Character Analysis of Jack Twist

[andy]

.......  I'm sure that someone will be willing to help me out of my confusion.

I sure hope so, friend, because I don't feel able to reply to your interpretation of what I said without getting all tangled up myself. 

[Desecra]

Jack definitely lies, and kind of keeps the lie going by not bringing up the subject.   But he lies in response to cues from Ennis.  At the motel, Ennis seems to be gently and subtly pushing him towards a certain answer.  There are plenty of clues that "yes" was not the right answer.  I don't think it's lack of knowledge or guts.  Jack continues to play along because he's still reading Ennis's cues.

Jack was braced for Ennis bringing up the subject again, but Ennis avoids it for 16 years.  It seems as if Jack had planned to tell the truth when Ennis was ready - but Ennis never did show signs of being ready.   Jack knew there would be a confrontation when the time came.  He was braced for it.  

What if Jack had been "faithful", (not slept with anyone other than Ennis and Lureen from the reunion on) - what difference would it have made to that confrontation?  Ennis doesn't ask about when Jack "went to Mexico" - whether it was before or after they got together.   He'd still have had to admit that he'd been with other guys.  By the reunion (perhaps even by Brokeback), Jack didn't have the choice to act in a way that would be acceptable to Ennis. He had already transgressed.  His only choice was whether to lie about or not.

Janjo and Dal, yes, I think something was missing with other guys, rather than that Jack was avoiding finding it.  Andy, I agree that Jack was looking for love.  I don't think there was a decision or attempt to be "emotionally faithful" to Ennis - I think that happened against his will.  It must have puzzled and frustrated him.  I think he starts to work it out at the end.

[fofol]

One of the beauties of the story is that for one of the first times, and certainly in one of the most popular/public presentations ever, two gay men are portrayed as sympathetic characters, despite the facts:  their clandestine love affair betrays, at minimum, their two wives, and one of them has sex with other men and blames it on a lack of action from the man we believe he loves.  Jack Twist compartmentalizes his life into three separate lives: his wife who doesn't know (and doesn't seem interested enough in him to figure it out) that his 'fishin' trips' are all about getting next to the love of his life; his lover may well suspect that Jack is having sex with other men, but blows up when confronted with the fact on the face of it; and the 'other men' who neither know nor care about the wife or lover (or would be extremely foolish to care).  So, Mr Twist is triple-timing the world, sure that the wife doesn't know that he has sex with men at any opportunity which presents itself, and just as sure that his lover should be kept in the dark about the other men who screw him.  He sacrifices truth for getting laid at his urge, at his convenience.  If he were honest about it with himself and the other people in his life, he would be ethical; if he made a choice and stuck with it, he would be moral; he isn't honest and considers his sexual needs as superior to all else in his life.  And still no one, including me, sees him as a bad man - fucked up, for sure, lost, no doubt, but bad, no, only needy, and that is not his choice, it's just the only gift he ever got from daddy.

[royandronnie]

Very nice, fofol, but I would take some issue with one thing--I don't think his sexual needs are the only thing he's satisfying: he yells at Ennis for threatening him over "somethin I don't hardly NEVER get," but we know that although the words of their argument are only about sex, their relationship is not. Sure, Jack is having sex rather than wanking; there's some pure need there. But surely also he's satisfying a spiritual need to be close to another man and have his hands on a man's body--it sounds sexual, I know, to put it that way, but he's craving the emotional rewards of being with a man rather than Lureen. Of course, like eating the fruit of the Dead Sea, his sexual encounters do not fill the void that is the absence of Ennis, so he has to keep doing it.

[janjo]

Well said, Mike and Charlotte. No amount of sex with paid companions will ever satisfy Jack. He wants Ennis, and Ennis isn't there!

[fofol]

I would still say that, no matter how sympathetic we are to them - it took me a while to see that Jack was more than a sexual opportunist, but I recovered - the homophobia that rules them (and that they may never understand) still screws them both up in ways that are not sexual: Jack's lack of self-confidence and Ennis's lifelong fear of exposure, directs their behaviors down unreliable, unreasonable paths.  I was in love with a Jack but finally got over spending nights alone, believing the lies.  My Jack's name was Andy, and even that was something he constructed: his real name was Leeland, and he was known to all the people we knew as Andy, but to his family and school friends, he was Lee.  His father was as much of a hard-bitten bastard as OMT, but that doesn't keep you warm on cold nights when the man you think of as your lover doesn't come home.  It's still betrayal, no matter the reasons, excuses, or causes.

[City Girl]

I was in love with a Jack but finally got over spending nights alone, believing the lies.  My Jack's name was Andy, and even that was something he constructed: his real name was Leeland, and he was known to all the people we knew as Andy, but to his family and school friends, he was Lee.  His father was as much of a hard-bitten bastard as OMT, but that doesn't keep you warm on cold nights when the man you think of as your lover doesn't come home.  It's still betrayal, no matter the reasons, excuses, or causes. 

We all bring our own personal experiences to the story and those experiences is the lens we see the story through.  I was astonished to come across a person in this fandom that quite literally hated Jack Twist.  Not because of Jack himself but because of the experience of having a gay father that left (in her eyes abandoned) the family.  In her eyes her father was quite promiscuous (I have no idea if that means he had 2 boyfriends or 20,000 boyfriends) and thus the fact that Jack had other men makes him the villian of the story.  I don't have the particulars of the man, what his situation was, or what kind of man he was, but the point is Jack is not her father! 

I have no idea the particulars of your relationship with Andy/Leeland but unless you also refused to leave your wife and family to make a life with him, unless the two of you never made a commitment to each other, unless you never made him feel as if he was a dirty secret and that what you had together was some kind of strange "thing" that overtakes you both, then the situations aren't comparable.  I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that you thought of the two of you as an actual couple, had made a home together that you both came home to, and that you had more than some friends with benefits situation.  And Jack's name isn't an assumed gay identity with his "real name" only known to his real life friends/family.

I don't mean to sound harsh but I don't think you can compare the two situations.   Jack broke his heart over Ennis, that's not what your Andy did.   

[fofol]

My point is that Jack is not the only injured party here.  IOW, they hurt each other, and by assigning manipulative tactics to Ennis, we miss the point of the story - BBM is not the story of poor little jack Twist and how big bad Ennis ruined his life, it is the story of poor little Ennis Del Mar and poor little Jack Twist, and how destructive rural homophobia destroyed both their lives, and many others.  All of this other stuff about rotten Ennis and how he fucked up poor Jack totally misses the author's stated point that homophobia is the truly destructive factor in all these lives - no one in the story is untouched by it.  
My original point stands: Ennis and Jack both suffered.  To align our sympathy with one or the other of the characters in the story, to consider that this is the story of poor Jack, misses the author's stated point, and in fact trivializes the work, IMOHO.

[Buffymon]

My point is that Jack is not the only injured party here.  IOW, they hurt each other, and by assigning manipulative tactics to Ennis, we miss the point of the story - BBM is not the story of poor little jack Twist and how big bad Ennis ruined his life, it is the story of poor little Ennis Del Mar and poor little Jack Twist, and how destructive rural homophobia destroyed both their lives, and many others.  All of this other stuff about rotten Ennis and how he fucked up poor Jack totally misses the author's stated point that homophobia is the truly destructive factor in all these lives - no one in the story is untouched by it.  
My original point stands: Ennis and Jack both suffered.  To align our sympathy with one or the other of the characters in the story, to consider that this is the story of poor Jack, misses the author's stated point, and in fact trivializes the work, IMOHO.

I completely agree with you. Both Jack and Ennis are victims in this situation. Like you say, it´s a story about destructive rural homophobia and how it affects both Ennis, Jack and the people around them. Ennis and Jack both suffer, they just handle it in different ways.

[Desecra]

To me, although it's the story of both of them, it feels more like Ennis's story.  I suppose that's because it's mainly from Ennis's point of view, and it starts and ends with Ennis alone.  (The short story, I mean.  The film feels more equal, because of the scenes with Jack alone).  I agree with what has been said above, that DRH is the bad guy in the story, not Jack and Ennis.  I suppose they did hurt each other, but it's difficult to see how they could have avoided doing so (given who they were and their circumstances).  However, I think they both feel guilty to some extent.  I get the impression that Ennis is trying to make amends to Jack at the end - the phone call, the ashes, the shirts, etc. and I do think he feels that he wronged Jack, although I know that's open to debate.

[fofol]

I completely agree with you. Both Jack and Ennis are victims in this situation. Like you say, it´s a story about destructive rural homophobia and how it affects both Ennis, Jack and the people around them. Ennis and Jack both suffer, they just handle it in different ways.

Precisely.  And they handle it in ways that are directly related to their individual childhood traumas:  Ennis loses his critical faculties because his dad laughing at a tortured corpse was truly too much information for him to process, so he retreats into his own head; Jack was nearly beaten to death, but survived after extreme humiliation from his father.  Ennis retreats into himself, away from an incomprehensible world, and Jack never gets a healthy perspective on his own self-worth.  Almost everything they do in the story can be traced back to these signal events.

[fofol]

To me, although it's the story of both of them, it feels more like Ennis's story.  I suppose that's because it's mainly from Ennis's point of view, and it starts and ends with Ennis alone.  (The short story, I mean.  The film feels more equal, because of the scenes with Jack alone).  I agree with what has been said above, that DRH is the bad guy in the story, not Jack and Ennis.  I suppose they did hurt each other, but it's difficult to see how they could have avoided doing so (given who they were and their circumstances).  However, I think they both feel guilty to some extent.  I get the impression that Ennis is trying to make amends to Jack at the end - the phone call, the ashes, the shirts, etc. and I do think he feels that he wronged Jack, although I know that's open to debate.

   Definitely Des - that point about Ennis trying to make amends when it's too late is probably the motivating factor for most of us who've made changes in our lives and habits as a positive outcome resulting from Brokeback.

[City Girl]

My point is that Jack is not the only injured party here.  

But you don't simply state that.  Again and again and again you bring up Jack's "infidelity" to Ennis.  My point is that in the case of Jack and Ennis there was no commitment.  No promise to be "faithful".  It was an absolute non-issue to Ennis because in Ennis's mind they weren't a "couple".  In fact, he chuckles at Jack's little story about the ranch neighbor's wife, while he himself has a thing going with a waitress in Signal.  You've related it back to your personal experiences of being cheaten on and that appear to have nothing to do with Jack and Ennis's situation. 

People seem to think that Ennis's blow up at the trailhead scene has to do with Jack having sex outside their relationship but if you go through the sentences line by line you see that Ennis blows up when Jack brings up the ghosts of Rich and Earl with his "I did once".  It was that Jack has stepped outside the agreement that they are a couple of straight guys who just happen to like having sex with each other. 

And I'm far past being weary of hearing how Jack has "wronged" Ennis by taking some comfort in some of the other 50 weeks a year.

[george66]

My point is that Jack is not the only injured party here.  IOW, they hurt each other, and by assigning manipulative tactics to Ennis, we miss the point of the story - BBM is not the story of poor little jack Twist and how big bad Ennis ruined his life, it is the story of poor little Ennis Del Mar and poor little Jack Twist, and how destructive rural homophobia destroyed both their lives, and many others.  All of this other stuff about rotten Ennis and how he fucked up poor Jack totally misses the author's stated point that homophobia is the truly destructive factor in all these lives - no one in the story is untouched by it.  
My original point stands: Ennis and Jack both suffered.  To align our sympathy with one or the other of the characters in the story, to consider that this is the story of poor Jack, misses the author's stated point, and in fact trivializes the work, IMOHO.

Precisely.  And they handle it in ways that are directly related to their individual childhood traumas:  Ennis loses his critical faculties because his dad laughing at a tortured corpse was truly too much information for him to process, so he retreats into his own head; Jack was nearly beaten to death, but survived after extreme humiliation from his father.  Ennis retreats into himself, away from an incomprehensible world, and Jack never gets a healthy perspective on his own self-worth.  Almost everything they do in the story can be traced back to these signal events.

For me...accurately worded!

george

[Desecra]

City Girl, I agree - it's not infidelity that's the issue.  It's Jack being gay.  That was what Jack lied about when Ennis asked him about doing it with other men 16 years ago.