SUGGEST NEW THREADS for this area: "The Story / The Film"

[Jadey]

I am in servious need of a BROKEBACK RECOVERY ZONE.   (but not yet)
    It ain't real. It ain't me. So why am I so affected...... "It coulda been like this..."

I second that idea. I am interested to know what people do to distract themselves from the obsession or how they attempt to get their life back. I myself tried to put a stop on the fever by watching a no brainer movie so I went to see King Kong. OMG, what a disastrous movie.  For the 1st time in my life I comtemplated asking the theater manager for a refund. I was mad that Peter Jackson would insult audiences intelligence like that. Yes we want to be entertained but we are not stupid!
Sorry, just have to vent a little. Still pretty mad about it. Yes I would like to have a BBM Support Group.

[Sarge]

Sorry, just have to vent a little. Still pretty mad about it. Yes I would like to have a BBM Support Group.

     Does that mean we all get to sit in a circle and hold hands?

[waynerman]

The most interesting idea to me is having an "audience reaction" thread. And I wonder how the type and location of theater might influence this.

Here in the Kansas City metro area, BBM has only been showing on 4 art house screens so far. I saw it on one of these screens in Overland Park, Kansas, a very conservative area. I was there with my male partner, but there were few other gay couples in evidence...the audience seemed to be comprised mostly of straight women. (I say "seemed" because, of course, this is based on judging people by their "looks," which can be misleading.) Perhaps because it was an art house, there seemed to be an openness and willingness on the part of the audience members to experience something new. But I didn't sense a lot of emotion in the audience toward the end of the film (while I sat there crying like a baby).

Long story short, I'm interested in this kind of discussion.... Thanks. I appreciate this forum.

[Cat]

How about... "Finish this sentence, 'Jack, I swear...'"

Or is that sentence complete in itself?

I actually say this quite a bit when I'm frustrated. Like when my cat is jumping on my head at 3am. "Kitty, I swear!"

When I'm mad at my boyfriend, "Baby, I swear!"

So is it some kind of mad thing? Like maybe Ennis was mad at himself or mad at Jack for dying?

Annie P really needs to clear this one up.

[TulseyJoe]

How about... "Finish this sentence, 'Jack, I swear...'"

Or is that sentence complete in itself?

I actually say this quite a bit when I'm frustrated. Like when my cat is jumping on my head at 3am. "Kitty, I swear!"

When I'm mad at my boyfriend, "Baby, I swear!"

So is it some kind of mad thing? Like maybe Ennis was mad at himself or mad at Jack for dying?

Annie P really needs to clear this one up.

Your wanting to cuss out your boyfriend or your cat is NOT the same thing as swearing an oath of allegiance, making a promise of a declaration  or swearing that a promise will be kept.

You aparently did not understand the context of "Jack, I swear . . ."

[TulseyJoe]

I have a suggestion. It's sort of related to the other thread "Were They Gay?"

But, it's more of an academic, psychological question. What was the sexual orientation of Ennis and Jack?

It seems that the younger generation and those who are either exclusively heterosexual or bisexual want to call both of the guys "gay." But, a person who accepts his sexual orientation of being exclusively homosexual would never say, "I ain't no queer!" or "I'm not gay!"

To those of us who grew up in the country, "ain't no" would not be a double negative; because it actually was a common way of saying, "No, I am not."

And those of us who went to college with some of the guys we grew up with and studied Romance Languages such a Spanish and French found out that if the predicate of the sentence was in the negative sense, it had a negative word before and after the verb.

Gay people don't deny their sexual orientation; especially when two of them are in love with each other and no one else is around.

[PetterG]

To those of us who grew up in the country, "ain't no" would not be a double negative; because it actually was a common way of saying, "No, I am not."

Thanks for that because I have noticed that line but I thought it meant ' I'm not any #%¤!!# queer'

[nakymaton]

I'd like to have a thread just for squeeing about little details I loved. Anything from the way a particular scene was shot that managed to capture one of Annie Proulx's descriptions ("...Jack, in his dark camp, saw Ennis as a night fire, a red spark on the huge black mass of the mountain"), to little details in the set design or costumes (the differences in Jack's and Ennis' hats later in the movie), to descriptive lines shifted to dialogue ("pair a deuces").

I, personally, find it easier to navigate a large number of more specific threads than a few very large threads. I know that preferences really vary about those, but I have shied away from the main discussion thread, first because I hadn't seen the movie, and then because it was just soooooooo big. Also, I think other movie message boards I've frequented have eventually had server problems when threads became too big... just opening the big threads was a strain.

[D. Fletcher]

Annie Prouxl mentioned in an interview that the movie presents the "universal sorrow." Sorrow for the way one's life turned out. Sorrow for making what seems to have been a bad choice. Sorrow for other's miserable lives, and violent deaths. And perhaps, sorrow for not having told someone you loved him, before he was suddenly gone forever.

If "universal sorrow" is the theme of the movie, perhaps this could be a thread of its own.

[sayitaintso]

I'd like to have a thread just for squeeing about little details I loved.

Would that be cross-country or downhill? 
 Umm, that's" Nordic or Alpine?"  for our international squee-ers.

[Jeff2]

Somewhat along the lines of a "recovery" thread, how 'bout a "so what" or "what now" thread? I think what a lot of people are struggling with after engaging this thing is figuring out what to do about what hit them. I know I am. What does the story/movie invite us to do, think, feel, be? What can we, should we, do about the relationships we're in that are not as honest as they could be? How do we find some closure/healing from past hurts that were inflicted or that we inflicted? What can we do, small things, large things, about this still devastatingly homophobic culture we're all in?   

[Jeff2]

Another topic that's been roaming around these threads in lots of guises and might be good to find a home: the dance between love and sex. I mean, one way of reading the trajectory of the story is from attraction to sex to love to some kind of primal human bonding (?) (hard to find the words). Example: One of the scenes practically everyone senses is the most powerful is the "dozy embrace." I think AP's story very carefully and masterfully leads us to this critical sentence, one we all could probably recite now from memory: "What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was ... the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger." I find it SO ironic that after all the talk and scrutiny of male sexual appetite, the story infers, at least, that the whole point MAY not be about sex at all, but about something else altogether! WTF IS that hunger?? How does sex try to fill it? Is the thing that so powerfully grabs at us the extraordinary presentation of this hunger? How do straight/gay men/women acknowledge, relate to, try to satisfy whatever this hunger is?

[doodler]

IS THERE A WAY OFF THE MOUNTAIN?
Where is the Search and Rescue team for BBM? My friends and kids are getting worried! They were thinking it would all go away once I got to see the movie (IF that ever happens!) however, several of them have been dropping in here (voyeurs?) and have come to realize it seems to get worse with subsequent viewings.

[jack]

LYNN...

will there be credits for our doctoral theses?

[lynn]

yes, it does look a little "professiorial", eh? well, the mods wanted specific suggestions...

if i could have taken a course like this in college i never would have left...