I read the book

This evening, I finally read the short story "Brokeback Mountain" from Close Range: Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx, which was the basis for the current film Brokeback Mountain playing now in select cities and going into wide release on January 6.

NOTICE: Contains "spoilers."

The short story had been published in New Yorker magazine back in 1997 or 1998, and until recently was available for downloading from the magazine's website. A new book with just "Brokeback Mountain" was published last month as a tie-in to the release of the movie, though, so the New Yorker link has been deactivated. Not wanting to pay the $14.95 for the hardcover or $9.95 for the paperback, I ventured out to a Border's Books, found the special edition (it's thin!), and stood there and read the story. That should tell you just how short this short story is.

The first thing that struck me about the book is how closely the screenplay writers stuck to the original story, even with much of the original dialogue intact. The movie version was able to fill out a lot of the detail in the story, particularly with the mountain vistas, sheep herding, and the family lives of both Ennis and Jack. The one thing they didn't follow was the detailed descriptions of Ennis and Jack written by Proulx. Ennis is supposed to be very skinny with a growth on his eyelid and Jack is supposed to be curly headed and bucktoothed, later getting his teeth fixed and getting fat. I suppose, however, giving us Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal is a suitably acceptable compromise.

One key scene which is clarified in the short story is Ennis's phone call to Jack's widow, when she tell him about the truck tire accident. The possibility that Jack may have met with tire-iron wielding gay bashers is a flash in Ennis's imagination. When Ennis discovers that Jack may have had an affair with another Texas rancher, he feels the tire iron incident may have been more likely, but there is no confirmation one way or the other.

The other day I mentioned in my movie review that there was one scene other than Jack's death which made all the gay men in the theater gasp and hold their breath. I'll say now that the scene in question is when Ennis is in Jack's bedroom at his parents' house and he discovers Jack's still unwashed bloody shirt from that final fistfight they'd had at the end of their sheep herding summer twenty years previously. Inside Jack's shirt was Ennis's shirt; Jack had wanted them to be together and close just like the shirts; he symbolically put Ennis inside his own skin; it was such a testament to Jack's deep love for Ennis. I think most gay men who've ever been deeply in love still have some relic, some souvenir, of that relationship, however tragically or badly that love affair ended, and thus, the gay audience members were struck both with the emotion of Ennis's discovery and their own emotions recalling from their own life that souvenir of love lost, giving them an Aristotelean catharsis.

The short story is good. This is one of the few times, though, that I'm going to say that I like the screen play better than the book.