Those, however (and count me in this crowd), who have experienced that powerful kind of love, ‘get it’ all the way. Everything else in life pales in comparison to this summit experience.

I take GayPatriot’s point in this post about the flashback, but only just. Take a look at the short story at: http://www.wesjones.com/brokeback.htm.

The memory is Jack’s in the story and set at night; in the film it is set - probably for continuity - in the daylight. There is a trade-off here: the viewer is disoriented for a brief moment, “is this the present or the past?” A nice touch of ring composition; but in the story the reader is transported instead to a dreamy, romantic night by the campfire beautifully evoked; the soaring description of this context and of Jack’s deep emotional reaction to it as set out by the author leaves me at least in no doubt how profound and enduring Jack’s love for Ennis already was. By contrast this scene in the film was emotionally light.

The flashback is placed perfectly by Proulx. Jack is watching Ennis leave for what will turn out to be the last time. With a trick as old as Homer, both reader and audience need to be reminded at the end of just what put this sad, terrible drama into motion. In fact they need this allusion augmented. Proulx has kept her powder dry, so to speak, in explicitly describing their love for one another. In both story and film, little details are there and they accumulate; but how artistically and emotionally satisfying that the author lets rip just at this point? Having Jack and Ennis dreamily carve hearts and initials over all the trees on Brokeback in earlier scenes would undercut this effect.

Poor, “predatory” Jack … well, I just don’t see it. In the story there is a long and essential conversation between Jack and Ennis at the motel about their tragic predicament, including its potentially destructive effects on their families. The screen writers astutely slice this up over several scenes in the film. One advantage of this is that it gives their predicament a timeless and hopeless quality: all those years have passed - and film time - and still this “thing” is not sorted out. On the other hand it obscures that fact that they already know in this scene how strong their love for one another already is, just four years after their first meeting - even if they cannot articulate it.

Proulx has Ennis state (again) that he won’t think of sex with other men, enjoys sex with women: but sex with Jack is something else entirely. There is never a suggestion that Ennis would ever turn to other men for release: “I never had no thoughts a doin it with another guy except I sure wrang it out a hunderd times thinkin about you.”

Ennis then asks Jack whether he has ever done it with other guys. “‘Shit no,’ said Jack, who had been riding more than bulls, not rolling his own. ‘You know that. Old Brokeback got us good and it sure ain’t over. We got a work out what the fuck we’re goin a do now.’” For me there was just a slight doubt at that point about Jack; but as the story progresses any such doubt is obliterated. Jack goes to other men as a surrogate, and only as a surrogate, for what Ennis rarely apportions him. It is characteristic of the more open Jack that he does this; pent-up Ennis just masturbates.

The screen writers carry this out faithfully in their adaptation. They make up the whole scene at the bar where Jack buys a drink to pick up the rodeo clown. Like Ennis always, he wears a white hat and a light shirt; Jack is always dressed in dark colors and his hat is black. Like a bright memory this man comes out of the darkness of the bar. Second, the narrative arc of Jack’s scene with the hustler in Mexico is spun out of Ennis’ violent accusation in their last scene together that Jack goes to Mexico for sex. But this new plotline is placed by the screen writers just after Jack runs to Ennis, having misunderstood the reasons for Ennis’ divorce. Jack never cries in the story (Ennis does); here in the film Jack does cry and, rejected, then drives to Mexico.

The real clincher is Ennis’ encounter with Jack’s father. Viewers already know that Jack may be involved with “some ranch neighbor a his from down in Texas.” The screen writers make up a whole scene for them to cruise each other with sad, furtive desperation at the supper club. This is spun out of Jack’s lie during their last “fishing trip” that he is having an affair with the wife of a rancher down the road, a dangerous affair (”… and for the last few months he’d slank around expecting to get shot by Lureen or the husband, one …”) - a boast to counter Ennis’ boast that he is “putting the blocks” to a waitress, the latter to become a storyline, too, showing Ennis’s continual rejection of any emotional intimacy. Both men misrepresent their relationships because to represent them truthfully would expose at this point the emotional hunger they have for one another, a hunger which, tragically, they still try to satisfy with other surrogates. Only in their final confrontation will any of this come out.

In Ennis’s scene with Jack’s father, however, Proulx makes it clear that the father does know what dreamer Jack has been up to with these men. He cruelly scoffs at the Brokeback dream: the cabin, the ranching, the living together. And in almost identical language he concludes, “then, this spring he’s got another one’s goin a come up here with him and build a place and help run the ranch, some ranch neighbor a his from down in Texas. He’s goin a split up with his wife and come back here. So he says. But like most a Jack’s ideas it never come to pass.”

Proulx tells the reader that it is at this point that Ennis knows for sure that Jack has been killed. This is Ennis’ prophesy from the start, an arbitrary prophesy, perhaps screening something else, that to my mind does more to preclude their happiness together than any outside social forces. Ennis never flinches from this dire prediction - even in their last scene together - even though we know, technically, that we are now in 1983 (the “queer” ranchers of Ennis’ boyhood would have been killed in the 1950s); yet Jack has died because he tried to manufacture with another, point by point, the very relationship with Ennis that Ennis always denied him. Dreamer Jack (”But fuck-all has worked the way I wanted. Nothin never come to my hand the right way’) is no cad or predator.

I think Ledger’s reaction to this is note-perfect in the film. He twitches and turns slightly away in anguish. Ennis knows something else, too. In their last scene, Ennis had threatened Jack: “‘I got a say this to you one time, Jack, and I ain’t foolin. What I don’t know,” said Ennis, “all them things I don’t know could get you killed if I should come to know them.’” The tragic irony is that Ennis now knows that his intransigence is ultimately responsible for his lover’s death at the hands of strangers far away from him; but “all them things” he only knows after that terrible fact.

I don’t think Ennis was thinking at all….after 4 years the hormones just took over. And asfor Alma’s reaction, I think about the time/place/person; She probably has no reference in her life for this kind of thing…probably never thought or considered about 2 guys going at it….the situation just makes her numb. Even when she brings up Jack later, she doesn’t discuss that kiss, but only mentions her own experience of tying the note to the fishing reel.

I think Jack’s father knew and wasn’t happy at all. Jack’s mother knew too…tells Ennis to go up to Jack’s room, gives Ennis a knowing nod when he comes back down with the shirts - and wasn’t she quick with that bag to give Ennis for the shirts? She talks about how she keeps his room since he was a boy: She goes to that room a lot and knows everything in there; including the little jog in the closet where the shirts were hidden. Mothers always know….

Jack/Lureen’s marriage seemed pretty interesting: Down and poor, rodeo wanna-be marries the pretty/rich rodeo girl. Pretty, rich, rodeo girl marries the guy who her father hates the most. She can’t really stand up to her father, so she’s hoping Jack will at some point (Of course that big payoff comes in the dinner scene - the look on Anne Hathaway’s face is priceless.)

I’ve said my piece elsewhere, so here I’ll just comment on something that suddenly struck me:

And I do have to close with this reflection. There were a couple of times during Brokeback where I cringed and thought, “Geez.. my Mom saw this scene!” No Mom, not every gay relationship begins with a tent-rape scene! *grin*

This reminded my wicked mind of the old saw about kids getting grossed out when confronted with the thought if their parents having sex, even though they obviously came from somewhere; what do parents think when confronted with the thought of their kids having sex?

I’ll have to ask NDT Dad and Mom about this; they may still live in a fantasy about me and even my married brother, but my married sister’s production of a piece of crotchfruit has completely shattered THAT illusion.

I guess the film could have made the men loving husbands, but that would have been a bit of a cheat, like “Same Time, Next Year”, where we found out that Ellen Burstyn and Alan Alda’s spouses had known about the adultery for years, and they thought it was just peachy.

I think the movie just showed no one is perfect. So yes, people might come from the movie with a negative opinion of the way they treated their wives, but at least it will show them how hollow these sham marriages can be, and show them that gays are human just like anyone else. I will take that over another TV show or movie where gays only decorate the house, or gays are deranged serial killers.