From the Wilderness into the Closet
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claustrophobic domestic spaces of Ennis del Mar’s and Jack
Twist’s marital homes that signal the intrusion of
homophobia’s stark realities, not to mention a necessary
illicitness about same-sex intimacy and desire that comes at
the expense of women, namely their wives. Similarly, it’s the
deafening silence that Lee’s film associates with open spaces
that seems to point to the site where intimacy’s potential might
be realized. Talk, by contrast, maps its very limitations. (B15)
Both the short story and the film are—at their center—about what
Luscombe calls “the circumscription of dreams about how fate and our choices
make the life we have much smaller than the one we had hoped for” (70). To
some extent, a prohibitive, constraining, traditional society is at fault; to some
extent, responsibility lies with human beings who underestimate their own
agency. In spite of what may have occurred to Jack Twist and what did most
certainly occur to Matthew Shepard, being gay does not necessarily end in death
or despair. That Jack can see the potential in his relationship with Ennis and that
he has the will to actualize it is both a blessing and a curse. He is blessed with
passion and courage, but he loves someone who is immobilized and who cannot
imagine a life with his lover.
Proulx’s short story highlights the differences between Jack and Ennis,
making Jack somewhat of a visionary and Ennis a man afraid of his own desires.
“Jack, in his dark camp, saw Ennis as night fire, a red spark on the huge black
mass of mountain” (9), writes Proulx. For Jack, Ennis is the “red spark” on the
“huge black mass of mountain” that is his life. For Ennis, though, the
relationship is not restorative or hopeful, but terrifying: “As they descended the
slope Ennis felt he was in a slow-motion, but headlong, irreversible fall” (17).
Moving toward one’s “red spark” and fearing an “irreversible fall” are decidedly
different reactions to falling in love. “I’m stuck with what I got, caught in my
own loop” (29), says Ennis. Meanwhile, Jack, rejected and desperate, says:
Tell you what, we could a had a good life together, a fiickin
real good life. You wouldn’t do it, Ennis, so what we got now
is Brokeback Mountain. Everthing built on that. It’s all we got,
boy, fuckin all, so I hope you know that if you don’t never
know the rest.... You got no fuckin idea how bad it gets. I’m
not you. I can’t make it on a couple a high-altitude flicks once
or twice a year. You’re too much for me, Ennis, you son of a
whoreson bitch. I wish I knew how to quit you. (42)
That they cannot “quit” one another is both their salvation—a testament to the
power of their attachment—and their ultimate damnation.
Although they do not share a vision of their future, the men agree on the
mysterious power of their love and desire for one another. In Proulx’s story,
Ennis tells Jack: “Took me about a year a figure out it was that I shouldn’t a let
you out a my sights. Too late then by a long, long while” (26). Later, he says,