I like to picture the book scene with the smaller Jack and taller Ennis. I think it gives a different feel, and Ennis seems more paternal.
We don't ever see what Ennis thinks of it, and apart from the fact that it wouldn't work to have two accounts of the DE, I think his feelings must be different. At the time, he'd managed to push all thoughts of the possibility that they might be gay out of his head, and even though the sex was obviously challenging enough for him to instinctively place limits on it, sex didn't feature in this moment. He was just hugging the unexpected and loved friend he'd discovered. But I wonder if it was marred for him looking back, once he'd realised what was really going on on Brokeback? And once he suspected that Jack was gay and was having to find reasons why he himself, wasn't?
I think for Jack it's different, because I think he's aware of his own feelings for Ennis, but keeps thsm hidden (he steals the shirt). I think he got the impression that Ennis was either straight and enjoying the sexual release, or gay and in denial, but either way, not open to a confession from Jack. I think the DE told a different story, about Ennis's true feelings, and it was enough to make Jack contact him after four years. Maybe not enough for Jack to have come up with something straight after Brokeback, but I think the punch got in the way.
Anyway, when Jack looks back, there's nothing that negates the DE or mars it really - he always knew about Ennis's reluctance, internalised homophobia, etc., even if he'd hoped that they might get further. Whereas when Ennis looks back, his current knowledge could mar the DE, because it wasn't what he thought it was at the time (It was a trying-to-be straight man showing love for a gay man, rather than a straight man showing love to his straight friend). They always seem to be coming from different directions.
Hi, Des. Not surprisingly, I agree totally about the height difference. It does alter the dynamic, although I see Ennis as channeling mother love while Jack is feeling it through the lens of his own father's rejection of him. I liked seeing the scene in the opera where their heights are as per the SS (and since AP had close involvement with that first production it's not surprising). Also, seeing Brokies Adam and Rodney re-enacting the scene up on Mt Brokenback as Rodney read the DE passage out also convinced me that AP had it right with her protagonists.
Your post had me dwelling again upon what Ennis thought/remembered about the DE, and while I can imagine stuff I don't know that we really know. Nothing is said about his thoughts; it's Jack who sees it as the one moment in their separate lives, not Ennis. It seems like Ennis was just going with the flow as usual. He wouldn't embrace Jack face to face on the mountain, yet was comfortable to hold him for quite a long time in that sexless embrace, then once the reunion kiss overwhelms him I guess we can assume he was happy to be f2f but we know he can't bring himself to display emotion again in that sweet and loving DE fashion. On the mountain I doubt he thought in terms of being/not being f2f, and afterwards I think he might have not even considered being sexlessly loving towards Jack. The only physical connection we are told about is pre- and post-sex.
But somewhere in his brain he does recall the DE and when he finds the shirts he understands, Jack's over Ennis's, and AP makes that clear with her choice of words:
...the shadow of their bodies a single column against the rock....the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one.Is it pure caution which makes Jack put his own shirt on the outside (since his jeans-ironing mother would no doubt see it), or is it symbolic of Jack's desire to hold Ennis that way? Probably both, and a few more things besides. It sort of puts them both on the same page, no twisting of the facts to have one gay and the other not-queer. We don't hear how the shirts are hung in Ennis's trailer, beyond the fact that he first puts them on a hanger, and I've often thought about Heath's instinctive decision to reverse them. In the film that kind of represents a return to the DE, giving Jack what he craved at last (and too late), but in the film we don't get that knowledge about the DE which we do in the SS. Still, Heath read the story beforehand and I'd like to think he was thinking of the DE when he reversed the shirts.
Sorry, that was a waffly post.