Brokeback Mountain

[DotTheEyes]

Originally Posted by Nickel

Okay, this is a bit of a spoiler (so if you haven't seen the movie, don't continue reading), but I have a question.





At the end, when Ennis calls Jack's wife, she tells him that he was hit in the face by the rim of the truck, and drowned in his own blood. Then it cuts away to Jack being hit in the face by a tire iron. Is that what really happened to him? Did people find out and beat him to death, or was Ennis just imagining that based on what happened when he was younger? Or is it just open to interpretation?

***SPOILERS...***




This was my impression... Ennis hears Jack's wife say he died due to an unfortunate accident, but because of his own paranoia about being 'found out' and what he saw as a child, he suspects Jack might've been murdered by angry homophobes. So, in a sense, I believe it's left open to interpretation. You can either believe the wife's story or accept what Ennis imagined happened.

Personally, I believe Ennis was right, if only because it adds even more impact to the film's message about two lovers being kept apart by society's strangling so-called 'values.'

[Nickel]

Originally Posted by DotTheEyes

Personally, I believe Ennis was right, if only because it adds even more impact to the film's message about two lovers being kept apart by society's strangling so-called 'values.'

I was thinking that too, for two reasons. One, Jack's wife sounded very...uninterested when she was recounting the story of how he died, as if she were just regurgitating some memorized script. Also, we know that Jack was becoming more careless, because he was travelling to Mexico, and also became involved with that other man toward the end. It stands to reason that he was found out.

[DotTheEyes]

You're right about Jack's wife's tone. And seeing as Anne Hathaway's performance was quite energetic elsewhere, I have to believe her cold, dry, and tired delivery of those lines was intentional. Perhaps her character's overbearing dad told her to tell this story so she wouldn't have to deal with the embarrassment of having a closet-homosexual husband.

And Jack definitely was the more open of the two. You could almost say he was the 'gayer' of the two, though it sounds kind of dumb. He didn't internalize his desires nearly as much as Ennis did and I could definitely see his yearnings getting him in undeserved trouble (shades of the real-life Matthew Shepard case, perhaps).