BBM General Discussion 2

[CANSTANDIT]

I agree. It's the individual perceptions of the writer that fuel the unique impact.

[Dal]

http://www.davidfisco.com/node/166

Bwaaaahaahaa !!!  I love that review to death!  How do you say 'clueless' in Objectivese?

"~The plot can be fully understood only from the Objectivist perspective. Had the script better exploited this, Brokeback Mountain would have been sublimed to brilliant tragedy.~" 

yes, Ossana and McMurtry just threw the story in the trash, such a shame!

"~Under Objectivist morality, this situation would be justification for Jack and Ennis to commit suicide if the men realized that, due to their restriction, their lives had no chance of ever being heroic. As Ayn Rand wrote in John Galt's suicide justification speech in Atlas Shrugged, 'there will be no values for me to seek...and I do not care to exist without values.' " 

Not to worry, John.  If sententiousness is a value, you'll never run out of values.

"In an alternate script, the two could have had a denouement discussion about their values and their inability to achieve greatness in the world to which they must return, check into a hotel and suicide. That version of Brokeback Mountain would be much closer to Randian fiction and drama."   

Very true.  It would be a trifle strange perhaps, to see Ennis and Jack all of a sudden talking existentially about Heroes;  but yes, it certainly would put the Rand Touch upon the movie!

"A final potential objection is puzzling, and remains nascent and underdeveloped in this article. The objection revolves around the question: How much of the plot of Brokeback Mountain does Proulx intend to be "real" within the context of the fiction and how much, if any, is a lie-of-the-mind? Toward the end of writing this article, I discovered an anomaly in the structure of Brokeback Mountain: All of the many geographic references in the film are real with the exception of three locations which appear to be fictitious: "  

He goes on for a ways about this.  He suspects... something.  He is baffled and upset.  "Is this real Wyoming, or some fantasy?  'cause if it's not real Wyoming, it's vile and amoral.  Would somebody pleeze tell me whether this is real Wyoming, or that other Wyoming?"  A paraphrase.

"Although not written in the genre of Romantic Realism and seriously flawed in philosophy, morality, construction and execution"

  -- Romantic Realism being the the genre of Ms Rand's revered tomes.   It deals with 'people not as they are, but as they might be, and ought to be' -- her words.  So, right, Brokeback is definitely not Romantic Realism!!   

Apparently, Non-romantic Realism strikes no chord with objectivists.  Altas Shrugged is the world's longest Harlequin romance.  For all its grandiosity, I really think it is a teenager's fantasy of the strongest guy in the human race, ready to spit in everybody's eye but...  taking her, and her alone, for his own.

Oh, and for those who wish to hook up with an objectivist, check out http://www.theatlasphere.com/dating/index.php?page=index.  Happy hunting!

[Ellen (tellyouwhat)]

Well --

it must be a heavy burden to go through life trying to work in a Randian understanding of all art.

Thus the preoccupation with suicide.

 

[Ellen (tellyouwhat)]

Oh wow, that article is amazing.

"Were these characters even gay?

the poor guy, he was gobsmacked by Brokeback Fever and forced to consider the movie, his mind kept returning to it again and again!

what a shock that must have been for him!

[BayCityJohn]

I have way too much free time on Saturdays 


I've been searching for the earliest occurence of the word "Brokeback"

This is from a 1963 article in Time Magazine:

Lonesome Lovers

The Ballad of the Sad Café, adapted by Edward Albee from Carson McCullers' story, finds the playwright in the role of ventriloquist's dummy. In echoing another voice, Albee has temporarily lost his own. In misconceived fidelity, the playwright has subordinated the dramatic to the novella form. He has relinquished a shapely, abrasive precision of language for mistily inflated poeticizing. As a play-to-play progression, the effect is dismaying; Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is to The Ballad of the Sad Café what an icicle is to its melted puddle.

Sad Café is a ballad of unreciprocated loves, testimony to a voguish dramatic ailment known as incurable aloneness. In their intertwining relationship, the three fantast-lovers in Sad Café are consumed not by their mutual fevers but by their solitary hallucinations.

Miss Amelia (Colleen Dewhurst) is a giantess, a strapping man's man of a woman. She runs a liquor and drygoods store in a dull and dusty Southern town and is as tight with her affections as with her cash. On the weather-beaten clapboard siding of her store, the faded lettering DRINK NEHI is a hint of some ghostly thirst for life. Marvin Macy (Lou Antonio) thirsts for Miss Amelia, and he reforms his rakehell ways to woo and wed her. In the ten scarifying days of their life together, he never beds her. Instead, she flings him to the floor and out of her life with venomous contempt. The castaway takes to crime, and his love-turned-to-hate festers in a Georgia penitentiary.

A hunchbacked dwarf named Cousin Lymon (Michael Dunn) comes along to claim kinship with Miss Amelia and monkey-walk his way into her barricaded heart. Cousin Lymon is sly, querulous and malevolent, but in her shy-smiling gladness Miss Amelia turns her store into a café where her half-pet half-child holds court. One night Marvin Macy shows up, and it is the dwarf's turn to love unrequitedly. Cousin Lymon is infatuated with the ex-jailbird who has seen the world, but Marvin cruelly cuffs him and calls him "Brokeback." The stage is thus set for a kind of gladiators' duel to the death between Miss Amelia and Marvin Macy. Glistening with hogfat and ringed by townsfolk, the pair slug and wrestle each other like mastodons before some prehistoric cave. As Colleen Dewhurst and Lou Antonio enact it, this raw battle of the sexes is charged with a passionate intensity that convicts the rest of the play of emotional anemia.

None of the loves in the Sad Café are of an aberrant kind that dares not speak its name. These loves do not know their names, and Albee is at a loss to make them credible. He resorts to sham mystification as exemplified by a narrator who pops in to bridge the gaps in the script and utter radio serial profundities: "No one can know what really takes place in the soul of the lover." A faintly supercilious device at best, the narrator tediously describes what ought to have been vitally dramatized—a confession of the playwright's failure.




http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,897027-1,00.html


The word is used 3 times in the story:

"What ails this Brokeback?" he asked with a rough jerk of his thumb.

"That will learn you, Brokeback," said Marvin Macy.

"Out of my way, Brokeback -- I'll snatch you bald-headed."

http://www.scribd.com/doc/11867410/McCullers-Carson-The-Ballad-of-the-Sad-Cafe-and-Other-Stories

THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFÉ
AND OTHER STORIES

A Bantam Book / published by arrangement
with Houghton Mifflin Company

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Houghton Mifflin edition published May 1951
Book Find Club edition published May 1951
Bantam edition / March 1958
Bantam Modern Classic edition / August 1969
Bantam Pathfinder edition / December 1970
Bantam edition / November 1971

[donna]

Bugs!  Let's talk about bugs. 

I just realized that this movie was filmed in the Canadian Rockies in the summer of 2004.  Well, as circumstance would have it, I spent my entire summer backpacking in the Canadian Rockies in 2004.  I can't even believe it myself, since I have become obsessed with this movie after the first time I saw it -only a week ago.  Nope, I never saw Ang, Jake, Heath, or even the person who makes coffee for the crew...

...but, I did spend a lot of time with those unsung extras- the gnats, mosquitoes, no-see-ums, etc!  I will never go back to Brokeback Mountain, because there's not enough insect repellant in the world to keep those critters away.  Has anyone else been bugged by all the bugs that swarm the characters in the movie?  I really felt it for Heath when he has that fly on his neck during the boy's final scene!

Sorry if this has been discussed here already.  I'm late to the party.

[Nax]

Welcome Donnab

the party is still in full swing

[donna]

Glad to hear it, Nax!

[Ennis Del Mark]

I have way too much free time on Saturdays 


I've been searching for the earliest occurence of the word "Brokeback"

This is from a 1963 article in Time Magazine:

Lonesome Lovers

The Ballad of the Sad Café, adapted by Edward Albee from Carson McCullers' story, finds the playwright in the role of ventriloquist's dummy. In echoing another voice, Albee has temporarily lost his own. In misconceived fidelity, the playwright has subordinated the dramatic to the novella form. He has relinquished a shapely, abrasive precision of language for mistily inflated poeticizing. As a play-to-play progression, the effect is dismaying; Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is to The Ballad of the Sad Café what an icicle is to its melted puddle.

Sad Café is a ballad of unreciprocated loves, testimony to a voguish dramatic ailment known as incurable aloneness. In their intertwining relationship, the three fantast-lovers in Sad Café are consumed not by their mutual fevers but by their solitary hallucinations.

Miss Amelia (Colleen Dewhurst) is a giantess, a strapping man's man of a woman. She runs a liquor and drygoods store in a dull and dusty Southern town and is as tight with her affections as with her cash. On the weather-beaten clapboard siding of her store, the faded lettering DRINK NEHI is a hint of some ghostly thirst for life. Marvin Macy (Lou Antonio) thirsts for Miss Amelia, and he reforms his rakehell ways to woo and wed her. In the ten scarifying days of their life together, he never beds her. Instead, she flings him to the floor and out of her life with venomous contempt. The castaway takes to crime, and his love-turned-to-hate festers in a Georgia penitentiary.

A hunchbacked dwarf named Cousin Lymon (Michael Dunn) comes along to claim kinship with Miss Amelia and monkey-walk his way into her barricaded heart. Cousin Lymon is sly, querulous and malevolent, but in her shy-smiling gladness Miss Amelia turns her store into a café where her half-pet half-child holds court. One night Marvin Macy shows up, and it is the dwarf's turn to love unrequitedly. Cousin Lymon is infatuated with the ex-jailbird who has seen the world, but Marvin cruelly cuffs him and calls him "Brokeback." The stage is thus set for a kind of gladiators' duel to the death between Miss Amelia and Marvin Macy. Glistening with hogfat and ringed by townsfolk, the pair slug and wrestle each other like mastodons before some prehistoric cave. As Colleen Dewhurst and Lou Antonio enact it, this raw battle of the sexes is charged with a passionate intensity that convicts the rest of the play of emotional anemia.

None of the loves in the Sad Café are of an aberrant kind that dares not speak its name. These loves do not know their names, and Albee is at a loss to make them credible. He resorts to sham mystification as exemplified by a narrator who pops in to bridge the gaps in the script and utter radio serial profundities: "No one can know what really takes place in the soul of the lover." A faintly supercilious device at best, the narrator tediously describes what ought to have been vitally dramatized—a confession of the playwright's failure.




http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,897027-1,00.html


The word is used 3 times in the story:

"What ails this Brokeback?" he asked with a rough jerk of his thumb.

"That will learn you, Brokeback," said Marvin Macy.

"Out of my way, Brokeback -- I'll snatch you bald-headed."

http://www.scribd.com/doc/11867410/McCullers-Carson-The-Ballad-of-the-Sad-Cafe-and-Other-Stories

THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFÉ
AND OTHER STORIES

A Bantam Book / published by arrangement
with Houghton Mifflin Company

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Houghton Mifflin edition published May 1951
Book Find Club edition published May 1951
Bantam edition / March 1958
Bantam Modern Classic edition / August 1969
Bantam Pathfinder edition / December 1970
Bantam edition / November 1971

Thanks for that tidbit, John.  Interesting.

I remember in 1999 that a local community theater staged this play and it was a disaster, albeit a noble failure.  To this day it's referred to as THE SALAD OF THE BAD CAFE.  (In case you're wondering, I wasn't in it.)

Mark

[suelyblu]

Hi  Donnab,  Like you new here.  Just to tell you I am going to the 'Rockies in September. Have been told about the 'bugs' up there, really hope it wont spoil my visit as I am Soooooooooooooooooooo   looking forward to going there. I have brought so many books about the place I could set up a library!!!!!!!!! When I get there I will be going to some of the Brokeback locations .I have printed off some maps etc off comp. Itss such a huge place I hope I get to see just one or two.We are going in an RV. so should be able to do some miles. Yes, I did feel for Heath and Jake having to carry on filming scenes when all flying flotsam and jetsom were using them as a landing pad!!!!!!!!.


                                                                           suelyblu

[donna]

September should be a lot better than when I was there!  The bugs will probably have died down by then and the weather will be less rainy.  My boyfriend has always wanted to go back to the Canadian Rockies (we were backpacking through there at the time of the filming) and now that I'm obsessed with this movie, I have finally agreed to go back again.  Now, he keeps teasing me by saying we can't stop at any of the filming sites!  I'm going to have to smack him!

[Ellen (tellyouwhat)]

Oh!  I thought when Aguirre slaps at that mosquito (count aint what I hoped for neither, you ranch stiffs ain't never no good) I just thought that was brilliant acting. 

ha!

[donna]

LOL- tell you what!  Really, I have been backpacking for 25 years and have hiked in mountain ranges all over the world and nothing was worse than the Canadian Rockies in summer '04!  You couldn't even eat outside of the tent without being eaten alive by swarms of mosquitoes and gnats.  It really makes me wonder why they chose to film there.  You can see the swarms of bugs in many of the outdoor scenes.  Gosh, I'm sure the actors and crew had to use a lot of DEET just to be able to go outdoors!  When we look at our pics from the trip, the scenery is so beautiful.  Then, when I saw the movie, I remembered how bad it really was! 

[suelyblu]

Do you know....I'm fast changing my ming about going to The Rockies'. Are you lot trying to put me off 'cause you want it to yourselves!!!!!!!!! But really I would walk over hot coals to get there to see some of the locations where BMM was filmed. Just to stand where Heath Ledger (Ennis) has stood would be awesome. After I've done that, they could screw down the lid and bury me up there!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


                                                                 suelyblu. xx

[button]

Does anyone know how to get in touch with the criterion  collection.  I hear they have done the ben button film which is shocking, since they usually release older films.  Since Focus pictures won't give us a proper dvd of brokeback mountain,  Do you think they might be interested?  I know the do a bang up job when it comes to bonus material.