I can't see Brokeback Mountain the movie because it's not playing anywhere in the state of Iowa. However, Close Range: Wyoming Stories is in my local library and was, apparently, just sitting there waiting for me to check it out (it was on the shelf but hadn't been checked back in so although there was a hold on it for someone else they let me check it out because I was standing there with it in my hand).
I have a bunch to say about this story and there will be spoilers galore because I can't talk about movies or books or stories without, you know, actually talking about them. I will start with a quote so you can make sure your head will not explode just by hearing about it (which is apparently what will happen to Iowans if the movie were, you know, to play at a theater nearby):
They were raised on small, poor ranches in opposite corners of the state, Jack Twist in Lightning Flat up on the Montana border, Ennis del Mar from around Sage, near the Utah line, both high school dropout country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life. Ennis, reared by his older brother and sister after their parents drove off the only curve on Dead Horse Road leaving them twenty-four dollars in cash and a two-mortgage ranch...
I think most people know the basic story: two cowboys meet one summer up on Brokeback Mountain herding sheep. They start a relationship that spans twenty years--it's intense and secret and ultimately lonely and tragic. In the way the world is and was and in who these men were, there wasn't any solution--only different tragedies.
Proulx is at her best in this story when she's describing the land and the people and way things work at one another. The dialogue is...not great. There's too much stage play exposition. But the description and the men and the way they move and look and act--that's all honest and wonderful and 'true' in the way that the very best stories are.
There's a feeling that I get--have always gotten, all my life--at certain moments. It's a feeling of want so big that it hurts, so big that the want itself is indefinable. I know it's there. I know it's close. I know that whatever it is--that deep aching Want, like an old, dark river full of hidden depths--if I could know it, if I could have it--it would open the universe and provide me with a path into Life and into a world that is both too much for me and everything I am meant to have.
Brokeback Mountain is all about that ache. It's about the clean, sharp beauty of open spaces, about time, about love and companionship that is both as big as the outdoors and too fragile to face the world. It's the ache of knowing that there's more, that the more would --somehow--be glorious. And it's the pain of knowing that whatever that glorious 'more' is, it will never be anything more than an ache inside you.
Jack Twist knows all about that ache and it drives him at times, looking for something that is too dangerous to hold or even, maybe in this world and in the place he lives, to want:
What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.
They had stood that way for a long time in front of the fire, its burning tossing ruddy chunks of light, the shadow of their bodies a single column against the rock. The minutes ticked by from the round watch in Ennis's pocket, from the sticks in the fire settling into coals. Stars bit through the wavy heat layers above the fire. Ennis's breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, the vibrations of the humming like faint electricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that was not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredged up a rusty but still useable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died, said, "Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go. Come on, you're sleepin on your feet like a horse," and gave Jack a shake, a push and went off in the darkness. Jack heard his spurs tremble as he mounted, the words "see you tomorrow," and the horse's shuddering snort, grind of hoof on stone.
Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. Nothing marred it, even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face because he did not want to see nor feel that it was Jack he held. And maybe, he thought, they'd never got much farther than that. Let be, let be.
The tragedy in this story isn't that they had this great thing and lost it. The tragedy isn't even that Jack was murdered in the end, though Jack had been headed toward being murdered more or less his whole life. The tragedy was that they couldn't have been happy in a place that would tolerate them and the place they'd be happy wouldn't ever tolerate them.
Though Jack--maybe--could have, Ennis could never leave his life or leave the land, because if he did then all he'd have is Jack. And Jack would have nothing. There would be no Ennis. Ennis and horses and the land and the livestock mixed together to make the man in a way that couldn't be separated one from the other. And the love and the sex wasn't big enough for that--could never be big enough to sustain a man who isn't even there anymore. In a way, of course, the limbo of a big, overarching relationship that could never exist--even in their own minds--even though it did, brought about the same end. Ennis fades and Jack dies and it's all a waste...except in those fractional moments when it is possible to just let it be.
(I have another rambly bit about the world of Brokeback Mountain but I'll save it for a later post)
