TexRob, I do not usually stick my nose gratuitously into other people’s business. But I got alarmed by a number of the details that were coming out in the course of the conversation, and I did what is for me the unusual thing of sketching out a possibly dangerous scenario that could be highly dangerous to Cara in the long run. I said my piece, stressing the provisional --- and possibly erroneous --- nature of the scenario, and now that I have said my piece, I shut my mouth and let it go.
But there is something about my observations in that post that the observations in your post has caused me to want to mention to you in a more abstract, general context. There has occasionally --- not often, but occasionally --- come to me in the course of my life the sudden realization that I was dealing with a person who appeared to have a integrated self (a soul, if you will) but who actually was nothing more than a highly ramshackle, badly fitted and potentially unstable construct of prejudices, stock phrases and stereotyped behaviors. Of course, that person has a soul: all human beings have souls, and as such, they can never be means, only ends. But in these people of whom I am now speaking the soul is so rudimentary, so submerged, so undetectable that you really cannot speak of them as functioning in everyday life as a unitary soul. Now I do not know whether Cara’s sister-in-law is one of those people, TexRob, but I do know that such people exist, and I suspect that they are playing a disproportionate role in the current controversy surrounding Brokeback Mountain.
There is a lot of soul-searching going on here on this forum about the stresses in various personal relationships that have erupted as a result of Brokeback Mountain. If I don’t agree with somebody else about the merits --- or even the facts --- of the film, then whose fault is it? Mine? His or hers? A combination of the two? In what percentage? And how can it be reconciled on a higher level? Can it be reconciled on a higher level? And so forth, and so forth…
I would suggest that, when dealing with these people whom I have described above, the suffering that these questions inevitably bring to the sensitive soul is totally unnecessary. There can come --- and sometimes, does come --- a point in a relationship when the difficulties cease to be personal and psychological in nature and begin to be systemic and political/cultural. And when that happens to a relationship in which you find yourself, especially if that relationship is an old one, the atmosphere of the relationship suddenly becomes surreal. The two of you suddenly begin to appear to each other like total strangers who have accidentally been locked together in a room for the time being and who are forced to exchange meaningless pleasantries to pass the time until help can arrive with a key to let you out. Or, to use another analogy, when you are together, it’s like watching each other through regular glasses, only to suddenly have to see him or her suddenly with 3D glasses and to know that that’s how you are going to have to be seeing him or her from now on, if you want to see him or her at all. I repeat, the personal and psychological suffering is totally unnecessary in such cases, but I have to concede that another kind of suffering, less intense but also longer lasting, takes its place. It’s the suffering of losing yet another rock-solid foundation on which you thought that you would could base your everyday life. And, believe me, that hurts a hell of a lot in a dull, throbbing way.
Do you see how dangerous movies like Brokeback Mountain are? We spend most of our lives operating with other people on a mask-to-mask basis, and that’s a good thing in general because, as T. S. Eliot knew, “humankind cannot stand too much reality.” But we begin to suffocate behind the masks, and every now and then, we need a soul-piercing work of art to crack the masks and to let our faces breathe. But oh, when we are without masks (for however brief a period of time that may be), we are so vulnerable to others --- and so dangerous to them as well. All sorts of things, not all of them good, come out into the open, as many of the discussions on this forum indicate quite clearly. And some of these things can never go back behind the renovated masks when we raise them at long last to our faces, with sadness but also with relief. And for the people who need the mask in order to have a face --- the soulless ones about whom I have spoken above --- this added facial baggage could be just the thing that tips them over the edge once and for all. That’s a scary thing to consider, almost as scary as to watch.