Well, I decided to read "Brokeback Mountain." It's in a collection of short stories called "Close Range (Wyoming Stories). Evidently Annie lives in Wyoming (who knew?). It's a 30-page story.
It's really nicely done. But the most amazing part for me is that all the key scenes in the film are in the story. The first intimacy, Ennis' fight with his ex in the kitchen, the shirt on the peg at the end... and I've missed more than I've listed. The other amazing thing is that there is quite a bit of dialog, and the movie used it verbatim. I do not think there is a bit of dialog in the story that you wouldn't recognize from the film.
There are two paragraphs that I think give the story a bit more heart than the movie. The first paragraph describes my favorite scene where Jack is remembering Ennis hugging him and it describes the tenderness and sexless love in that embrace, and then follows the tenderness with the awareness that Ennis would never hug Jack face-to-face and "face" the relationship and what they are.
The second one describes the shirts Ennis finds in the closet and has some nice imagery about them being one inside the other, together as one skin (or something like that).
Both are perfect examples of how prose can tug you in a completely different way than a film. And I love them both. But I think the film is actually more poignant all around.
(I thought about typing these bits up and then got lazy, but I'll get Peggy the book this week, so if you're interested, you can check it out!)
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3 comments:
I agree with you Francine, while both the story and the movie are heart wrenching, the movie is somehow more poignant. I read the story over the last two nights. It was more sparse than the movie (duh - it is a short story). But the language Proulx uses is gorgeous. My favorite, other than the dialog is when Ennis and Jack first herd the sheep up to Brokeback Mtn, she describes the sheep pouring up the mountain like streams of dirty water. When I read that, I absolutely saw the scenes from the movie again in my mind. Actually, the whole story made me rewind the film in my mind's eye. Which made me wonder ... what scenes would have been in my mind had I read the story first? I'm totally guessing here, but I think that the landscape I would have imagined would have been more sparse, just like the language in the story, and like things often were in Ennis' life. I think I would have had a somewhat different view of Ennis. Heath Ledger did such a beautiful job in the film of clipping Ennis' characterinto a tightened fist of personality. I didn't get the same characterization (although close) from the short story.
Thanks for sharing the story with me, Francine.
Peggy passed it on to me, and I read it last night. I agree that the story was more sparse. Everyone involved with that film did a great job with the raw material and turning it into such a lush film.
The story made me realize there was some symbolism in how the sheep on brokeback got mixed with the other herd, and how inside, Ennis would be mixed up forever...
Yup... there's some good stuff in the story that it's hard to communicate in film without some long scene or lame voiceover, but this is one movie where I think the movie perfectly represents the writing.
I'm glad you gals enjoyed reading it!
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