"Brokeback Mountain," Annie Proulx

Disquieting. I haven’t seen the movie, but I kept running into reviews that called the original short story “haunting,” the “most powerful love story I’ve ever read,” “a tale of star-crossed lovers,” etc. I found the story brutal -- there’s violence, suffered by the characters themselves and featured in their stories about other people, the characters are in extreme denial and don’t have much to live for, and the narrator’s attitude toward them is sort of cold and clinical. I can’t believe the movie treats them this way -- Jack and Ennis couldn’t have remained the blank slates they are in the short story for the whole two hours of a movie; nobody would stay till the end. And even though there is star-crossedness, there’s no catharsis, no real tragedy, because there’s no effort on anybody’s part to challenge his dismal existence, and no awareness that it even is dismal. I don’t know why Jack and Ennis fall so profoundly in love; one minute they aren’t in love, the next minute they are. All I know is that these are very sad lives, and that it was not a good thing to be gay in Wyoming in the ’60s through ’80s.

-- Daniel Brown, See You Tonight for Supper