So this is an opportunity to educate and enlighten, not harass and insult. And I think “Brokeback Mountain” did a fantastic job of giving people an idea about something they otherwise would have never known or thought about. Do you think someone like Two and A Half would be having even this much of a discussion about being gay without it?
The relevant phrase is “someone like Two and A Half”.
Which is a very polite way of saying what needs to be said.
And also a violation of the rules against no insults (direct or implied), and it comes right after two mods had already warned and admonished people to stop insulting others outside the Pit.
As has been said before–disagreement in Cafe Society is going to happen; other posters will present viewpoints for which you may not care. That doesn’t give you a license to insult them or to comment on them personally. If you can’t present your view of things in a polite manner, than keep your venting in the Pit, or just refrain from posting at all. And if you run across a poster you feel is breaking the rules, report the post and let a moderator handle it instead of going head-to-head with the insulting comments.
I’m hoping this is the last warning we’ll have to give out in this thread.
I think this is a legitimate question, and from what I can gather the party line seems to be “yes.” If society forces gay men into the closet, they have carte blanche to be jerks to their beards. I find this position distasteful.
No, they do not have carte blanche to be jerks. But when you look at the circumstance of the time and place, it is more understandable why they would do the things they did.
Having just watched the film again I’m mystified at where the idea that Jack and Ennis treated their children like shit comes from. Jack’s son was only in about three scenes: just after he was born (Jack wasn’t mean to him in any way); sitting on Jack’s lap “driving” a big tractor or whatever (certainly no meanness there); and at Thanksgiving dinner (where he wasn’t allowed to watch the big game on TV, but that hardly rises to the level of being treated like shit). Alma Jr. and Jenny were in more scenes and generally Ennis was always quite affectionate with them when they were young, more so than I remembered. He worked hard to pay their child support (which Alma probably didn’t need once she got with the grocery guy) and refused to quit a job to spend time with Jack because of that responsibility. Once he refused to be with Jack because it was his only time with his kids for the month. Yes, the relationship with Alma Jr. was strained because of Ennis’ general emotional distance but as the film ended he was clearly making the effort to strengthen their relationship (Jenny vanished from the story for some unknown reason). I suppose one could say that by cheating on their mothers they were taking focus away from the marriages and were thus shitty to everyone involved in the marriages, including the children, but that’s awfully abstract.
As for treating the wives like shit, again leaving aside the abstraction that “cheating equals treating like shit” it’s quite a stretch to tag either of them with that either. We never saw either of them being physically abusive during the marriage (Ennis did threaten Alma after they were divorced, at Thanksgiving). We never saw overt emotional abuse. Obviously neither of them was as emotionally invested in the marriage as they could have been but to say that they were treated like shit because they were cheated on leads right back to the painfully simplistic “adulterers suck so the movie with adulterers in it sucks.”
Wouldn’t it be more useful to consider why you, yourself, blame the horse for the farmer hitching him to the back of the wagon?
No one’s saying they had a right to be jerks, if they even were that.
How long ago do you think the film was set? 
Jack and Ennis met in the early sixties.
Aren’t you supposed to put outside the spoiler tags what exactly is being spoiled? It doesn’t do any good if you don’t - I had no idea what you were going to spoil inside the tags, and my choices are either highlight it and risk getting spoiled, or not highlight it and have no idea what kind of example you are giving. Seems like a kinda stupid action.
I know that, but I wanted to know when lissener thinks the film was set, as I was alive then, and there were numbers of "confirmed batchelors’ around then.
Sorry, I thought your comment meant you didn’t think societal pressures were as strong as lissener might have thought they were.
That’s the jerk part, along with the adultery.
Being cheated on is, in fact, being treated like shit. BM (snerk) is a good movie about two jerks. Why is that such a problem?
They had no choice—society made them jerks. If not for society, they would’ve been free to explore their cowboy gaiety and wouldn’t have become jerks. But if society were accepting, there likely wouldn’t have been a Brokeback Mountain book or movie, because a story about two gay cowboys wouldn’t have been particularly interesting, let alone scandalous. So they wouldn’t even exist. So the jerks come full circle!
I don’t consider having emotional problems/issues in any way the equivalent of being a jerk.
Actually, “adulterers suck so adulterers in movies suck” would be a more accurate statement of the OP’s position. To quote the OP’s first follow-up:
And nobody has said that having an emotional problem is equivalent to being a jerk. Doing jerkish things to people is equivalent to being a jerk. The source of the jerkishness may (may) be a mitigating factor, but it doesn’t negate the fact that the person is still being a jerk.
Nicely said, my rooty friend.
Men can’t be in relationships with other men. Men cannot marry other men. There can be no “adultery” where an adulterous relationship cannot exist.
What are you talking about? Men can be in relationships with other men. If you mean they aren’t as accepted as heterosexual relationships, extramarital affairs between a man and a woman also aren’t accepted by most of society. Does that mean that an adulterous relationship cannot exist?
Same sex relationships have only been recognized in a few areas and only recently. For Jack & Ennis to be adulterers, they’d have had to fool around with someone of the opposite sex, not their spouse.