this thread: such intolerance and, simply, ignorance, as has been expressed in this thread is the same kind of intolerance and ignorance that made my teen years such a misery, and Jack and Ennis’s lives unsurvivable.
The lack of compassion and empathy in this thread is very, very saddening to me.