Topic: Why do some people think this????

[lamusica]

So many of the recent posts have been interesting to read and think about.  Dalemidex, I think you are right on, especially your point # 5.  People say a lot without using their voices and what they do actually speak is only a small portion of what they mean.  John Twist's tone of voice and stare and body language all point to what you said.  He was disgusted to think Jack was gay ( and Ennis and Randall, or anyone else).   Patriot, I agree with you about the bitterness, but I still maintain that bitterness often makes itself known through mean actions and words.
     You surmised that, if I think John Twist is mean becasuse of his wife's actions, then Ennis was mean according to the reticence Alma shows towards him.  Maybe you are right.  I DO think Ennis had a mean streak.  You may call it a hot temper, or anything else ( built up frustrations that occasionally erupted into violence).  Call a rose by any other name and it's still a rose.  So Ennis' flare-ups could be called many things, but the fact is, he WAS volatile and Alma knew that.  In another thread, someone suggested and I agreed that Alma never confronted Ennis about seeing the kiss because of her fear of Ennis.
    You bring up Jack's incompetence, and I, as you, I think, see nothing condemning about incompetence.  It's just a trait some poeple have more of than others.  I doubt, though, if any of us could have opened a can of bean lying prone, as was Jack in that scene.  I'm a whizz with a can-opener, but I couldn't have done it.  I think Jack is just silly sometimes -- doesn't always make wise decisions.  We see that several times in the movie, too, I think.
     Well,  this is an interesting thread and it sure shows how many different takes there are on one issue in this story.  I do wonder, thoiugh, what it is that makes you, Patriot, so certain that John Twist knew and would have been accepting of Jack ( and Ennis") sexuality? Did he say something, or do something that leads you to that certainty?

[Patriot1]

Interesting discussion here!

I for one don't cut John Twist any slack on the "he resents Jack for not staying to help with the ranch" for several reasons. I also don't think Jack and Ennis moving to the Twist place would have worked out, either.

Well, sounds like we have an accident scene here dalemidex. You know, an accident witnessed by two people who see the accident in different ways.

(1)  Expecting a child to not break away from the nest and  build their own lives is the action of a selfish parent.  And resenting them bitterly for decades for having done so is stinks of jealousy and bitterness.   Anyone who cares to look (and are old enough to have lived life a little while) has seen the type of stunted adulthood this type of parental expectation can produce.

Well then there are an awful lot of selfish parents living it the miswest U.S.A. I remember when the farmers of the U.S. were having troubles making a living; some so bad they were forced to sell pieces of their land to keep their heads above water. To a man they said they resented the situation they were in because they wanted to leave the farms to their kids but the way things were going their kids would have to find non-farm jobs. Eldest sons were also interviewed and a few wanted to get off of the farm but only because it was so difficult to make a living. Some of them were angry they would have to leave because the farm had been in their family for generations. But you know, I never heard one father or son say they hated farming.

(2)  If John hoped that Jack would choose on his own to stay around the ranch, he should have fostered a better relationship with his child.  From the glimpses we have of the Twist home life it seems like just the opposite...the type of place where most any type of child would want to leave as soon as they could walk.

Well, I think John Twist accepted his son's lifestyle and that was a big thing for a man like John Twist. As for the ranch and house not being in the best shape, well, hard to make money working a ranch alone. Maybe if Jack had stuck around and brought someone up there to help out the ranch could have grown and there would have been more money and they could have lived better.

(3)  John Twist couldn't get help because he was too remote?  "Remote" is a very relative term in a place like Wyoming.  Several miles between neighbors is nothing.  Sometimes just to get to the buildings from a public (dirt) road is a couple miles.  And in the perpetually-economically-depressed open west, ranchhand work had to be pretty awful for nobody to take it back then.  Look at the remote, lousy, unsteady work that Ennis and Jack took just to have a job.  If John Twist couldn't get help, I suspect he either paid nothing, offered terrible conditions, or both.  Probably doesn't take too long to get a reputation.

You need money to pay anything at all and it was clear they had very little to pay anyone. As for terrible conditions, with nobody to help run the ranch there surely wasn't anyone to maintain a bunkhouse so I guess the conditions were pretty bad, yes.

(4)  If Jack did stay at...or return to...the Twist ranch, what kind of life would he have had?  His parents were dirt poor and don't appear to be making it on that ranch.  Would it have been able to support Jack and Ennis or someone else as well?   And would John have let Jack take the ranch over?  Doubt it.  I come from a farm background and have seen people like John Twist plenty.  They expect their son to be their hired man until they drop dead...be loyal and work like a dog as the father gets older and can do less, but won't sell the place to them.  The son gets to be 40 or 50 or older and doesn't own a dang thing to show for their years of hard work.  Don't control anything, don't get to make any decisions.  Their only hope is that the old man dies while they are still young enough to get something out of it.  Assuming the old man's decisions and ways didn't drive the place in to the ground in the first place, there might be something to inherit.  Seen this very thing happen many times.  Breeds hate and resentment.  And I can think of several instances where the son's marriage was busted up by this very situation.  The daughter-in-law resents her father and mother in law for not letting them build their own life, and she resents the son (her husband) for letting himself be pushed around by his father.  Jack and Ennis live happily ever after with the Twists?  I think that's a long shot.

Well, everything you said here is speculation. I would thing that John Twist would let his son and son-in-law run the ranch as they saw fit if the boys could show they could increase the money coming in. But that is speculation also I guess. Mr. Twist would have been a fool if he stopped the boys from making the ranch a good business.

(5)  I think that John Twist is dripping with disgust when he talks about his son wanting to build a cabin and live with a man.  Right from the first moment he says "Ennis Del Mar".  If he really wanted this (so he'd have help) his contempt would be sharpest when he says that this was just another half-baked plan of Jack's.  He might even have sounded wistful, positive or at very least neutral about Jack's plan to come home with another man to help out on the ranch, then turned sour at the "but it never happened" part.  I don't hear any of that.   Rather, I think John Twist is coming from his own perspective where men don't live together unless they are queers, and that's just wrong and disgusting.  Everybody knows that, and it sickens him to think that his own son was one of them.  As for Mrs. Twist, well, it's hard to know exactly how she would have been if she actually had to face facts right up front.  When we meet her, years had passed and she had a lot more time to get used to the idea, versus if Jack just showed up  at 19 or 23  with Ennis one day and they lived together.  Also, when a loved one dies, it's very common to have a change of heart about things.  In her grief and longing for her son, Mrs Twist showed great compassion and understanding for her son's lover.  No guarantee she would haver reacted as supportively if instead Jack and Ennis showed up and started bunking together.

Again I disagree. By the time Mr. Twist gave Ennis his little speech, 20 years had passed and he was bitter.  By that time he had become a bitter and tired old man waiting for Jack to bring Ennis up there to help out. Then too, Mr. Twist could have been bitter toward Ennis for not coming.

(6)  I doubt that Ennis would have accepted the remoteness of the Twist place as any kind of comfort to allow him to live with Jack.   Ennis would have had to stay secluded on the Twist place for years -- never go to town, never go to the doctor, or dentist, or a movie, or to vote, or to or buy anything.  Why would he have to do this?  Because word gets around quickly in a rural community.   Even if Ennis got mail the local postmaster or postmistress would know that Ennis lived with the Twists.  And from local experience growing up in rural areas in the 70's and 80's, they gossip.  Maybe nobody would have hassled Jack and Ennis, but the critical thing is that Ennis believed that.  I don't think the Twist place would have offered the level of security Ennis needed.  Heck, I don't think he would have accepted living in a cabin up in the mountains, either.  It wasn't only remoteness but "appropriateness" that allowed him to be comforable with Jack.  Two guys camped together for fishing or hunting?  Nothing unusual about that.  Two grown men living together, just the two of them?  No good way to explain that.

I don't buy one word of that.  Here is why.  Let us say Mr. Twist had the money to hire some men to help out. Would each man have their own house?  No, of course not. They would live together in a bunkhouse. If what you say is true, why wouldn't they worry about what people might say? Because people wouldn't say it that is why.  What would they know about Ennis? That he is a ranch hand living in a cabin on the Twist Ranch. Why would they know Jack lived their also? For all they knew Jack was staying in his room in the main house.  Nothing to explain there at all. All people would know is that the Twist kid came home to work the ranch after making some money somewhere in Texas. Enough money to hire a ranch hand.

I do understand the line of thinking followed in some of these threads, but I run into roadblocks following it.  And so I view it a little differently.

Yep. That accident thing again.

[Patriot1]

So true, so sad.  That maybe they could have had that sweet life.  Though Jack never mentioned that it would be his Dad's Lightning Flat ranch.  Did he ever say that in the SS? 

kathy

No, the Twist Ranch was never mentioned by Jack to Ennis.

[Patriot1]

I do wonder, thoiugh, what it is that makes you, Patriot, so certain that John Twist knew and would have been accepting of Jack ( and Ennis") sexuality? Did he say something, or do something that leads you to that certainty?

When I was 17 my mother didn't accept my homosexuality or me. She told me to get out of her house. So, for a short time I lived on the streets. I would never have told here I had a lover and we were going to come back and build a cabin and help with the farm. Jack did that. He freely and openly told his father he was going to bring Ennis back home and they were going to build a cabin to live in. Then it was Randall only this time he was going to divorce his wife also. If Jack had felt his father would not accept that idea or his homosexuality he would never have told him in the first place. And even if he did not know how his father was going to react when he told him about Ennis, he sure knew by the time Randall came around and yet he freely told his father again. Sounds to me like a son telling his father about his sex life and a father just waiting for his son to bring a man home to help out. Hell, if John Twist was against his son's sexual orientation he would have told Jack to forget it and not come home. Jack wasn't any help to him anyway.

Now I am not saying Mr. Twist liked his son's sexual orientation, and I am pretty sure he wouldn't throw them a 25 anniversary party, but he was resigned to it if he could just get some help on the ranch.

[lamusica]

Well, Patriot, I know this comment in OT, but I sure hope your mother wised up over time, and things worked out between the two of you.
     Back OT:  I think you really have gotten into John Twist's head, and I understand a bit better why you believe what you believe about John's accepting ( although perhapos, not preferring, Jack's mate).  Although what you say is a possibility, I still don't think John's tone of voice and body language shout anything but ridicule and skepticiam of Jack and Ennis.  Just MHO, but I hear censure in every word he says to Ennis, not frustration because he and Jack never did come up to help with the ranch.  One thing we Do agree on, I think, though, is that Jack's words did mean something to the old man.  He remembered Ennis's name and he remembered Jack's dream to come up there and help out, so these things were very important to John, for one reason or another.

[dalemidex]

Hi Patriot--

I very much like your witness-to-an-accident analogy! 

(1)  Expecting a child to not break away from the nest and  build their own lives is the action of a selfish parent.  And resenting them bitterly for decades for having done so is stinks of jealousy and bitterness.   Anyone who cares to look (and are old enough to have lived life a little while) has seen the type of stunted adulthood this type of parental expectation can produce.

Well then there are an awful lot of selfish parents living it the miswest U.S.A. I remember when the farmers of the U.S. were having troubles making a living; some so bad they were forced to sell pieces of their land to keep their heads above water. To a man they said they resented the situation they were in because they wanted to leave the farms to their kids but the way things were going their kids would have to find non-farm jobs. Eldest sons were also interviewed and a few wanted to get off of the farm but only because it was so difficult to make a living. Some of them were angry they would have to leave because the farm had been in their family for generations. But you know, I never heard one father or son say they hated farming.

It's not a matter of hating farming -- fathers and their sons both generally want the farm to continue to pass from generation to generation.  Most farm fathers do want a son to follow in their footsteps -- in the abstract.  What's much harder to do is in fact step down and give up control.  That's because farmers generally have most of their self worth built on that farm and it kills them to see anyone else -- even their own son -- take over and make decision.  In my own family, one in which we get along better than most I see -- this still came into play.  My grandfather wouldn't sell until he was simply too old to do anything and after my father had worked as a hired hand for more than 20 years without getting to own anything more than his car and his family's household possessions.  When it came time for my father to retire, he swore he'd not make the same mistake his father did.  So he sold to my brother 20 years ago, and ever since then my father hasn't been able to keep his nose out of his son's business because he still feels like it is "his" farm.  My brother's ways are different than my father's, and it causes constand conflict in the family and puts a huge strain on my brother's marriage.  My brother has been a successful farmer for years, but my father will to this day (he's in his mid-80's) say that he should have never sold the farm, and will break out into angry profanity based on some as simple as my brother being among the last in the area to get a particular field task accomplished.

Yet if you'd ask either of them, they'd definitely say similar things to what you've heard in the media -- about wanting to keep the farm in the family, about it being difficult economically to do so, about how hard it would be to give it up and the hardships they sometimes endure to make it.    My family's experience is not unusual in farming communities, and it often doesn't work out as well as ours has.  No estrangement and no divorce, but I can think of several instances just from our area with both.

The reason I see John Twist as just this type of ranch owner is that in spite of being old, dirt poor, and having no help, he didn't sell the place and move to town.  Old stubborn farmers are removed from their dilapidated farmsteads by ambulances and hea rse.

(4)  If Jack did stay at...or return to...the Twist ranch, what kind of life would he have had?  His parents were dirt poor and don't appear to be making it on that ranch.  Would it have been able to support Jack and Ennis or someone else as well?   And would John have let Jack take the ranch over?  Doubt it.  I come from a farm background and have seen people like John Twist plenty.  They expect their son to be their hired man until they drop dead...be loyal and work like a dog as the father gets older and can do less, but won't sell the place to them.  The son gets to be 40 or 50 or older and doesn't own a dang thing to show for their years of hard work.  Don't control anything, don't get to make any decisions.  Their only hope is that the old man dies while they are still young enough to get something out of it.  Assuming the old man's decisions and ways didn't drive the place in to the ground in the first place, there might be something to inherit.  Seen this very thing happen many times.  Breeds hate and resentment.  And I can think of several instances where the son's marriage was busted up by this very situation.  The daughter-in-law resents her father and mother in law for not letting them build their own life, and she resents the son (her husband) for letting himself be pushed around by his father.  Jack and Ennis live happily ever after with the Twists?  I think that's a long shot.

Well, everything you said here is speculation. I would thing that John Twist would let his son and son-in-law run the ranch as they saw fit if the boys could show they could increase the money coming in. But that is speculation also I guess. Mr. Twist would have been a fool if he stopped the boys from making the ranch a good business.

Unfortunately, I just don't see John Twist as the type to let Jack and/or Ennis to really run the place.  Money, or the prospect of it with Jack and Ennis running the place, is not the motivator.  Stepping aside admits defeat in the only thing that really matters to a hardscrabble homesteader like John Twist.  A successful Jack & Ennis would only rub into John's eyes that he was a failure.  And we already know Jack has said he couldn't do anything right in his daddy's eyes, and so I question that Jack would stick around even if it were tried.

continued in next message---

[dalemidex]

...continued from prior message

(5)  I think that John Twist is dripping with disgust when he talks about his son wanting to build a cabin and live with a man.  Right from the first moment he says "Ennis Del Mar".  If he really wanted this (so he'd have help) his contempt would be sharpest when he says that this was just another half-baked plan of Jack's.  He might even have sounded wistful, positive or at very least neutral about Jack's plan to come home with another man to help out on the ranch, then turned sour at the "but it never happened" part.  I don't hear any of that.   Rather, I think John Twist is coming from his own perspective where men don't live together unless they are queers, and that's just wrong and disgusting.  Everybody knows that, and it sickens him to think that his own son was one of them.  As for Mrs. Twist, well, it's hard to know exactly how she would have been if she actually had to face facts right up front.  When we meet her, years had passed and she had a lot more time to get used to the idea, versus if Jack just showed up  at 19 or 23  with Ennis one day and they lived together.  Also, when a loved one dies, it's very common to have a change of heart about things.  In her grief and longing for her son, Mrs Twist showed great compassion and understanding for her son's lover.  No guarantee she would haver reacted as supportively if instead Jack and Ennis showed up and started bunking together.

Again I disagree. By the time Mr. Twist gave Ennis his little speech, 20 years had passed and he was bitter.  By that time he had become a bitter and tired old man waiting for Jack to bring Ennis up there to help out. Then too, Mr. Twist could have been bitter toward Ennis for not coming.

I just don't see John Twist waiting up there for Jack to come up and take over all those years.

John Twist says quite freely -- and in some ways he's not too far off  based on the Jack we see in the story -- that his talk of bringing Ennis up to the ranch and whipping it into shape was just one of countless windbag Jack statements that were not going to come to pass.    His son has a wife and kid and a good life down in Texas, and yet John Twist thinks that someday Jack is going to make good on that promise? The promise to someday bail him out of his hopeless situation? 

I don't see John Twist's statements as saying:
"He promised for years to bring you up here and finally help get this place to where it should be, but he never came through for me".

Rather, I think the underlying message is:
"The no-good jerk thought he was gonna be real smart and show me up someday  Come up here and show me how I SHOULD have been running this place all these years, that he could do it better than me.  But the gutless bum didn't even have the balls to try and make good on his threats.  Just a big bag of wind he was."

John Twist quoting his son's plan to bring Ennis and "whip this damn ranch into shape", that wasn't "someday I'm going to help you Daddy".  It was a direct blow to John Twist's ego.  As I said before, many farmers view their land and place not just as a reflection of who they are, but the whole of who they are.  Jack's statements clearly implied that his daddy wasn't cutting it, and that was certainly a huge offense to John Twist.  That's why he'd say this to Ennis, because ultimiatly he beleive he got in the last laugh -- the pissant son of his never stood up to the old stud duck.

He wasn't disappointed his son failed in keeping promises to help him out.  He was disgusted with his son's failure to meet his definition of a man -- and never challenging him in this way was just one more way he didn't measure up.   

(6)  I doubt that Ennis would have accepted the remoteness of the Twist place as any kind of comfort to allow him to live with Jack.   Ennis would have had to stay secluded on the Twist place for years -- never go to town, never go to the doctor, or dentist, or a movie, or to vote, or to or buy anything.  Why would he have to do this?  Because word gets around quickly in a rural community.   Even if Ennis got mail the local postmaster or postmistress would know that Ennis lived with the Twists.  And from local experience growing up in rural areas in the 70's and 80's, they gossip.  Maybe nobody would have hassled Jack and Ennis, but the critical thing is that Ennis believed that.  I don't think the Twist place would have offered the level of security Ennis needed.  Heck, I don't think he would have accepted living in a cabin up in the mountains, either.  It wasn't only remoteness but "appropriateness" that allowed him to be comforable with Jack.  Two guys camped together for fishing or hunting?  Nothing unusual about that.  Two grown men living together, just the two of them?  No good way to explain that.

I don't buy one word of that.  Here is why.  Let us say Mr. Twist had the money to hire some men to help out. Would each man have their own house?  No, of course not. They would live together in a bunkhouse. If what you say is true, why wouldn't they worry about what people might say? Because people wouldn't say it that is why.  What would they know about Ennis? That he is a ranch hand living in a cabin on the Twist Ranch. Why would they know Jack lived their also? For all they knew Jack was staying in his room in the main house.  Nothing to explain there at all. All people would know is that the Twist kid came home to work the ranch after making some money somewhere in Texas. Enough money to hire a ranch hand.

Two things to support my opinon on that:

(1) At small ranches, ranch hand work tended to be more intermittant and transient.  And these types of jobs tended to be younger guys who sometimes didn't work at the same place twice, or if they did it wasn't constant through the winter.  Ennis would have been there 24/7 for years.  Not normal.    More steady ranch work, like the kind Ennis had as a mirried man, did indeed often go to men who rented their own place and had a wife and family.  Ennis living year after year on the Twist place would have stuck out, especially as they got older.  Remember, too, that at this same time Jack's lack of wife and family would have also been increasingly apparent.

In my part of the world they're not called ranch hands but are instead called hired men.  And in some instances they live on the farm where they work.  In the rural area where I was raised, we all knew a couple of hired-man situations that were definitely "fishy" -- mostly male-female but not entirely.

(2)  Just as important, the kicker was Ennis perception that things would eventually look too fishy.  No matter if people eventually put 2 + 2 together or not, Ennis would have feared it none the less.  Ennis' fear was what really held him back even if his fear wasn't always rational or in proportion to reality.

[CrimsonSky]

I know as much about farming and ranching as I do about rodeo-ing (ie nothing), but I can appreciate Jack's dad must have had a hard time of it, but I'm sorry, I still can't bring myself to have any sympathy for him. Maybe if I hadn't read the ss I might, but finding out that he beat Jack was the final straw for me. What sort of person attacks a four year old child with a belt? I know that in those days it was accepted that parents used corporal punishment to discipline their kids, but whipping a helpless four year old with a belt is just vicious and evil, it makes Jack's dad nothing but a bully and a gutless coward imo And the worst thing is, Jack still obviously wanted his love and approval, wanting to be a bull rider like him, helping on the ranch when he went back home,but nothing he did could ever please his dad He should think himself lucky that Jack ever went back at all(although he probably went to see his mum, rather than his dad).

I don't think Jack living on the ranch with anyone would have ever happened, Jack may have said it to taunt his dad,both about his inability to run the place properly and about his homosexuality,but the way he spits into his cup after he says about Jack and Ennis moving there, it's like he's disgusted by the thought, and would never allow that to happen on his ranch. And the way he tells the story, it's like he's setting Ennis up for a fall, he only says it so that he can then bring up Randall and add to Ennis's pain, he knows Ennis is grieving for Jack, but he can't resist making it worse, and seems to me like he's enjoying it But I love the way Jack's mum immediately goes to comfort Ennis by touching his shoulder and telling him he's welcome to go up to Jack's room, it's like she's telling him to take no notice of her husband, she knows it was him, and only him, who Jack loved, and she knows by going to Jack's room, Ennis will realise and remember that.

[Patriot1]

 

Well, Patriot, I know this comment in OT, but I sure hope your mother wised up over time, and things worked out between the two of you.

No,Lamusica. Mother died in 1980. The only time she ever "talked" to me or even acknowledged me was when we were at a family gathering and her mother, my grandmother, was around.

The damn woman was more stubborn than I am. 

[welshwitch]

I don't find any sympathy for John Twist either, but Patriot 1's posts have made me look at him from another angle - it's hard for the 21st-century town-dwelling English to get into the mindset of a 20th-century American rancher - most of my ideas of ranching come from movies or from seeing huge places in Texas. And I supose one must grant him complexity - both needing help and needing to see himself as unable to cope single-handed and at the same time caught up in the resentment of the older for the younger generation, before questions of Jack's sexuality enter into it.

[lamusica]

I want to say that I share welshwitch's sentiments directly above.  Patriot, you have shed a new way of thinking about Mr. Twist to those of us following this thread.  So, even if we don't agree with you (Here I am speaking for myself only), We have heard  a different interpretation for John Twist's wors and actions.
       (Terribly sorry about your mom's stubbornness.  One is just WAY TOO stubborn when it alienates a woman from her son.  What a loss tp her ( self-inflicted!)!!!

[JT]

[We know Jack wasn't competant at a lot of things. He couldn't shoot a coyote, he couldn't open a can of beans without getting it all over himself. And there were other things he wasn't good at, some of which you yourself pointed out in other threads. Hell, he couldn't even pee in a toilet without getting it all over the place. But the point is we saw Jack's incompetencies when his father was nowhere around him to make him nervous or self-conscious. Jack was just a lovable and loving man who wasn't too good at many things men of that time and place were good at. That doesn't make him a defective or anything.

I agree that John Twist was more of a bitter man than a mean one, but the way he treated the four-year-old Jack was just nasty.  He wasn't evil like Ennis' father was, but not a pleasent one to around with either.  I think he was tired of running the ranch mostly by himself and he let that attitude out on Jack, who I think is as competant as anyone else.  Jack may not be as good as Ennis at shooting a coyote, but in the ss, he was able to shoot an eagle.  He said he was good with a can opener, so I think he was just being lazy or silly by doing it lying down and holding it awkwardly.  Peeing on the toilet?  How many four-year-olds can pee so neatly?  Go into any public restroom and you can see even most grown up men make those messes.  So, I don't see Jack's "incompetence" or sexuality playing a role in John Twist's behavior at all.  He was just a tired, resentful, bitter old man.

[Patriot1]

We know Jack wasn't competant at a lot of things. He couldn't shoot a coyote, he couldn't open a can of beans without getting it all over himself. And there were other things he wasn't good at, some of which you yourself pointed out in other threads. Hell, he couldn't even pee in a toilet without getting it all over the place. But the point is we saw Jack's incompetencies when his father was nowhere around him to make him nervous or self-conscious. Jack was just a lovable and loving man who wasn't too good at many things men of that time and place were good at. That doesn't make him a defective or anything.

I agree that John Twist was more of a bitter man than a mean one, but the way he treated the four-year-old Jack was just nasty.  He wasn't evil like Ennis' father was, but not a pleasent one to around with either.  I think he was tired of running the ranch mostly by himself and he let that attitude out on Jack, who I think is as competant as anyone else.  Jack may not be as good as Ennis at shooting a coyote, but in the ss, he was able to shoot an eagle.  He said he was good with a can opener, so I think he was just being lazy or silly by doing it lying down and holding it awkwardly.  Peeing on the toilet?  How many four-year-olds can pee so neatly?  Go into any public restroom and you can see even most grown up men make those messes.  So, I don't see Jack's "incompetence" or sexuality playing a role in John Twist's behavior at all.  He was just a tired, resentful, bitter old man.

Oh my!  It is so nice to finally have someone agree with me about Mr. Twist.

You have just become my hero JT