Thanks you so much MPJ. You know, this is one of my favorite symbolic scenes in the movie, and feel that this is one of the direct classical allusions in the film. I find rich meaning in this "dead sheep" scene, and what you say here only adds greater dimension to how I see it.
I believe there is an entire thread devoted to this scene, it's meaning, and symbolism. Have you read it? If you can't find it, I will be happy to search it for you...
Indeed, mpj and tpe, I have felt the same about this double meaning. It's full of insight and feeling:
One little image and one brief expression can say so much. And here, it does, and unravels over the whole story. It's like that sheep's blood is spread thin over all (mis)communications between Jack and Ennis, etc.
Ennis put a ghostly hand in that open sheep and fingerpainted his love for Jack over 20 years, like prepubescent graffiti. His love making would always be so animalistic and fearful and the most passionate thing in his life, I think; it's because that sheep was not only foreshadowing that 20 year love affair. It was also Ennis' intersection of Heaven and Hell, of Brokeback and Earl. From here on out he is a young man madly in love, attracted to what he both needed and couldn't stand despite of his claiming to have to.
Four years later, holding the post card, you see under his fingernails the dark, dried crimson (did he ever wash his hands of the sheep -- of Jack?). Another handful of years later, holding the "Deceased" postcard, you see his dirty thumbnail again as it presses lightly into an item of his love.
The feelings and insights MPJ notes, of Ennis at the sheep go a long way. Ennis did feel his love rip open, and he also saw the guts were missing. It reminds me of the alley seen when he's 'puking up his guts'; however, nothing comes out. Instead, Jack had taken everything from Ennis including the insides that now belonged to their relationship. - - heart, soul, *cough*... gag reflex.
Ennis sitting from afar in that field of grass, seeing Jack was his open heart, and his reaction to it: Having to let Jack go that summer, the punch, the blood. Every meeting with Jack was his brilliant picture of love and bloody consequence.
Among the purposes of the sheep, the one thing Ennis forgot to do was carry Jack away from death. In the end when Jack had died, he carried his shirt.
Like the 'puppy' that stood howling for the open sheep, Ennis could have stood by Jack.
I'll stand by you, JackBut then if Ennis stopped running from his fears, this probably wouldn't be the epic story it is.
It's befitting of Ennis to accept the fate that was ripped open before him, that had been thrown into a ditch 10 years earlier in his life. He and his patterns.
Sorry I'm on my way to work and strayed off there. In other words though, I'm with you both that this topic is very, very intriguing.