Brokeback Mountain by Annie ProulxMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
View all my reviews
When I say that I love this story I really mean it. It means so much to me! I even wrote countless essays based on this movie! I will provide a link to a folder of them below.
You can easily tell how passionately I love the story by how I write in the essays. There are so many issues with society in this story that there was a lot to talk about in the essays.
Although it is extremely tragic, I love this love story so much! I absolutely loved the performances from the main leads.
My Brokeback Mountain Essays (except for the last file, it’s based on another movie, just ignore that one in the folder):
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dX_9LcI4dMKZQCOfn58qIDquYZL2p5Ky?usp=sharing
All my Kindle highlights were in blue because the main colors in the movie were blue. The movie poster has Ennis and Jack both wearing blue jean jackets, so it makes sense to me.
I really wanna order the physical book, so I can add it to my collection and write down the rest of the page numbers.
God! I was such a mess over that movie lol tears everywhere!! HahahaPlaylists: ⤵️
My Brokeback Mountain Covers:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYL0fUO8zjtZ-xOKxGGF_tEwm15YvyyQ8
My Favorite Brokeback Mountain YouTube Mixes:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYL0fUO8zjtbsc845JwFFG19qfGI_6CJG
Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx YouTube Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYL0fUO8zjtbNVZNphxBEzgf49YKW7cw7
Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx Spotify Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3fu1p0UWHtjIvVl2nSWV39?si=c148206216f948da
My Favorite Instrumental Tracks from the Movie Soundtrack:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2gl3fp9L9b0YOD3Qja7Iig?si=844472ee4201461a
Brokeback Mountain Theme ‘The Wings’ Remixes Spotify Album (I love this album!):
https://open.spotify.com/album/6XnqbZ7CF6Ml8claSb9bkl?si=tvtuNaBdRMGdlvYtmQpa9w
“...yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream.
The stale coffee is boiling up but he catches it before it goes over the side, pours it into a stained cup and blows on the black liquid, lets a panel of the dream slide forward. If he does not force his attention on it, it might stoke the day, rewarm that old, cold time on the mountain when they owned the world and nothing seemed wrong.”
“Shot a coyote just first light,” he told Jack the next evening, sloshing his face with hot water, lathering up soap and hoping his razor had some cut left in it, while Jack peeled potatoes. “Big son of a bitch. Balls on him size a apples.”
There’s this mix on YouTube that uses this line from the movie and I love it! Check it out here:
“Jack said his father had been a pretty well known bullrider years back but kept his secrets to himself, never gave Jack a word of advice, never came once to see Jack ride, though he had put him on the woolies when he was a little kid.”
Jack said this line in the movie right before this scene starts:
“They were respectful of each other’s opinions, each glad to have a companion where none had been expected. Ennis, riding against the wind back to the sheep in the treacherous, drunken light, thought he’d never had such a good time, felt he could paw the white out of the moon.”
“Ennis knew the salty words to “Strawberry Roan.” Jack tried a Carl Perkins song, bawling “what I say-ay-ay,” but he favored a sad hymn, “Water-Walking Jesus,” learned from his mother who believed in the Pentecost,”
“Strawberry Roan”:
“...a Carl Perkins song”:
“Water-Walking Jesus”: https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/d2763fcb-c879-4b85-b361-e914b8130980
“‘Jesus Christ, quit hammerin and get over here. Bedroll’s big enough,’ said Jack in an irritable sleep-clogged voice. It was big enough, warm enough, and in a little while they deepened their intimacy considerably. Ennis ran fullthrottle on all roads whether fence mending or money spending, and he wanted none of it when Jack seized his left hand and brought it to his erect cock. Ennis jerked his hand away as though he’d touched fire, got to his knees, unbuckled his belt, shoved his pants down, hauled Jack onto all fours and, with the help of the clear slick and a little spit, entered him, nothing he’d done before but no instruction manual needed. They went at it in silence except for a few sharp intakes of breath and Jack’s choked ‘gun’s goin off,’ then out, down, and asleep.
Ennis woke in red dawn with his pants around his knees, a top-grade headache, and Jack butted against him; without saying anything about it both knew how it would go for the rest of the summer, sheep be damned.
As it did go. They never talked about the sex, let it happen, at first only in the tent at night, then in the full daylight with the hot sun striking down, and at evening in the fire glow, quick, rough, laughing and snorting, no lack of noises, but saying not a goddamn word except once Ennis said, ‘I’m not no queer,’ and Jack jumped in with ‘Me neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody’s business but ours.’...waiting until they'd buttoned up their jeans" (Proulx 14-15 Brokeback Mountain).
Of course, I have to attach the love scene here:
And the aftermath:
“Late in the afternoon, thunder growling, that same old green pickup rolled in and he saw Jack get out of the truck, beat-up Resistol tilted back. A hot jolt scalded Ennis and he was out on the landing pulling the door closed behind him. Jack took the stairs two and two. They seized each other by the shoulders, hugged mightily, squeezing the breath out of each other, saying, son of a bitch, then, and easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths cam together, and hard, Jack's big teeth bringing blood, his hat falling to the floor, stubble rasping, wet saliva welling, and the door opening and Alma looking out for a few seconds at Ennis's straining shoulders and shutting the door again and still they clinched, pressing chest and groin and thigh and leg together, treading on each other's toes until they pulled apart to breathe and Ennis, not big on endearments, said what he said to his horses and daughters, little darlin.
...
His chest was heaving. He could smell Jack--the intensely familiar odor of cigarettes, musky sweat and a faint sweetness like grass, and with it the rushing cold of the mountain.
...
His shaking hand grazed Ennis's hand, electrical current snapped between them.
...
From the vibration of the floorboard on which they both stood Ennis could feel how hard Jack was shaking.
...
They went off in Jack's truck, bought a bottle of whiskey and within twenty minutes were in the Motel Siesta jouncing a bed. A few handfuls of hail rattled against the window followed by rain and slippery wind banging the unsecured door of the next room then and through the night.
The room stank of semen and smoke and sweat and whiskey, of old carpet and sour hay, saddle leather, shit and cheap soap. Ennis lay spread-eagled, spent and wet, breathing deep still half tumescent, Jack blowing forceful cigarette clouds like whale spouts, and Jack said, ‘Christ, it got a be all that time a yours ahorseback makes it so goddamn good. We got to talk about this. Swear to god I didn’t know we was goin a get into this again--yeah, I did. Why I’m here. I fuckin knew it. Redlined all the way, couldn’t get here fast enough’” (Proulx 21-24 Brokeback Mountain).
“Jack said he was doing all right but he missed Ennis bad enough sometimes to make him whip babies.
The horses nickered in the darkness beyond the fire’s circle of light. Ennis put his arm around Jack, pulled him close … Jack slid his cold hand between Ennis’s legs … undoing buttons … and they rolled down into the dirt. One thing never changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough” (Proulx 38-39 Brokeback Mountain).
“November. What in hell happened a August? Tell you what, we said August, nine, ten days. Christ, Ennis! Whyn’t you tell me this before? You had a fuckin week to say some little word about it. And why’s it we’re always in the friggin cold weather? We ought a do somethin. We ought a go south. We ought a go to Mexico one day.”
“Mexico? Jack, you know me. All the travelin I ever done is goin around the coffeepot lookin for the handle. And I’ll be runnin the baler all August, that’s what’s the matter with August. Lighten up, Jack. We can hunt in November, kill a nice elk. Try if I can get Don Wroe’s cabin again. We had a good time that year.” “You know, friend, this is a goddamn bitch of a unsatisfactory situation. You used a come away easy. It’s like seein the pope now.”
“Jack, I got a work. Them earlier days I used a quit the jobs. You got a wife with money, a good job. You forget how it is bein broke all the time. You ever hear a child support? I been payin out for years and got more to go. Let me tell you, I can’t quit this one. And I can’t get the time off. It was tough gettin this time--some a them late heifers is still calvin. You don’t leave then. You don’t. Stoutamire is a hell-raiser and he raised hell about me takin the week. I don’t blame him. He probly ain’t got a night’s sleep since I left. The trade-off was August. You got a better idea?”
“I did once.” The tone was bitter and accusatory.
Ennis said nothing, straightened up slowly, rubbed at his forehead; a horse stamped inside the trailer. He walked to his truck, put his hand on the trailer, said something that only the horses could hear, turned and walked back at a deliberate pace.
“You been a Mexico, Jack?” Mexico was the place. He’d heard. He was cutting fence now, trespassing in the shoot-em zone. “Hell yes, I been. Where’s the fuckin problem?” Braced for it all these years and here it came, late and unexpected.
“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.”
“Try this one,” said Jack, “and I’ll say it just one time. Tell you what, we could a had a good life together, a fuckin real good life. You wouldn’t do it, Ennis, so what we got now is Brokeback Mountain. Everthing built on that. It’s all we got, boy, fuckin all, so I hope you know that if you don’t never know the rest. Count the damn few times we been together in twenty years. Measure the fuckin short leash you keep me on, then ask me about Mexico and then tell me you’ll kill me for needin it and not hardly never gettin it. You got no fuckin idea how bad it gets. I’m not you. I can’t make it on a couple a high-altitude fucks once or twice a year. You’re too much for me, Ennis, you son of a whoreson bitch. I wish I knew how to quit you.”
Like vast clouds of steam from thermal springs in winter the years of things unsaid and now unsayable--admissions, declarations, shames, guilts, fears--rose around them. Ennis stood as if heart-shot, face grey and deep-lined, grimacing, eyes screwed shut, fists clenched, legs caving, hit the ground on his knees.
“Jesus,” said Jack. “Ennis?” But before he was out of the truck, trying to guess if it was heart attack or the overflow of an incendiary rage, Ennis was back on his feet and somehow, as a coat hanger is straightened to open a locked car and then bent again to its original shape, they torqued things almost to where they had been, for what they’d said was no news. Nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved.
What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.
They had stood that way for a long time in front of the fire, its burning tossing ruddy chunks of light, the shadow of their bodies a single column against the rock. The minutes ticked by from the round watch in Ennis’s pocket, from the sticks in the fire settling into coals. Stars bit through the wavy heat layers above the fire. Ennis’s breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, the vibrations of the humming like faint electricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that was not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredging up a rusty but still useable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died, said, “Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go. Come on, you’re sleepin on your feet like a horse,” and gave Jack a shake, a push, and went off in the darkness. Jack heard his spurs tremble as he mounted, the words “see you tomorrow,” and the horse’s shuddering snort, grind of hoof on stone” (Proulx 43-44 Brokeback Mountain).
“Jack used a say, ‘Ennis del Mar,’ he used a say, ‘I’m goin a bring him up here one a these days and we’ll lick this damn ranch into shape.’ He had some half-baked idea the two a you was goin a move up here, build a log cabin and help me run this ranch and bring it up.”
“At the north end of the closet a tiny jog in the wall made a slight hiding place and here, stiff with long suspension from a nail, hung a shirt. He lifted it off the nail. Jack’s old shirt from Brokeback days. The dried blood on the sleeve was his own blood, a gushing nosebleed on the last afternoon on the mountain when Jack, in their contortionistic grappling and wrestling, had slammed Ennis’s nose hard with his knee. He had staunched the blood which was everywhere, all over both of them, with his shirtsleeve, but the staunching hadn’t held because Ennis had suddenly swung from the deck and laid the ministering angel out in the wild columbine, wings folded. The shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack’s sleeves. It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he’d thought, long ago in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack’s own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one. He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands.”
“Ennis, what are you lookin for rootin through them postcards?” said Linda Higgins, throwing a sopping brown coffee filter into the garbage can.
“Scene a Brokeback Mountain.”
“Over in Fremont County?”
“No, north a here.”
“I didn’t order none a them. Let me get the order list. They got it I can get you a hunderd. I got a order some more cards anyway.”
“One’s enough,” said Ennis.
When it came -- thirty cents -- he pinned it up in his trailer, brass-headed tack in each corner. Below it he drove a nail and on the nail he hung the wire hanger and the two old shirts suspended from it. He stepped back and looked at the ensemble through a few stinging tears.
“Jack, I swear -- “ he said, though Jack had never asked him to swear anything and was himself not the swearing kind.
Around that time Jack began to appear in his dreams, Jack as he had first seen him, curly-headed and smiling and bucktoothed, talking about getting up off his pockets and into the control zone, but the can of beans with the spoon handle jutting out and balanced on the log was there as well, in a cartoon shape and lurid colors that gave the dreams a flavor of comic obscenity. The spoon handle was the kind that could be used as a tire iron. And he would wake sometimes in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy and release; the pillow sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets.
There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.”
In the film Brokeback Mountain there are various examples that relate to the representation of men and the male body. The active/passive concept is portrayed through a few scenes in the film. An example of a passive role is in the scene where Jake Gyllenhaal's character, Jack, is by the campfire waiting for Heath Ledger's character, Ennis. We see that Ennis has a head injury and Jack tries to treat his wound for him, but Ennis quickly takes Jack's hand away and treats his own wound. In this instance, Jack would be given the passive role because his action of treating Ennis' wound would compare him to a nurse, which is a culturally viewed traditional woman's job. An example of an active role is when Ennis and Jack herd the sheep because they are represented as the traditional western cowboy. The active state of herding the sheep displays these two men as controlling, as in they control the sheep. Another example of a passive theme is when Jack is the submissive partner in the sexual act that Ennis and him share. Women are eternally the submissive partner and when Jack initiated the act he made himself "the woman in the relationship." Another example of an active theme is when Ennis and Jack fight before they leave Brokeback mountain because that is how they say goodbye to each other.
In the movie, the camera position, lighting, and body placement are important to the display of the male body and there are a few examples that illustrate this. For example, in a scene where Jack is peeling a potato the camera pans over to his face that is positioned to the left of the screen and Ennis is positioned to the right. Ennis is naked and is washing his genitals in the background, which is blurry and we only see the side of his body. In this instance, Ennis’ body is positioned in a way that his genitals and his entire body is clearly concealed by the blurry composition. Another example of the display of the male body is in a scene where Jack is in a similar position that Ennis was in. Jack is washing his clothes, wearing boots and nothing else, by the river in a squatting position and the camera pans up from his rear end to his head, then it cuts to a wide shot. This scene emphasizes on the idea that male nudity is almost always shown from behind and though the lighting is very bright we still do not see male frontal nudity. The only time we see some nudity that shows the genitals is when Jack and Ennis jump off a cliff naked into a lake.
Brokeback Mountain contains examples of the masculine spectacle and of the collapse of masculinity. For the masculine spectacle, the phrase “how much of a man are you?” suits the way Ennis proves his masculinity. For example, in the scene where Ennis’ family goes to see the fourth of July fireworks Ennis fights with two drunks who disturb them. In this scene Ennis confirms his measurable masculinity by protecting his family from danger. If he were to let the drunks curse in front of his daughters he would be, in our culture’s eyes, not a man. By proving his masculinity he is a better father somehow. The collapse of masculinity is shown through the scene where Ennis cries in Jack’s arms after Jack says, “I wish I knew how to quit you.” Ennis’ crying shows how weak his masculinity is at that point and he tries to put his masculinity back in check when he pushes Jack away as he tries to comfort him, but ultimately Ennis falls to his knees and continues to cry.
Word Count: 625
FMS 100
04 December 2017
Final Examination
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