The Wichitan - Midwestern State University, Wichita Falls Texas

MIDWESTERN STATE UNIVERSITY | January 25, 2006

ENTERTAINTMENT

'Brokeback Mountain' is great love story
Jason York | Staff Reporter

“Brokeback Mountain” is, above all the controversy, a well-written love story.

The original short story by Pulitzer Prize winning author, Annie Proulx (“The Shipping News”), deals with the life-long relationship between Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar that begins in rural Wyoming during the summer of 1963. According to the author’s Web site, Proulx writes “almost exclusively about rural North America and rural social situations.”

“Brokeback began as an examination of country homophobia in the land of the Great Pure Noble Cowboy,” Proulx states. The story first appeared in her book, “Close Range: Wyoming Stories,” published by Scribner in 1999. “The work of imagining, thinking, picturing, describing how things would have been for two 19-year old rough, uneducated young men in 1963 Wyoming was slow, difficult and arduous.”

Proulx writes with all the precision of a razor, using language to cut her story from the fabric of a fertile imagination. The result is sharp landscapes and tight characters which maintain immense depth and integrity after passing through Proulx’s unrelenting plot. Packed into a mere 55 pages, the stand-alone Scribner paperback of “Brokeback Mountain” threatens to collapse under its own literary weight.

The story dares to address the existence of love in a place society does not think it could ever exist. Proulx raises tough questions about human sexuality and people’s attitudes toward anything they don’t understand or accept. Her portrayal of two men in love defies the stereotypes; Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar are rugged, stoic cowboys who accept the bleak realities of life. One of those realities is that they are two men in love at a time and in a place where such a thing could, and often did, get a man killed.

“Brokeback Mountain” is not so much an exploration of the past as it is a window into our own time. The same prejudices and fears encountered by Jack and Ennis are encountered by people even today, even in people reading this sentence, which is exactly Proulx’s point. The tragedy of Jack’s murder is the direct result of an ignorant and unaccepting society which, by its cruelty and its hatred, destroys not its perceived enemies but itself.

Jack and Ennis are prototypes of the new reality, one in which humanity is driven not by hatred of evil but by love of good. They have no agenda; they hardly even understand what it is they’re experiencing. All they know is that they care very deeply for each other, and not just sexually but emotionally as well. The struggles they endure -- living a lie for their own protection, denying the heart – vividly demonstrate the injustice and unfairness of a society that condemns any form of love, no matter how unorthodox.

So, why would anybody choose to go through that? Proulx’s answer is both simple and logical: They go through it because they have no choice. Is it better to suffer the despair of denying the heart or to face the consequences of surrendering to it? “Brokeback Mountain” is controversial because its characters choose to surrender to their passions. Each of the main characters still attempts to live according to society’s standard, but doing so is difficult almost beyond endurance.

Jack Twist is the more physical of the two main characters. Ennis del Mar is characterized by his emotion. What Jack means to Ennis is what having a friend means to someone society has forgotten. Ennis holds on to his memories of Brokeback because they represent a time in his life he was loved unconditionally. Jack clings to his memories of Brokeback because with Ennis he was free and had no fear. After their summer wrangling sheep on the mountain, their separate lives keep them apart, ripping their spirits apart.

The screenplay for the motion picture adaptation of “Brokeback Mountain” was written by Pulitzer Prize winning author Larry McMurtry (“Lonesome Dove”) and Diana Ossana. Very few movie scripts are ever as faithful to their source as McMurtry’s was to “Brokeback Mountain.” McMurtry and Ossana’s script won a Golden Globe this year for best screenplay from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

Heath Ledger (“10 Things I Hate About You,” “Monster’s Ball,” “Lords of Dogtown”) plays the lead role of Ennis del Mar, rancher and one-time camp tender. The 26 year old Australian actor takes on the accent of the American West with surprising believability. As the movie progresses through twenty years of Ennis and Jack’s relationship, Ledger does an amazing job of aging along with it. By the end of the movie, Ennis’ voice and movement are so slow and soft, it’s as if he were vanishing into the landscape, nothing more than a dusty breath of wind across the waving grasses of Wyoming.

Jake Gyllenhaal (“Donnie Darko,” “The Day After Tomorrow,” “Jarhead”) plays the supporting role of Jack Twist, a rodeo cowboy too full of life to be tamed. Gyllenhaal is always convincing when he’s yelling at somebody, probably because of all the veins that pop out from his neck and forehead and how his eyes go all crazy like a maniac. I still haven’t gotten over his “I’m going to kill you!” scene from “Jarhead.” At any rate, he still has the calmness to play a love scene with all the emotion in the world, which he does exceptionally well in “Brokeback.” His performance earned him Screen Actor’s Guild and British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award nominations.

Directed by Academy Award winning director Ang Lee, “Brokeback Mountain” also stars Randy Quaid as Joe Aguirre (Jack and Ennis’ employer on Brokeback), Anne Hathaway as Lureen Newsom (Jack’s wife in Childress, Texas), and Michelle Williams as Alma del Mar (Ennis’ wife who learns the truth about her husband).

The film, besides portraying 1970’s Childress, also mentions Lake Kemp, which begins to hit home for a lot of people in this area. “Brokeback Mountain” is worth seeing for its stunning landscapes, which were filmed in Alberta, Canada, but the mention of a little part of Texoma on the big screen is definitely worth the price of a ticket. Above that, what truly makes “Brokeback Mountain” great as both a short story and a motion picture is its content. Thought-provoking, brutally honest, and above all else, infinitely sad, “Brokeback Mountain” will not leave anyone the same.

The Scribner stand-alone version of Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” is available at Books-a-million, and the motion picture is currently playing at Cinemark Theatres. Book buyers and moviegoers should be aware that “Brokeback Mountain” contains depictions of homosexual acts.

*the book and movie both get five stars

'Snow' insightful, powerful book to read
Jason York | Staff Reporter

Does anybody remember when it used to snow in Wichita Falls? I remember one snowfall in 1986 that was actually heavy enough to last for more than a day and that you could use to make grass-less snowmen. (Wichita Falls natives know what I’m talking about with grassy snowmen!) Considering that we seem to be stuck in eternal summer, I hope this book is not the only snow we see this year.

“Snow” is Pamuk’s seventh novel, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely. Although Pamuk is a highly acclaimed author by European readers, his fame in the United States is minimal. “He deserves to be better known in North America, and no doubt he will be, as his fictions turn on the conflict between the forces of ‘Westernization’ and those of the Islamists. Although it's set in the 1990's and was begun before Sept. 11, ''Snow'' is eerily prescient, both in its analyses of fundamentalist attitudes and in the nature of the repression and rage and conspiracies and violence it depicts,” writes Margaret Atwood for “The New York Times.” (August 15, 2004).

The main character is a poet named Kerim Alakusoglu, who prefers to be addressed simply as Ka. A native of Turkey, Ka spends ten years prior to the events in the novel in Frankfurt scraping out a living reading poetry to small gatherings of Turkish exiles.

The novel’s most persistent image is that of the snow that falls constantly on the town of Kars, Turkey. Kar actually means “snow” in Turkish. A remote village on the eastern border with Armenia, Kars is a microcosm of the “jihad vs. McWorld” clash of civilizations currently plaguing the world. The fact that the snowstorm closes off the town to all traffic both incoming and outgoing during Ka’s stay intensifies the struggles of the people held prisoner by the snow.

Ka returns to Turkey after a decade spent in Germany as a political exile. He is in Istanbul for his mother’s funeral. While there, he learns of a number of girls committing suicide in the remote village of Kars on the Armenian border.

Even before he arrives, a snowstorm has begun that eerily continues throughout his stay. To the people of Kars, Ka claims to be a journalist from Istanbul who’s heard of the murder of the town’s mayor and of the “suicide girls.” Yet Ka has a hidden motive: to find a woman named Ipek with whom he’d gone to school and with whom he’s in love.

He wanders through the city, past its old buildings reflecting various periods of its history. Ottoman, Russian, Armenian, and Turkish structures line the avenues and boulevards. Ka encounters many of the locals and becomes involved in their lives, mainly their struggles between Islamic fundamentalism and Western secularism.

This forces Ka to examine his own beliefs. When he meets Blue, an enigmatic paramilitary Islamist who is thought to have killed the town’s mayor, Ka begins to reawaken to his faith. His childhood in the bourgeoisie class of Istanbul never lent itself to fanatic faith, but trapped in the provincial village of Kars, Ka comes face-to-face with the power of religion.

As his supposed investigation probes deeper, he becomes aware that the town’s girls are not committing suicide because they’re unhappy. Their real reason for suicide is shocking.

While Ka learns more and more about the people of Kars and the issues that threaten to plunge the town into anarchy, he meets an actor named Sunay Zaim. A failed television star, Sunay’s theatre troupe is really a front for Sunay’s pro-secular politics. He envisions himself as a new Ataturk, and chaos breaks out during a stage performance in which Sunay effectively takes control of the city.

Danger looms over almost everyone in Kars while the snowstorm persists. The police and the pseudo-military have run amok, and things are only getting worse for the girls of Kars as Sunay attempts to forcibly impose his secular ideas on the captive citizens.

In the middle of all of this is a bland love story between Ka and Ipek, who is finally persuaded to give in to his advances. Their love is desperate and ill-fated, but it is the impetus for much of Ka’s spiritual rebirth. While he is in Kars, he overcomes his writer’s block and composes 19 poems of exactly 36 lines each.

Through all of this, the snow continues to fall, the flakes getting larger and larger right up until the point that the snowstorm stops altogether. By the time the storm ends, most of the conflict in the village of Kars has been resolved, but Ka’s desire for Ipek to return with him to Germany remains an elusive dream.

“Snow” is a powerful novel, both prescient of and relative to the current East-West conflict. Its images are stark but beautiful; its characters retain a certain mystery Pamuk is careful to preserve. Pamuk’s seventh novel is a wonderfully refreshing voice out of Turkey, despite the seriousness of its themes. It’s also a good read because of the constant presence of snow, the perfect break from this January summer in Wichita Falls.

*five stars

Marshall's 'The Greatest' CD more than worth the money
Richard Carter | For the Wichitan

She’s as southern as a Cat Power gimme cap, but there’s a fine and true soul underneath.

Singer songwriter Chan Marshall (who records under the name Cat Power) once told an interviewer that she wrote short stories in the vein of Carson McCullers, William Faulkner and Denis Johnson. That line in itself is a valuable insight into the tenor of her songs’ lyrics and moods.

A daughter of the south (Atlanta), Marshall has spent the last 12 years in New York City. Her six previous records mixed an indie brand of urban folk with a melancholic strain of sadness and an intriguing twist of soul.

Never whiny, she lyrically and melodically cuts to the heart of things in an incisively immediate and meaningful manner. If I have a favorite all-time song, it’s her “Metal Heart,” a confluence of voice, two picked electric guitars, heavily reverbed drums and simple bass. Near the end of the quiet tune, Marshall sings several lyrics from “Amazing Grace,” re-defining the words to resonate with her love-lost lyrics.

“Metal Heart,” off her 1998 “Moon Pix” record, easily becomes more addicting with each listen. Impressively enough, her next record of original tunes, “You Are Free” ((2003), also mixed up enough of the old with the new to once again re-create a distinctive and memorable collection of sounds.

On Marshall’s newest record, “The Greatest,” she returns to her southern roots, to the famous Ardent Studio in Memphis (Stax Records). There, she employs session men who played with wrote with the likes of Al Green and Booker T and the MG’s.

Three years may be a long time to wait for any new CD. But “The Greatest” is worth the time and struggle. While many of the songs were supposedly recorded on a first take, the tunes took some time and patience to come together. The 12 songs of “The Greatest” bring together melody, mood, imagistic lyrics, clean production values and a melancholic southern sensibility. There’s a certain smooth lilting quality to Marshall’s singing that will easily wrench or tear a listener’s heart.

From the opening song, an aspiring boxer wants to be the greatest only to discover that also-rans suffer immeasurably. Another song, “The Moon,” has Marshall pondering about life, love, death and the immutable. Her vocals are almost breathed, softly inflected, across an

ultra-tasteful arrangement of guitar, organ, snare drum and bass.

It’s always amazing to me how Marshall, like singer songwriters such as Elliott Smith, can bring a real sense of beauty to the profoundly sad. It’s also fascinating to hear how Marshall assimilates the musical influences of her players into her musical past. If the record begins with Marshall playing with great session players, they quickly come together as a band.

This influence is a worthwhile one for both musical forces. “The Greatest” comes off as a meeting between urbane folk and smooth roots soul. If the point of indie music is to bring together sounds to create new ones, “The Greatest” works.

More importantly, Marshall’s songs are ones that will stay with listeners, with their rich melodies, lyrical phrasings, verbal meanings and arrangements. Southern soul hasn’t sounded this vital since the ‘60s. And a large part of that is the introduction of a felt folk sensibility, a fine voice and an under noticed talent returning home to her musical roots.

Like previous Cat Power CDs, “The Greatest” is recommended.