After seeing Brokeback Mountain for the first time, I came away overwhelmed, not the least, by the breathtaking scenery; it added pathos to the little human dilemma that was taking place amidst it.
Spurred on to read more of Annie Proulx, I found the following prologue to her short story ‘People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water’ (“Close Range: Wyoming Stories”):
You stand there, braced. Cloud Shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country-indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky-provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut.
Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti’d celebration of athletic victory on bridge overpass, crust of blood on the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on the highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that.
Doesn’t the “wild country-indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting” found in Brokeback Mountain have the same significance?
Ennis’ and Jack’s tragedy hurts us all the more because, against the Mountain, they both are so ephemeral.