Topic: The River and The Closet

[jason]

I'm disappointed that no one picked up on my Reply #21 to this topic quoting Annie Proulx at length from People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water (Wyoming Stories).

The quote really is worth a slow, medtative, read.  I have a hunch its what the "fixed mass" of natural backround in Ennis and Jack's life on Brokeback contributes to their tragedy.

Sept, we may not reply but many of us read your most pithy posts.

I hadn't thought of reading more Proulx but I will now, especially as a geographer like Proulx with specific interest in landscape and people ...  and especially now you have pointed the way to parts of her work that can illuminate the so-short treatment of our Ennis and Jack.

Thanks.

[jason]

2. The Closet.

It's when the movie moves upstairs at Jack's parents' house that "Brokeback Mountain" achieves its true power and universality. The subject then becomes not homosexuality but closets, which Lee presents, again literally -- that's a real closet there -- and metaphorically. Ennis is alone in the room, but he feels a presence and looks into the closet where he's metaphorically lived the most meaningful and happiest days of the life. He ducks in as if prostrating himself before an altar, drops to his knees and, hidden way in the back, finds Jack's shirt, smeared with blood from a fight they'd had; and within Jack's shirt is his own shirt, with his blood from the fight.

Apologies if this line of thought has been explored somewhere else.

Someone mentioned that Jack's room has a shrine-like nature, kept unchanged by Mrs Twist, for Ennis and for her.  They will feel it to be a memorial after his death.   

There's just enough deliberateness given to Ennis going into the closet to make me think that the metaphor closet-as-shrine works --  for me. Ennis' behavior on entering has obvious religious metaphors (which I didn't pick up during my 5 viewings but that's OK).

Ennis is on his knees, he's in a special place, with a sense of reverence being there.  His  slow but alert movements show this.

Let me press the metaphor of shrine, altar. Spilling sacrificial blood is what altars were all about, and here we find bloodstained shirts.  Most of us feel Jack was a sacrifice in some way to higher things (I know anti-BBM folks will cringe here). And we know Ennis feels Jack was murdered (sacrificed we feel, to some terrible god, who needs to be beaten back ...). 

Most of all the high seriousness of the scene gives it a religious feeling, apart from the metaphorical trappings, but trappings add such power, solemnity.  And Annie P has this grerat sense of solemnity and power in her writing.

The closet is crowded with meaning, earthly and otherwise.

[chrissy323]

There is a magnificent review in the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/01/AR2006020102477_2.html

In it, the reviewer argues convincingly for two symbols: the River and the Closet. 

1. The River of Homosexuality.

Homosexuality in "Brokeback Mountain" is always associated with a river: It's a great torrent of nature, which cannot be controlled and which provides sustenance, nurture, satisfaction, joy. The happiest image in the film, and the most poignant, is Ennis and Jack, off by their lonesome, pulling off their clothes and leaping off a cliff into the placid, welcoming waters below. Realistically, it's a river; metaphorically, it's the great river of homosexuality, and safe and free immersion in it is utterly joyful to them. Indeed, most of the two men's squabbling and (mostly off-camera) lovemaking takes place next to a river. It's glimpsed in many of the backgrounds, usually a turmoil of frothing white water to signify the rush and power of their love and lust for each other. Sometimes it's calming, it's always there for them, and they suffer at their imposed distance from it.

Contrast that with the imagery of family and hearth. These venues are expressions of the impoverishment of the heterosexual family lifestyle. Ennis lives in a shabby apartment where he is regularly assailed by his doughy, clueless wife (Oscar-nominated Michelle Williams). His children squall and make demands that he cannot satisfy; his wife clings and resents; we are pressed to identify with him and feel the pain he feels and the yearning he aches with as he lurches out to the "purity" of the river.

The same is true for Jack. His family is equally dysfunctional, fronted by a bully and braggart of a father-in-law who sells farm equipment in Texas. His wife, Lurlene (Anne Hathaway), is first glimpsed as an impossibly pretty young rodeo rider, but after the marriage she ages gracelessly into a chain-smoking harridan with big blond hair and bad teeth.

My question:  do you agree with these symbols?  I think the reviewer's arguments are magnificent.  Do they really mean anything in the movie?

I've seen the analogy about the river several times and never quite bought into that.

Not knowing much about camping and the great outdoors - my idea of roughing it is staying in a motel with a blcak and white TV - I just assume that when you camp you want to be near a water source, hence, they are always near a river.

I don't mean any disrespect to anyone's interpretations or feelings, but sometimes I think we can just over analyze things. Didn't Freud once say that "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."  :-)

Chrissy

[matsuki33]

 :o :o :o i have not word that post was awesome it is so incredible the way they analized the river and the closet amazing