http://www.smh.com.au/news/books/a-faithful-take-on-love-and-hate/2005/12/29/1135732684438.html?page=2By Steven Barrie-Anthony
December 31, 2005Annie Proulx confesses to being "blown away" by Ang Lee's film adaptation of her short story Brokeback Mountain, yet she does not welcome the return to the forefront of her consciousness of Ennis and Jack, the two ranch hands who fall in love.
"Put yourself in my place," the 70-year-old author says. "An elderly, white, straight female, trying to write about two 19-year-old gay kids in 1963. What kind of imaginative leap do you think was necessary? Profound, extreme, large. To get into those guys' heads and actions took a lot of 16-hour days, and never thinking about anything else and living a zombie life. That's what I had to do. I really needed an exorcist to get rid of those characters. And they roared back when I saw the film."
Proulx, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Shipping News was adapted for the screen, remembers the moment when years of observed hatred began taking form. It was 1995 and Proulx, who lives in Wyoming, visited a crowded bar near the Montana border. The place was rowdy and packed with attractive women, everyone was drinking and the energy was high.
"There was the smell of sex in the air," Proulx recalls. "But here was this old shabby-looking guy ... watching the guys playing pool. He had a raw hunger in his eyes that made me wonder if he were country gay. I wondered, 'What would've he been like when he was younger?' Then he disappeared, and in his place appeared Ennis. And then Jack. You can't have Ennis without Jack."
Proulx didn't think her story would ever be published. The material felt too risky; Ennis and Jack express their love with as much physical gusto as any heterosexual couple. The backdrop is that wide expansive west that spawned John Wayne and the Marlboro Man - but then the edges of the mythos fray, and the world becomes chilly and oppressive.
When the story was published in The New Yorker magazine in 1997, screenwriter Diana Ossana read it one night and sold the idea to her writing partner, Larry McMurtry (The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove). Proulx found their enthusiasm "interesting" but thought to herself, "this is not going to happen".
She had never considered Brokeback Mountain to be a cinematic possibility - it pushes too many buttons, challenges too many norms. Three months later, Ossana and McMurtry sent her their screenplay, a spare and faithful rendition of the story.
"I thought it was good," Proulx says. She had a few quibbles, mostly about language - some of it seemed more Texas than Wyoming - but those were worked out in the next and final draft. It made sense for the screenplay to stick closely to its source, Proulx says with typical candour.
"This was a strong story. It had a very solid framework, it had terse, good language. It would've been hard to change that without maiming everything."
The movie, like the story, does not pull any punches. The sex is just as graphic, the critique of rural homophobia just as angst-ridden and raw. Proulx doesn't pretend to know what audiences will think of the movie but she is happy that her message will be broadcast through such a popular medium.
"There are a lot of people who see movies who do not read," Proulx says. "It used to be that writing and architecture were the main carriers, permanent carriers, of culture and civilisation. Now you have to add film to that list, because film is the vehicle of cultural transmission of our time. It would be insane to say otherwise, to say that the book is still the thing. It isn't."
After a screening of the film, there was a question-and-answer session with Proulx. "The story began in 1963," said a woman from the audience. "Do you think things are better now, in terms of attitudes?"
"I wish," Proulx said. "But one year after the story was published, Matthew Shepard was killed less than [48 kilometres] from where I live. I was called to be on the jury for one of the killers."
The tough-guy western mythology undergirding the American identity should be questioned, Proulx says, and she hopes her story - and now this film - will spur that kind of dialogue.
Los Angeles Times
