O, just to add a footnote: don't forget the isolation and whiskey helped along the feeling of friendship changing into romantic love and sex. I'm sure if this happened in Riverton or Lightning Flat, FNIT or SNIT would be very different.
Well, those 2 factors, isolation and whiskey sure didn't hurt, either in starting a friendship or, later, transforming things. Am always struck, though, by how these two guys were almost designed for each other, and at the same time, how credible the developments were.
I also notice we probably fell for them, for the same reasons they fell for each other. Maybe we had our own progression, the first time we watched the movie, from considering them acceptable friends, to (for some) objects of at least light sexual interest, to our own romantic love for them. Maybe the activating factors were even the same:
- we didn't see any malice in either of them. This is so very important because in our own real world, we are always having to look over our shoulders against people who have an ugly streak. And it would have been the same for them.
-we didn't feel threatened by them ---they had no agenda that would cause us to bristle or rub our fur the wrong way, and that was operative for them, too, particularly since, in the SS, Annie has them having conversations early on, where they showed nothing cantankerous and respected each others point of view
-we did see faults, or imperfections, but these were non-threatening and fleshed out their humanity, and the same occurred with them.
We could have been friends, then, up to a point, with either one, or both. But Ennis, in particular, IMO, was near to empty, as far as anything to his life. He wasn't a dreamer, like Jack, nor very lively. He was just limping along when that freight train, Jack, hit. So the friendship love went into the sacred zone for him, and we hadn't caught up to this when the explosion of FNIT occurred, which may be why we were staggered at the suddenness.
Might even say that, like the shirts, FNIT redefined everything seen before. Ennis looking off at Jack on the mare with the low startle point. Almost drinking in....something, thoughtfully. Jack watching Ennis at night, off in the distance, with the sheep. Every smile seen, interpreted in a new way. And we saw it, but hadn't caught up to what it meant. And neither did they, to any fullness. New territory, friendship love, for two men basically rejected by most of the surrounding world. The sex forced a confrontation (and Jack wanted that), and then, compromised, admission or ratification.
The romantic love? Looks to me like it was far more difficult territory than the previous 2 stages, and clearly more dangerous (you can adjust to a sacred friendship, and even a sexual fling, occurring at so young of an age), but you damn sure don't know what to do with the impossible- heartfelt, enduring, soul-meeting, romantic love. So they kept being nibbled at by that force that would not go away.
Am I going too far? Their real troubles were never over the intensely ratifying friendship love. And, whatever the practical, real-world troubles inherent in the sexual relationship, they, uh, still did it, even if always under the suffocating environment of homophobia. The sex worked. But the final stage...romantic love, was the obstacle. It was to prove to be the most powerful force of all, and there they could find no resolution.
I'll go ahead and say it. Ennis' fears of being discovered, and his so-called repressed sexuality, were real, yes, but he used them to avoid confrontation with that third stage he couldn't handle: romantic love.
And off, to the side...remember Aguirre? He adjusted to the sex he'd witnessed, grumped, and accepted it. He would NEVER have accepted any romantic, eternal love as possible. Ennis had trouble concealing just that....the final stage. And he used the sexual issues, IMO, as a cover.
