BBM General Discussion 2

[Sason]

Hmmm........this seems to be more complicated than I first thought.....

All those examples from the film you gave Roland; I love them, but I never thought of them as sexy.......more like profoundly emotional and deeply touching......

As for sexy, Cally, I haven't really thought a lot about what I mean......but I think what I meant was that the film doesn't turn me on sexually. I turns my heart on, not my genitals.....

[Sara B]

Hmmm........this seems to be more complicated than I first thought.....

All those examples from the film you gave Roland; I love them, but I never thought of them as sexy.......more like profoundly emotional and deeply touching......

As for sexy, Cally, I haven't really thought a lot about what I mean......but I think what I meant was that the film doesn't turn me on sexually. I turns my heart on, not my genitals.....

Really? It's both with me!

[Sason]

Yes, really.....

Now, as for slash, that's quite a different matter.....

[Marc]

Turning the calendar page to December was painful, what with the terrific picture of Ennis.  One of life's ironies.  It's a real gift because it wasn't in the movie.

I haven't heard that there will be a BBM calendar for next year, so I guess there won't be.  The concept of "moving on" occurred to me:

-- Ennis moves on from Jack
-- we move on from Heath
-- we move on to different calendars, though I would have happily bought BBM calendars for the rest of my life
-- and in a way, we move on from the film, as it recedes and as we run out of things to say about it.  I predict that, someday, this website will be history.

[Queen_Beruthiel]

......and as we run out of things to say about it. 

Well, I post on a The Godfather board...... 

[Sason]

......and as we run out of things to say about it. 

God forbid....!!!!

Well, I post on a The Godfather board...... 

That's a relief to hear.....

[Ministering angel]

Turning the calendar page to December was painful, what with the terrific picture of Ennis.  One of life's ironies.  It's a real gift because it wasn't in the movie.

I haven't heard that there will be a BBM calendar for next year, so I guess there won't be.  The concept of "moving on" occurred to me:

-- Ennis moves on from Jack
-- we move on from Heath
-- we move on to different calendars, though I would have happily bought BBM calendars for the rest of my life
-- and in a way, we move on from the film, as it recedes and as we run out of things to say about it.  I predict that, someday, this website will be history.

Ennis never moves on from Jack. He lives out the rest of his life warmed by those dreams and rocked by that wind. Jack is with him eternally. No-one else takes his place.

Heathens haven't moved on from Heath and many/most will probably wind up like Elvis or James Dean or Marilyn fans, devoted unto death 

Run out of things to say about BBM? But I've barely begun 


Moving on isn't the same as leaving behind.

[BayCityJohn]

“Like two skins, one inside the other”: Dual Unity in Brokeback Mountain

David Willbern

In an interview, Annie Proulx revealed that the impulse for her now-famous story, “Brokeback Mountain,” came from her observation of a middle-aged cowboy in a Wyoming bar, nursing his beer in solitude while gazing at the handsome younger men around him. In another conversation she remarked how especially difficult it was to get inside these particular characters; how the story haunted her for months as she tried to get it right. The question of a writer's uncanny imaginative habitation of characters is in this case intensified by the distances between a New England woman in her seventies and the young, male westerners she invented.

Inventing characters is of course a main work of writers, but I suggest that the sources for Proulx's literary figures emerged not merely from her empathic social observations, and not merely from her personal preference for male characters. Underlying the fictional relationship of two sexually confused, adolescent men is another scene, anchored in our primary emotional life, and perhaps especially available to Annie Proulx as a woman, and mother. In this brief essay I'll examine the story and the film in terms of literary and cinematic texture, and from the perspective of object-relations psychoanalysis.

I want to consider the two shirts, enfolded or embraced within each other, as models of what Mahler termed “the symbiotic phase” of the maternal dyad, or dual unity, and of what Winnicott called the “transitional object.”

Re-creating and reversing the scene of their standing embrace, when Ennis held Jack from behind, here Jack's shirt envelops Ennis's. The pairing materially produces a intimate symbol: “two skins, … two in one.”  The shirts thus re-enact or re-present a primal bond: the pleasurable and nurturing symbiosis (in Mahler's terms) of mother and child, or as Proulx writes, “the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.”  From another perspective, as an object hanging on a nail in Ennis's trailer, the shirts become a condensed emblem: a refined aesthetic model of a transitional object (in Winnicott's terms) that represents and re-animates in memory and dream his lost relationship with Jack -- and another relationship before that (it is Ennis who recalls his mother during the standing embrace).  “The shadow of their bodies a single column against the rock,” as Proulx describes it. This vivid figure evokes another famous Freudian phrase, appropriately from “Mourning and Melancholia,” connoting psychic development from symbiosis to individuation: “The shadow of the object has fallen on the ego.”14 Torn, dirty, bloodied, the worn fabric holds the crucial past: a link to lost experience, like a child's favorite blanket— a primary con-text. This is I think the deepest texture of unconscious experience in Brokeback Mountain, which is why so many of Proulx's metaphors involve bodily images, smells, noises, warmth and coldness—signs of preverbal life. Perhaps the extraordinary popularity of the story and the film is anchored in this matrix of pre-oedipal, preverbal, universal human experience -- beyond sexuality, straight or gay, and beyond judgment.

http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2008_willbern01.shtml

[Desecra]

That's an really interesting take - thanks for sharing.   I notice that in the reference notes he says that these particular theories (Mahler, Klein, etc.) are no longer so popular but that he thinks they are relevant to the story.    Sometimes it does feel to me as if the story is embedded in its time and the thinking of the time, rather than being presented as a modern day view.   For instance he also points out this, about Jack's parents:

This family dynamic of distant, angry father and protective, submissive mother neatly sketches or caricatures a textbook case of filial homosexual production as theorized by many psychoanalysts in the 1960s and 70s.

(And circumcision, something his parents did to him, becomes a sort of symbol of Jack's sexuality).

I also like this, on BBM being advertised as a "universal love story":

In this view the story is about two people in love -- truly, deeply -- who through no fault of their own come to grief, in a modern version of the saga of Romeo and Juliet. Although a popular view, it doesn't hold up well under close examination. In fact it's a denial of major themes of both story and film, which are the dangerous -- indeed lethal -- effects of social homophobia, and the devastating psychological effects of self-contempt in a person who represses core parts of his sexual identity.

[lislis]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_description

Audio interpretations of BBM movie:

The UK DVD has "English Descriptive Audio"

Do any other video releases of BBM have Descriptive Audio
(the USA video releases don't)?

[Sason]

Thank you so much John for the quotes and the link!

I find that most interesting.

Torn, dirty, bloodied, the worn fabric holds the crucial past: a link to lost experience, like a child's favorite blanket— a primary con-text. This is I think the deepest texture of unconscious experience in Brokeback Mountain, which is why so many of Proulx's metaphors involve bodily images, smells, noises, warmth and coldness—signs of preverbal life. Perhaps the extraordinary popularity of the story and the film is anchored in this matrix of pre-oedipal, preverbal, universal human experience -- beyond sexuality, straight or gay, and beyond judgment    

I've been constantly wondering about the film's enormous impact, not only on gay men which I find quite understandable, but also on myself and other straight women. I've been having a feeling there must be something beyond the obvious theme of closeted homosexuality and internal homophobia (without deminishing these strong themes in any way!). But if that was all, why would I and so many other straight women have this overwhelming and life altering experience of the film?

This may very well be the answer to my questions....

THANK YOU JOHN!!!!!!

[CANSTANDIT]

Thanks for the links, John...Always interesting to see authors discussing the same stuff we've discussed in the Themes threads.

[Rosewood]

Turning the calendar page to December was painful, what with the terrific picture of Ennis.  One of life's ironies.  It's a real gift because it wasn't in the movie.

I haven't heard that there will be a BBM calendar for next year, so I guess there won't be.  The concept of "moving on" occurred to me:

-- Ennis moves on from Jack
-- we move on from Heath
-- we move on to different calendars, though I would have happily bought BBM calendars for the rest of my life
-- and in a way, we move on from the film, as it recedes and as we run out of things to say about it.  I predict that, someday, this website will be history.

Ennis never moves on from Jack. He lives out the rest of his life warmed by those dreams and rocked by that wind. Jack is with him eternally. No-one else takes his place.

Heathens haven't moved on from Heath and many/most will probably wind up like Elvis or James Dean or Marilyn fans, devoted unto death 

Run out of things to say about BBM? But I've barely begun 


Moving on isn't the same as leaving behind.

I have moved on from the tragedy of Heath Ledger's death and short life.
I had to.
It was just too painfully abrubt, too wounding.
I began to feel that if I wasn't careful Heath and Ennis would merge into one
and down that road I didn't want to go.

I much prefer Ennis as a separate entity, alive for me only in the film and short story.
Nowhere else.

I couldn't agree with you more on Ennis NEVER moving on from Jack.
In that we are one hundred percent in agreement and you know Angel, nothing
else much matters. This is the crux of the story for me. This is finite.
Ennis NEVER moves on from Jack.

I thought, for a while there, that I had run out of things to say about BBM, but
I've discovered lately that I sure as hell haven't.

So I'll be staying on here for a spell.

As for why BBM resonates so deeply with straight older women like myself,
I do agree that it is because the story is more about 'universal human experience' than it
is about rural homphobia and the perils thereof. I've always thought so.
I see BBM as a love story. Always have. Otherwise I wouldn't be here.
I would have seen the film, learned something or had my own views affirmed
and then moved on.

I don't think I would have been as moved. I would not have wept.
I would not have felt as if I knew these two young men intimately.
I would not have had my heart broken. I would not have been as outraged by
society's indifference.

(You know it is a tribute to Ang Lee that he saw BBM as a story of love and
brought this out in his actors.)

This is why I believe the story continues to resonate so deeply with straight
older women like myself. Dare I say it? At our stage in life we have, hopefully,
learned a thing or two. We have valuable life experience. We view things
in a more textural, panoramic way. Know what I mean?
We KNOW that there are things in heaven and earth that were not
dreamt of in our earlier philosophy.

I believe 'universal human experience' is the key.
If only the viewer/reader is open enough to use it.

[Ministering angel]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_description

Audio interpretations of BBM movie:

The UK DVD has "English Descriptive Audio"

Do any other video releases of BBM have Descriptive Audio
(the USA video releases don't)?

The descriptive audio is both funny at some times and moving and helpful at others.

[Ministering angel]

I also like this, on BBM being advertised as a "universal love story":

In this view the story is about two people in love -- truly, deeply -- who through no fault of their own come to grief, in a modern version of the saga of Romeo and Juliet. Although a popular view, it doesn't hold up well under close examination. In fact it's a denial of major themes of both story and film, which are the dangerous -- indeed lethal -- effects of social homophobia, and the devastating psychological effects of self-contempt in a person who represses core parts of his sexual identity.

Hmmmmmm, worth repeating, I think.