Paul!
Okay, I gathered together bits of your Dozy Embrace posts in one place (and well away from the Reunion thread although, as we all know, it's hard to keep ideas separated out in this story.
~snip~ I feel the embrace in the film works as well as it does simply because it omits the story’s authorial voice from “on high” passing retrospective judgement on what was a spontaneous moment of pure affection.
When the flashback ends and Ennis rides off we return to the present to see Jack looking wistfully at Ennis as he drives away. The sequence works because there’s nobody telling us that what we saw was anything other than Jack remembering a special moment.
Proulx’s insertion of her authorial voice might indeed, as you suggest, produce a “kick in the guts,” but as there’s no indication from Jack himself that he thought what she says he thought her interjection just comes out of the blue without supporting evidence that that was the case.~snip~
In the film there is no "Summer Of No Face-To-Face" so it's impossible to have that sudden revelation. Initially, Larry and Diana considered having the DE both in its correct chronological place and also as a flashback but settled on the same setup as the story. It works simply as a beautiful memory followed by an older and wiser Jack reflecting on what just happened.
But what do you mean when you say,
there's no indication from Jack himself that he thought what she says he thought
What sort of indication would you want? Jack thought what she says he thought
because she wrote the story. There is no independent Jack to verify or deny what she says he thought. Could you explain to me what you mean, because this makes no sense at all.
As for the supporting evidence, it's all there in the story. AP described the story as a Moebius Strip, i.e one where you find that when you reach the end you haven't actually reached the end. You may not like the way she wrote it, with revelations late in the piece requiring a rethink of previous assumptions, but that's the way it's written. It's a reflection of the way both Jack and Ennis reach conclusions. Jack hoped that the reunion overrode the restrictions of the summer of 1963, but after the argument he comes to understand that a physical change did not indicate a mental change. Ennis still would not metaphorically embrace him face to face. His body would but his mind wouldn't. Then in the closet Ennis comes to understand what he has done to Jack (both in finding the shirts and in remembering the tale of Mr Twist's abuse of Jack). There's more to it than that, of course. The pissing scene also shows us why Jack never quite stands up for himself fully.
~snip~
The issue of sexual arousal, by either party, had Jack turned around, if that what’s you’re hinting at, doesn’t arise.
It’s a different situation to the only other post-reunion instance of actual close physical contact that we’re told about (“Jack slid his cold hand between Ennis’s legs ... and they rolled down into the dirt.”) and Jack’s reference to “high-altitude fucks.”
No, it's not what I was hinting at.
This is where I basically disagree, and not only about whatever Jack “had learnt” on the mountain.
The only time we hear about this supposed reluctance on Ennis’s part to embrace Jack face-to-face is when the narrator pipes up with her timely little nugget of information. #
We never hear anything about it again. Not once does Jack raise the issue when the brakes are off and a full-scale major argument erupts at the trailhead parking lot. He just complains about how their life could have been better, about Ennis keeping him on a short leash, about meeting only a few times over the years and having to go to Mexico for what “he needs” and “never hardly gets.”
But it’s odd that, if Ennis’s refusal to “embrace him face to face because he did not want to see nor feel that it was Jack he held” was such an important issue “in their separate and difficult lives,” why Jack didn’t mention it. After all, it was the perfect time to do so.
As I said earlier, we have only the narrator telling us that that was what he thought. 
# Which rather conveniently ignores the fact of their full-on, face-to-face embrace outside the Riverton apartment, and casts doubt on the veracity of the narrator’s interjection.
It might have sounded like a bit of a hissy fit for Jack to be yelling, "And you wouldn't even embrace me face to face all summer, you bastard!" But you need to trust AP when she says that nothing marred the memory of the embrace, even that standout fact about Ennis. It's only when Ennis has revealed that he has never accepted the full situation (i.e. two gay men in a loving relationship) that Jack goes back to that memory and understands that nothing much has really changed. Sure, they moved forward a bit but not much further.
We actually hear about this supposed reluctance of Ennis in the lines
"both knew how it would go. As it did go." We simply make the wrong assumptions at first. Moebius Strip.
Anyway, I really want to know why you separate out fictional Jack from the narrator's version of him. The narrator is Annie Proulx. She may be playing tricks with her readers but that's no reason to doubt her when she makes a flatout straightforward statement. (I'm not sure what you mean to indicate by using the sunglassed emoticon.)
Also, somewhere in your posts you said that the reunion kiss negated the DE memory. I hope what I said above about Jack's realisation covers that issue. No face-to-face on the mountain followed by the reunion kiss, but the kiss didn't deliver on its promise because Ennis only changed his body not his mind.
