What Did Ennis Jack See in Each Other?
Obviously physical attraction is necessary for any sexual interest. But, for a long-term relationship, more is necessary. There must also be an emotional bond.
What was the attraction of Ennis's Jack's personalities to each other?
I think Jack was attracted to many of the same things in Ennis's character that were also what kept Ennis apart from Jack (preventing Ennis from becoming his ranch partner on Jack's parents' ranch in Lightning Flat, WY or seeking a more gay-friendly urban life in Denver, as Jack suggested in the Short Story).
Ennis tells Jack, in the Siesta Motel in 1967, that he learned that he was in love with Jack by the time Jack drove away in his pickup truck (after Ennis Jack came down from Brokeback Mt.). But at the time he thought he was just suffering dry heaves from a hangover - with Annie Proulx adding that Ennis felt as if his intestines were being pulled out yard-by-yard and that he didn't feel better for a long time afterward.
It took Ennis about a year to figure out "what it is was" and by that time, he was already married to Alma. He tells Jack that if knew then what he knew now (that he had fallen in love with Jack), he would have never left Jack out of his sight.
But now it was too late to change that. Both of them were married and had children. They had to remain "decent."
Ennis was also afraid that if the "thing" (in other words, he and Jack being swept up in the euphoria of their kiss outside of Ennis's and Alma's apartment over the laundromat in Riverton, WY - the first time they had seen each other since Brokeback Mt., four summers ago) ever happened to them again, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, he and Jack would be dead.
Ennis then tells Jack how his father took him and his older brother to see the old gay rancher Earl's body lying mutilated in the ditch with Earl's penis pulled off and his face covered in welts from a tire iron. Ennis was 9 years old. Ennis's father laughed while showing them this.
Ennis believed his father would have killed both him and Jack, if he had been alive to find them together in their motel room. A ll that life could offer him and Jack was an opportunity to meet each other a couple of times a year. It had to be done in way that no one would suspect their homosexuality. They would "ride it as far as they could." Ennis sums it all up and tells Jack, "If you can't fix it, you gotta stand it."
Ennis is probably right about how violent, unyielding, and zealously unreasoning anti-homosexual bigotry can be. His view is intellectually sound. It's appropriately prudent given the attitudes of the often violent, conservative rural Wyoming society he and Jack lived in. He sought to do what he thought would protect both him and Jack.
But this also was the source of their great emotional frustration. Ennis thought these unsatisfactory choices were necessary if they were to be able to survive.
I, myself, am torn between an admiration for Ennis's stoic philosophy of, "If you can't fix it, you gotta stand it," and a revulsion of the ruinous consequences such a philosophy can lead to (because of the many missed opportunities in life). I also admire Ennis's protectiveness of Jack. I also admire Ennis for his willingness to do what he thought was the "right thing to do," despite his emotions to the contrary. I love Ennis for his vulnerability.
As Welschwitch said, Ennis could be unyielding is his decisions. Obviously, simply being obstinate does not show a "strength" of character, however. Obstinacy is often misinterpreted as such, especially by those who find an authoritarian character appealing.
But in Ennis, it's something more than that.
I agree with tpe that Ennis uses his marriage, his alimony payments, preserving his visitation rights to his daughters, holding onto a job, etc. as an excuse to not live with Jack. I also agree with tpe that Ennis keeps Jack further and further at arm's length (seeing him less frequently over the years) because he doesn't like the pressure he feels from Jack to live together. (Jack, of course, resents being kept on such a "short leash" by Ennis.)
But there is something noble about Ennis's refusal to abandon his wife and children, too. Ennis saw both his Jack's marriages as an important commitment they made - even if they were homosexual and could never have emotional and sexual fulfillment from these heterosexual marriages. Their wives and children were a commitment they could not abandon lightly.
Ennis may have been influenced in his opinion about this because of his own childhood: becoming an orphan when his parents died in a strange accident when they missed the only curve in 40 miles in the otherwise straight Deadhorse Road.
(I wonder if there could be some sexual metaphor here about Ennis's parents and a "curve" in what is mostly a "straight" road? The times Ennis's parents lived in were even more homophobic than his own, of course. The life stories of those who were homosexual in his parents' day was an even more closely kept secret than it was in Ennis's Jack's day, of course. The history of homosexuality - or anything else - is often easily forgotten when it is never told.)
Ennis is protective of Jack. He trades places with Jack on Brokeback Mt. in 1963. He takes on the job of going to the herd camp, himself, after Jack complains how the tent there smells like "cat piss" and how he has to get up in the middle of the night to protect the sheep from being eaten by predators. There is also the long two-hour ride between the cook camp and the herd camp. Jack is also cold because he can't build a campfire at night in the herd camp. If he lights a fire there, the Forest Service might find out. His being in the herd camp breaks the Forest Service's rules. But Joe Aguirre, the ranch manager, has ordered them to set themselves up in two separate camps: a cook camp and a herd camp.
Ennis doesn't complain. He tells Jack he wouldn't mind trading places with Jack.
Ennis's generosity takes Jack by surprise. He admires Ennis for this.
Remember Jack's favorite memory of Ennis: a 19 year old Ennis holding Jack from behind, rocking him into a trance, humming him a song from Ennis's "long ago" childhood, telling him it's time for cowboys to go to bed. Jack's favorite memory of Ennis shows a concern for Jack's well-being and a pleasure in his company.
Ennis, was attracted to Jack's vulnerability rather than any "protection" Jack might offer him. Ennis's happiest moments with Jack often seem to be when he teases him.
When Jack shows Ennis his rodeo trophy belt buckle, Ennis tells Jack how Ennis's father thought rodeo riders were "f*** ups" (if I heard that right). Jack then begins leaping wildly up and down. (Perhaps Jack startles Ennis, at first, when he does this. This is another instance of a scene in the movie where my opinion of it seems to change each time I watch it.)
Ennis quickly realizes Jack is joking around. Jack finally loses his balance, collapsing into a pile on the ground, while leaping. Ennis laughs, telling Jack, "I think maybe my dad was right."
It's the young Jack, 19 years old, with wavy hair and buck teeth, whom Ennis pictures in his dreams of Jack in his trailer at the end of the Short Story. It's not the mature Jack that Ennis dreams about, with straight teeth and a mustache, who has filled out "through the shoulders and hams." (This is an ambiguous description of Jack by Annie Proulx. Jack is potentially more muscular as the years pass: thus, more masculine; thus, more "dominant." But, as another possibility, he is perhaps simply fatter and overweight.)
In fact, when Jack attempts to become protective of Ennis, he is frequently met with Ennis's resistance, in one way or another.
Jack, of course, assumes the dominant position when he takes the risk of initiating sex with Ennis in the cook camp tent on Brokeback Mt. But then Ennis quickly turns Jack around and performs anal sex on Jack.
When Jack attempts to staunch Ennis's nosebleed (caused accidentally by Jack's vigorous, "aggressive" actions), Ennis lays him flat with a surprise punch. It is the last day they are on Brokeback Mt.
(In fact, Ennis tells Jack, in the Siesta Motel in Riverton, WY in 1967, that he believes that Jack might not have contacted him for four years after Brokeback Mt. because he thought Jack might still be angry with him for hitting Jack on the last day they were on Brokeback Mt. Jack laughs, though, in response. He tells Ennis that he'll watch out for him the next time.)
Perhaps, over time, we become more like what we admire in others, however slowly this occurs.
As Jack becomes more like what he finds most attractive in Ennis's personality, Jack may, in fact, have become less attractive to Ennis. (Thus, Ennis becomes less willing to see Jack: only a couple of times of year, for what Jack calls a "few high altitude fucks," far away, in the wilderness, during a cold time of year.)
Ultimately, during their last argument on the barren shore of the mountain lake, in May 1983, Ennis tells Jack, "It's because of you that I'm like this...I'm nothing."
He tells Jack he gave up all those jobs so he could be together with him more often during the earlier years. Now he needs to keep his job to pay his alimony payments.
(However, Ennis neglects to mention that his daughters are also quickly approaching their "age of majority," eighteen years of age, when they will graduate from high school, and his alimony payments will no longer be a necessary legal burden.)
Jack believes him. (It's possible that Ennis was only telling Jack this - that he needed to keep "this" job - to mollify Jack. If Jack accepted this explanation Ennis was offering him, Ennis may have expected that they would continue seeing each other - as Ennis wanted - only a few times of year.)
Jack, in an act of great generosity toward his lover, decides to give Ennis what Jack thinks (perhaps mistakenly) he wants. At this moment, Jack decides he must leave Ennis in order to accomplish this. There is a great sadness in Jack's eyes, after the movie returns to the present time from a flashback to Jack's favorite memory of Ennis (holding him from behind, rocking him into a trance, humming to him).
Annie Proulx explains in her Short Story that Jack was never fully conscious of the sexless hunger this (Ennis holding Jack from behind, rocking him, humming to him) satisfied in Jack.
My opinion of this scene seems to have changed each time I watched the movie. As well as a great sadness, I have also seen a great determination in Jack's eyes (to leave Ennis), after the memory flashback ends, when I've watched it before. Perhaps Jack realizes he needs to leave Ennis because its too heart-wrenching for him to continue with Ennis.
In the end, Ennis is not angry with Jack's decision to become ranch partners with his Texas ranch neighbor.
Jack's father tells him that Jack was no longer going to have Ennis del Mar as his ranch partner. Jack's father has a general contempt for his son's ideas. Ennis finds Jack's father to be a man with a "hard need" to be the "stud duck of the pond," a not uncommon type.
Perhaps Jack's father is angry with Ennis because he is disappointed that nobody will continue the family ranch. I suspect Jack's father would have accepted a gay son living with his male lover if that's what it took to keep the Trick family ranch going in Lightning Flat, WY.
Ennis, at that moment, upon hearing that Jack's last plans were to have a Texas ranch neighbor to be his ranch parter "knew" (intuitively) that it was the "tire iron" that killed Jack. (Ennis "knew" Jack was murdered for his being a homosexual.)
When Ennis's goes to Jack's boyhood bedroom, he finds the nook in the closet where Jack has hung the bloody shirts that Jack saved from their last day on Brokeback Mt. (when Jack accidentally caused Ennis's nose bleed). Jack kept them as a memory of Brokeback Mt.
Jack's shirt holds Ennis's shirt inside of it. (Jack's shirt holds Ennis's shirt in its "protective" embrace.)
Ennis no longer fights Jack's "protection." He takes the shirts home with him, back to his trailer. With a 30 cent postcard of Brokeback Mt. attached, he builds his memorial to Jack.
