Annie Proulx's 1997
New Yorker story occupied only parts of 13 pages in the magazine, but was stretched to 55 pages as a stand-alone book.
This is one of the most powerful American short stories
ever, in a league with "Big Two-Hearted River," "The Killers," "The Bear," and "Noon Wine" (the latter two are much longer). If you don't recognize the titles, you need remedial American lit and can find them in the collected stories of Ernest Hemingway (the first two), William Faulkner, and Katherine Anne Porter). Proulx's story has a similar tragic inexorability, and is a masterpiece of tightly packing an emotional wallop.
The screenplay retains all Proulx's dialogue and scenes. The movie has the story's main wallop (in a Wyoming closet) and several of the others (including the contents of Ennis's tackle box), too. It added a lot of middle between the 1963 beginning and the 1981 ending of a tragic story about social and emotional blockages and macho Wyoming men. The movie's opening up to include a novelistic array of characters seemed to me something of a midriff bulge that comes close to interfering with the main love-tradgey story.
Proulx's story, Ossana/McMurtry's screenplay, and Ang Lee's film do not editorialize. They show rather than tell. I, however, want to stress that Jack and Ennis are following the program that continues to be prescribed by the Christian Right: try to forget about male love, get married, sire children, put aside "childish things" (a category including adolescent same-sex sex that must be a "passing phase"). Ennis, in particular, cannot conceive two men living happily ever after. Proulx supplied him with an extremely vivid childhood lesson of what happens to those who try. Jack thinks it is possible and that it is lack of imagination (and commitment) on Ennis's part that keeps their relationship brief, passionate reunions. Both can do the heterosexual deed and procreate. But that does not reorient them, as it's supposed (by cynical charlatans who know how rare eradication of male-male sexual orientation is) to do. This (ab)use of women continues to be actively sponsored by the Christian Right. Trying to function (sexually if not emotionally) with a woman is the central part of "reparative therapy," a program that produces husbands who almost invariably do not extinguish their desires for males, though they often sire one or more children before giving up the attempt at "normality." This results in wives who are hurt and confused, blaming themselves. And when their husbands revert (often in secret), more than a few wives have been infected with HIV (though, I think that most men who continue to have sex with their wives use condoms with male sexual partners).
Proulx supplied Alma searing lines of long-unexpressed pain in eventually articulating her knowledge (in regard to the contents of a tackle box). I have to say that the most tragic lines are Ennis's: "If you can't fix it, you've got to stand it" which Proulx supplied in her original story.
From the "story to screen" book, I, want to quote Proulx on the "gay cowboy" label that I objected to in discussing the movie:
"They met herding sheep, animals most real cowpokes despise. Although they were not really cowboys (the word 'cowboy' is often used derisively in the west by those who do ranch work), the urban critics dubbed it a tale of gay cowboys. No. It is a story of destructive rural homophobia. Although there are many places in Wyoming where gay men did and do live together in harmony with the community, it should not be forgotten that a year after this story was published Matthew Shephard was tied to a buck fence outside the most enlightened town in the state, Laramie, home of the University of Wyoming." Wyoming is not just postcard-value scenery, but a hard place for those living with the wind and the mountains.
The story is available in a book that also includes the screenplay, fascinating essay by Proulx, and interesting ones by the adapters, Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry. (Ossana also coproduced the movie with James Schamus, who wrote most of Ang Lee's other movies.) The story is also available in Proulx's first collection of her Wyoming stories,
Closer Range. McMurtry earlier included Proulx's story in
Still Wild: Short Fiction of the American West 1950 to the Present, and it is also in other anthologies, including
The Best American Stories of 1997.
I'd recommend getting more than just the story in this stand-alone edition. Either the Proulx Wyoming story collection or the McMurtry modern West story collection or the "story to/plus screenplay" volume are better values, Nonetheless, the story is the thing, that is the essential diamond, whether standing alone or embedded with other hard-edged stories of the modern American West.
On the story+screenplay+essay book, see my review at
http://www.epinions.com/content_225095487108 (though much in it overlaps this posting).
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