Okay, hadn’t remembered to check back in here for a while. Thought I might clear up a loose end or two for my own piece of mind before putting the topic to bed, so to speak!
The whole "hat" discussion came back to me because of an entertainment program I watched last week. They were interviewing the musician Daniel Powder, "(so you had a) Bad Day". Apparently he gets a lot of flack for all the hats he wears. In this video he's wearing at least 6 different ones. He admitted the hats were a security blanket for him, he uses them like a crutch. He actually said "when I'm wearing a hat, and I put my head down, it's like a buffer between me and the world." How appropriate was that to some of the things we were hypothesizing here? :D So, ...onward ....
Edgar, Shieldmaid, LJN; wonderful observations. I love what you all had to say about the dozy embrace both as it relates to the hat discussion and how this perfect moment still shows Ennis's conflicted nature.
"Now back to the dozy embrace. A famous part of the story describes that embrace as as satisfying a "shared and sexless hunger"; at that moment Ennis would not have felt comfortable embracing Jack from the front. So the hats being on can show that the embrace was not a full-on, hat-knocking-off imbroglio like the reunion embrace.
Ever so slightly off topic: in the dozy embrace, I have often thought it odd that Ennis strokes the jacket lapel, not the face or even the shirt. Once again, perhaps in an attempt to the be (somewhat) faithful to the story's description of a "sexless" embrace, the hats and the jackets provide a little insulation against sexuality for the characters (and the viewer). (However, it must be said that the dozy embrace does look to me very much like the embrace of lovers... but still, perhaps, "sexless" at that moment.)
Edgar, this was an excellent point - it's the embrace of lovers without the immediate urgency of fulfilling the physical aspect of their love. And it makes perfect sense that their clothing as you say would "insulate" them, allowing the spiritual to be forefront of the sensual for this moment.
But notice that moment when Jack dips his head down slightly, because even in this embrace which he remembers as sexless, he still finds comfort in skin to skin contract with Ennis, rubbing his chin against Ennis’ hand. (Reminds me for some reason of Thomas’s observation about Jack reaching up under Ennis's hat to touch his face at the end of the “prayer of thanks” scene; here Jack, from under his own hat, is still tentatively reaching out.)
Right after FNIT we see Jack not only hatless but naked washing the clothes. Ennis took off without a word to him and here we see him naked, he shivers and you can't be more exposed than that. {I realize he was naked because he was washing the clothes but....}
LJN, I love this comment about how exposed Jack is in this quick scene. Shivering, cold, naked, left for this moment in time emotionally adrift, the scene totally speaks of his vulnerability. This is a similar notion to the one I got about the shot of them sleeping together on their last camping trip, when I equated being hatless while sleeping together to being open to one another. Patriot1 rightly points out that one doesn't (typically) wear hats to bed and then we started the whole discussion that eventually lead here.
In context of last night camping, though, if we are debating hatless = open, vulnerable, then
you’re never more vulnerable then when you’re asleep, and one of the must trusting things you can do is sleep with someone. According to Ang, this scene was in part to convey the idea that theirs was not just a physical relationship, but one based also on affection, the comfort they found in each others company and the compelling need to be together in all ways that any other couple gets to be. So it’s still one of the few times we see an unguarded Ennis; one of the rare times we see him reaching out and touching Jack, with his arm thrown over him in sleep.
In sleep, Ennis relaxes his guard and can allow himself a small expression of his love. (OT - significance of, again, him embracing Jack in affection from behind him, Jack turned away so Ennis doesn’t see his face??? Yes, on the surface, just a comfortable sleeping position, but in the bigger picture ... ??)
As Sheildmaid (& her husband
) pointed out earlier, hats have been used in many other stories as major symbols. It may not be that we are over-analyzing so much as we haven't given the film makers or talent enough credit for knowing what they were doing with the props throughout the film.
OT to hats but not to the subject of attaching too much significance to themes within a film ... this weekend I had watched Moonlight Mile, the JG film with Dustin Hoffman, etc., really touching, and afterwards played the director/actor commentary. JG, DH and the director all discussing the process.
Toward the end they started talking about the "repetitive narrative"; that it was important for the characters to have some specific actions, gestures, "tells" unique to them that would continue to appear again and again through the course of the story. It anchors their characters as real people in the eyes of the audience. They spoke of a gesture that DH uses often, and how at the end of the film, JG borrows this action, too, and it's a way of subconsciously connecting the two characters emotionally in the minds of the audience.
The director also said that "if you can trust your audience they will imbue a prop with emotion", that the repetitive use of a prop will "resonate" with them. And naturally, listening to this, as with all things lately, I immediately go back to BBM, and how we were imbuing the hats in some scenes with specific emotional responses.
So, maybe, it's not far-fetched to assign deeper meaning to some of the themes we think we've discovered in BBM - be it the hats,clothing colours, wordplay, whatever. We may just be sensitive enough to pick up on what was put there for us to find!
Sorry for the over long post, peoples, my personal vision of hats needed closure and the darn theme just seemed to be everywhere I turned this past week!. Carry on with your regularly scheduled programs..
Thanks for all the great, great discussion!
