Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain

Although the story of “Brokeback Mountain” has been classified as “the gay cowboy story”, it contrarily is the tale two young men who strive to come to acceptance of who they are in a society which demands something so different from the taboo nature of this union. Originally written as a short story by Annie Proulx, this story that started off as one of the most real tales of her fictitious stories took up almost 30 pages that covered a relationship that lasted 20 years and was adapted into film with a delicate yet balanced symposium of cinematic screenplay and cinematography. The elements of the story and its adaptation go to reinforce different aspects and beliefs that have been developed and poeticize the relationship of Ennis and Jack
The most obvious of these additions that take place for both Ennis and Jack with the expansion of different relationships with some of the minor characters, some of which were not in the original story. Jack’s relationship with his father-in-law was always a tense one. L.D. felt as though Jack was not only completely inadequate for Lureen but also for the greater community. This resentment brewed inside Jack until one Thanksgiving Day where he established his competence and authority by threatening his father-in-law into submission. L.D. fell silent to Jack after he commands “Sit down, you old son of a bitch...This is my house...or I’ll knock your ignorant ass into next week” (66.). Jack’s unsteady grasp of who he was and what his role in life as a closet homosexual was further expanded with the introduction of a couple who just moved to Texas. While at some social function, the two husbands, Jack and Randall, were out having a cigarette and Randall suggested to go up fishing at a cabin nearby with some whiskey to just “get away” (76.) thus introducing a
Director Ang Lee must use numerous visual elements that enhance Proulx’s belief and portray it to the audience. Producer and screenwriter Larry McMurtry had a vision in mind based off of Ansel Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez, New Meixco. This became the foundation for the locations that were to portray Riverton and the other towns and establishments in Wyoming. The vastness of space that filled the background with nature’s beauty of the Big Horn Mountains would contain the foreground of a somewhat desolate ranching society scarcely filled and obviously behind in the times to comment on the simplicity of the culture where most of its inhabitants lived paycheck to paycheck and ranch to ranch. The cinematography of “Brokeback Mountain” would not only play a crucial part with Proulx being a “geographic determinist” but also with Larry McMurtry’s classification “lyrical pastoralism”. In his essay “Adapting Brokeback Mountain”, McMurtry describes director Ang Lee as “a reluctant, even an unwilling, pastoralist...[getting] as much of the grit of the towns as he can” (141). Having the foundation set with the Ansel Adams photograph mentioned earlier, this would set the dichotomy between the two lives both Ennis and Jack choose to lead poeticizing