The End of Brokeback Mountain (Massive Spoilers)- Page 7

[PalJoey]

Posted: 12/28/05 at 10:10am

I agree, Auggie. It's another way the movie is subversive, even while being a romantic tragedy. (ESPECIALLY while being a romantic tragedy.)

It doesn't portray Ennis and Jack as "gay men"--because it takes place in a world and a time when "being gay" was impossible. It simply shows them as two men who wake up to the understanding that sexually and affectionally they are oriented toward other men.

My assistant (who is a heterosexual former frat boy) just told me that his 20-year-old sister wanted to see one movie only over the Xmas holiday: Brokeback. She thinks Jake is hot and she wanted to see him in a love story.

He actually asked her if the movie if she would now have trouble envisioning him in a heterosexual romance. She looked at him like he was nuts and said "Of course not."

The movie has ALREADY changed the conversations we have about gay love.

Updated On: 12/28/05 at 10:10 AM

[SueleenGay]

Posted: 12/28/05 at 11:08am

What BROKEBACK portrays is a lifetime defined by a commitment of the heart.

That was sort of what I found lacking, Auggie. I never really saw the LOVE, just the animal physical attraction. Ennis found someone to have sex with that he knew was "safe" and wouldn't tell his secret. To me it came off more as a "he is the only one I can Fu(1< and I am so horny...can't wait to see him again." Rather than "I can't live without you" love.
Even Jack moved on. It was obsession. It was lust...but I never really felt love.

[roquat]

Posted: 12/28/05 at 11:24am

Amen, Auggie. As someone said before, the genre of "love stories" in film is dying. I think this is because every great love story needs great obstacles, and we've disposed of the most compelling ones. Political differences ("Dr. Zhivago"), religious ("Abie's Irish Rose"), racial ("Guess Who's Coming to Dinner"), generational ("The Graduate"), neurotic ("Annie Hall")--they all seem dated today. The only "love" movies we get anymore are unfunny, unromantic "romantic comedies" where the leads have no real conflict and are obviously going to end up together. But the problem of two men in love is still unsolved in today's world, and may never be solved to everyone's satisfaction. That's why the film can resonate with gays and straights. It turns love back into what it really is--something unexplainable and rather frightening that ambushes you, confuses you, and messes everything up. It involves real risk and real sacrifice to make it work, and it seems like it isn't worth pursuing. But if you don't at least try to take that risk, you end up hollow and destroyed, like Ennis.

Anthony Lane, "The New Yorker"--

"This film has been hailed as a gay Western, yet it feels neither gay nor especially Western...Any attempt to promote this as an 'issue' movie, gripped by an agenda, feels badly misplaced; the only issue here is the oldest and the saddest one of all."

[PalJoey]

Posted: 12/28/05 at 11:26am

Sueleen--the story certainly is about love not lust. How would the filmmakers have shown love, given the society they lived in? They couldn't have done it in the ways movies usually show love: flowery language, tender emotional embraces, moonlit walks, handholding, etc.

Don't you think Jack's expressed desire for the two of them to run away and live on a ranch together was "love"?

[robbiej]

Posted: 12/28/05 at 11:42am

I'm with you 100%, SueEllen.

And, am I the only one who cannot agree with this definition of love:

'It turns love back into what it really is--something unexplainable and rather frightening that ambushes you, confuses you, and messes everything up. It involves real risk and real sacrifice to make it work, and it seems like it isn't worth pursuing. But if you don't at least try to take that risk, you end up hollow and destroyed, like Ennis.'

Perhaps that's why I could not become emotionally invested in this film. That's simply not my definition of romantic love.

[SueleenGay]

Posted: 12/28/05 at 11:53am

This movie could have used a scene where they were riding together on a bicycle to a Bacharach/David tune. And I am only half kidding. I never saw them just enjoying each other. There was the one little wrestling scene (I believe it is when Quaid's character spies them) but other than that I never really got the feeling that these two were head over heels. Their guilt or shame overshadowed all the joy and freedom that I really wanted to see a glimpse of.

[roquat]

Posted: 12/28/05 at 11:57am

"Moonstruck" (another of the rare great semi-contemporary love stories)--

Do you think love makes everything pretty? It ruins everything! We are put here to screw things up, and love the wrong people, and die! The storybooks are bullsh*t!

[PalJoey]

Posted: 12/28/05 at 12:00pm

That's the point Annie Proulx set out to make, Robbie and Sueleen: that romantic love was denied to Ennis and Jack by the society they lived in, just as it was denied to Romeo and Juliet (but for obviously different reasons).

[robbiej]

Posted: 12/28/05 at 12:31pm

But we have to see the potential. I understand completely that others see it and have an emotional reaction. I, however, did not. To understand the loss, one has to see what is being lost. The film was too schematic for me.

'Do you think love makes everything pretty? It ruins everything! We are put here to screw things up, and love the wrong people, and die! The storybooks are bullsh*t!'

OK...Now you're forcing me to get personal. The love I've discovered in my life has ruined nothing and enhanced everything. It's the greatest gift I've been given...a gift of which I do not take advantage. I realize how lucky I am. It was not without difficulty in some ways...but the good FAR outweighs the obstacles.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 12/28/05 at 12:44pm

Yes but Robbie--would your love be as interesting on the screen as Jack and Ennis's? Would you be played by Heath or Jake? Are you man enough for nothing more than spit 'n' gumption?

[Auggie27]

Posted: 12/28/05 at 12:48pm

At a certain point our debate here becomes a simply sharing of subjective responses.

I saw the film twice, and like Pal Joey, found the love very much dramatized. Not in traditional terms,no. These men have no vocabulary, and cannot bring the learned lexicon of hetero love to their relationship. But there are many moments in their scenes -- to my observation -- that constitute real intimacy. Not lust, but intimacy. (I found the film almost devoid of eroticism.) Ennis is one of the most tamped down, closed off men in his own already tamped down culture. Yet he is able to reveal biographical details to Jack, to open up, and early. It's that mysterious alchemy between people who fall, and fall hard,irrevocably. An emotional safety net just happens.

And Sueleen, the much discussed scene here with Quaid spotting them through their bionoculars seemed to me to be their BUTCH CASSIDY moment. (The shirtless tumble down the hill.) They found enormous comfort -- serenity -- in one another's company, and that was shown. Walking their horses in the water, sitting by the camp sharing a joint and whisky. I am often put off by the ways we are expected to accept "falling in love" in movies. Too often, a shorthand is used that leaves the falling off camera. But Ang Lee rather daringly allows the first 35 minutes to linger on the almost entirely silent connections between two men who stumble upon ...what I can only say feels like The Real Thing.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 12/28/05 at 12:53pm

So Auggie--when we gonna go fishin'?

[SueleenGay]

Posted: 12/28/05 at 1:07pm

I think I will give this movie another chance. Like I said, I did not hate it, it just didn't hit me as hard as it did some of you. Perhaps now that I have read some of your reaction I may see something different.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 12/28/05 at 2:48pm

If you can, Suelleen, read the story before you go back.

[Auggie27]

Posted: 12/28/05 at 4:24pm

PJ, I'll go fishin', with Karl and Jeff Gannon clear outta the (log) cabin.

[eslgr8]

Posted: 12/28/05 at 5:20pm

Augie, what a beautiful way you described this movie:

"I think it is so powerful a validation of homosexual love -- innate, unbidden, unchanging and unwavering, not "chosen," but hard-wired into people everywhere -- that it will change hearts and minds."

Of all the people posting here on this film, you are certainly one of the most eloquent, if not the most. I have truly enjoyed reading and been rewarded and moved by your insights into BB Mountain.
Updated On: 12/28/05 at 05:20 PM

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 12/28/05 at 5:58pm

When the movie was over my boyfriend said to me, "If that's love I want no part of it."

So I raped him.

[Luscious]

Posted: 12/29/05 at 12:10am

Lending credence to the old adage... "For every trash can there's a lid".

Updated On: 12/29/05 at 12:10 AM

[luvtheEmcee]

Posted: 12/29/05 at 12:22am

I saw it again today; I had knots in my stomach through the last three or four scenes or so. I don't know what to say other than that this movie is really something. It's rare for a film to stick with me this way.

[Luscious]

Posted: 12/29/05 at 12:27am

'Brokeback Mountain'... a quite box office boon

Who's afraid of a couple of gay cowboys?
Not moviegoers, who helped "Brokeback Mountain" post the highest per-screen average over the film-flush holiday weekend.

http://famulus.msnbc.com/famulusgen/ap12-28-191742.asp?t=apent&vts=122820052102

Updated On: 12/29/05 at 12:27 AM

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 12/29/05 at 12:29am

Yes, yes, we are all perfectly capable of reading Datalounge ourselves, Luscious.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 12/29/05 at 12:31am

You raped him? But you said you were a piggy bottom.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 12/29/05 at 12:32am

Oh no I did not. mahainoqwayur*

* Heath-speak.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 12/29/05 at 12:47am

Well, i THOUGHT that was what you said--but ever since you became OBSESSED with that gay-cowboy movie, you been MUMBLING!

[eslgr8]

Posted: 12/29/05 at 3:00am

In attempt to return this thread to some degree of the seriousness with which it was initially started, I ask the question, "How can anyone who's seen the final minutes of the movie (Ennis left hollow by the knowledge that he will never see and touch and hold Jack again) doubt that it was love of the most profound and powerful kind? That these two men still desired each other with the same passion twenty years after they first met--that's not lust. That's a love that so all consuming that, when it can no longer be fulfilled, leaves a loneliness and emptiness that will haunt Ennis till the day he dies.