cornflake
Ranchbesitzer
Dabei seit: 23.11.2006
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Level: 63 [?]
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Ein wahnsinnig toller Artikel, der ich gerade ungelogen 5 Mal hintereinander gelesen / verschlungen habe. Leider auf Englisch, aber ziemlich einfach zu lesen.
Quelle: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Coming%20d...in.-a0190002927
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Coming down the mountain.
I am sitting on a train. Coming down the mountain. Express to Sydney. Out the window the view is mostly eucalypts, valleys and ridges of trees that seem to be infinite, that keep you somehow transfixed and staring, as if you might never see primary colours again. "Gum blindness" an English friend calls it.
I settle into my seat. The sway of the carriage is gentle, almost soothing, the sound of the wheels on the track like a metronome. Like a heartbeat. The university reader is on my lap and I turn to the index to find the story scheduled for today's class discussion.
Every week I do this. Last minute homework. One hour and fifty minutes until the train terminates. Usually long enough to read the story or at least skim it enough to be able to participate in class. Often as I read I look up and out the window, first mesmerised by the green, then once the Nepean River is crossed, mesmerised by the western suburbs, the backyards, the washing, the ordinariness of it. It's like sipping a cup of tea, or looking at a clock, a distraction from the page.
"Strathfield"
"Everton Cafe"
"Kang Chow Korean Foods"
"Ryde"
"Apollo Window Blinds"
"Westmead"
"Borkie"--grafitti sprayed on a brick wall.
Page 154. "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx. I smooth the page, push it hard against the spine and with a sigh lean back into the seat and begin to read. I finish the story well before Central Station and for the rest of the journey I look out the window, seeing nothing. I forget to think of something clever to say in class. I forget to analyse. I forget everything. When the train terminates at Central Station, I get to my feet like an elderly person, waiting for the traffic to thin, reluctant to make the transition. To leave the carriage, the warm womb of it, the heartbeat wheels.
Short stories do that sometimes. Take you into another world with such devastating clarity, with such astute, finely aimed prose that it is hard to clamber back out again. Like one of those short, sharp love affairs that leaves you ragged and breathless, yet at the same time pierced right through. All colour and brilliance. There is something in the brevity of a short story that lends itself to that kind of intensity, a deeper, brisker dive rather than the gradual immersion of a novel. And when you come up for air, there is a wildness. The taste of salt on your tongue.
It took Proulx a long time to write "Brokeback Mountain". To make that dive. She has said it took her twice as long to write as a novel. When asked why, Proulx replied, "Put yourself in my place. An elderly, white, straight female, trying to write about two 19-year-old gay kids in 1963. What kind of imaginative leap do you think was necessary? Profound, extreme, large. To get into those guys' heads and actions took a lot of 16-hour days, and never thinking about anything else and living a zombie life. That's what I had to do."
"Brokeback Mountain" is a story about two young aspiring cowboys, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, who fall in love while working on Brokeback Mountain, herding sheep for the summer. Set in the "wild west" countryside of Wyoming, the story charts twenty years of their lives where despite marriages and children, neither can forget the passion and friendship forged on the mountain. Unable to resolve their relationship and haunted by fear and confusion, their love eventually leads to tragic consequences for both of them.
The story was originally published in 1997 in the The New Yorker magazine and shortly afterwards screenwriters Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry optioned the story to make a film. Directed by Ang Lee and starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, the movie was released in 2005. However, even Proulx herself was unprepared for what followed. "It was just another story when I started writing it. I had no idea it was going to even end up on the screen. I didn't even think it was going to be published when I was first working on it because the subject matter was not in the usual ruts in the literary road." The film was a resounding success, made its money back in the first three weeks of its limited release and received numerous awards and accolades, including eight Academy Award nominations.
When Proulx was asked if she planned on bringing back the characters of Jack and Ennis, the answer was an emphatic "no". "They're not coming back. There's no way. They're going to stay where they are. I've got other things to write." While Proulx is content to let her characters go, others it seems are not. I type "Brokeback Mountain" into the internet search bar and for hours I surf, wave after wave of Brokeback, in the end so transported, so waterlogged that it is hard to haul myself back out.
On brokebackmountain.com visitors are invited to "share your story". There are sites where writers create short stories and novels based on the characters of Jake and Ennis. On youtube.com fans broadcast music videos where footage from the film is edited to a love song track. Chapters, stories, testimonials and videos are regularly posted and feedback invited, which is not so much constructive, but effusive encouragement from other fans eager to keep "the mountain" alive. There is even a Brokeback Mountain cowboy themed gay porn site called "barebum mountain". "They're all alone with no one in sight and it's their first time."
Enthusiasm for "Brokeback Mountain" is not confined to the web. Aside from the movie, the collectors edition DVD and the soundtracks, there are the books. Reading Brokeback Mountain is an anthology of essays on the book and film. I wish I knew bow to quit you is a book of Brokeback Mountain trivia. Beyond Brokeback: The Impact of a Film is a book of personal stories by Members of the Ultimate Brokeback Forum. On Brokeback Mountain: Meditations about Masculinity, Fear, and Love in the Story and the Film discusses the film and book in the context of gay history and literature. Even Proulx has co-written a book with the screen writers called Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay.
Perhaps the most revealing insight into "Brokeback mania" is a comment in a book review on Amazon.com. "Did you hear that an openly gay actor paid well into the six figures to buy the stained piece of clothing that Jake G.'s character wore in 'Brokeback'? There are some people who love them more than anything in the world."
Away from the hype, the spin-offs and commercialism, there is the short story that began it all. I come back to the book. Back to the university reader. Three years have passed since I read the story that day on the train. Annie Proulx has written other books. The screenwriters have made a telemovie. Heath Ledger, who starred as Ennis in the movie, is dead.
This time I read the story at daybreak, while my baby son is sleeping. I read it on a misty day, in the mountains, the fog drifting in and out of the trees, the sky white-grey. Cold. There is the swish of an occasional passing car, and the muted sound of birds calling. I build the fire until the flames are burning hard and hot, rushing and whistling up the flue, the heat box tinking. I read it sprawled out on the lounge room floor, drinking milky tea, the glorious heat full on my face. I savour the reading, come to it like a date.
I read with a more experienced and trained eye. I am going to analyse the story. Think about the sentences, the structure, the form of it. I begin. I re-read paragraphs, lingering over a description, pausing to admire a sentence, a paragraph, how much is said in so few words. Yet part way in, I forget again. I let go of it all and just ride the story, untethered and bareback, as I had in the train.
I put the book down, but I am not finished with it. In an interview Proulx once said, "It is my feeling that a story is not finished until it is read, and" that the reader finishes it through his or her life experience, prejudices, world view and thoughts". For days I am thinking, seeing, dreaming, still living in the story. The movie images from a few years .ago, so poignant at the time, have faded and I am back in the landscape of my imagination, crisscrossed over with my own memories, like fresh footprints in snow.
I am nineteen years old. Sitting in the back seat of a car. Two rodeo riders are sitting in the front and I watch the driver, his forearm brown and muscled, changing gears. There is a lot of silence and too much sideways glancing between the two and so I prattle on endlessly, engaging them in a conversation about their lives, about the rodeo circuit, about their injuries, about their horses. For two hours I talk. Hitchhiking has taught me the art of long distance conversations and I pace myself out like a lap swimmer. When I relate the story later to my friends, with typical teenage swagger, I say, "They were so good looking."
I could have read "Brokeback Mountain" with rebellion, with a sense of reluctance. I have never been to Wyoming. I am not a gay man. I have no interest in cowboy culture and I am not in love or longing for anyone. I am a single woman living on the fringe of Australia's largest city. I am a mother breast-feeding my son. But a good story always has cracks, portals in, where a reader can get alongside a character, muscle into the text.
What do I know? Where is the door?
I find it in landscapes. Australian landscapes. Remote, extreme places, the places where space and silence converge, where a combination of harsh weather and rough terrain create an intensity that is not so much felt as lived and breathed. I remember it in the Southern Ocean, in the weathered hands of trawler fisherman, in their craggy faces peering beneath layers of dripping wet-weather gear. In the focussed gaze of the long haul truck drivers on the wasteland roads in the Pilbara. In the skin of men and women that have spent too long in the desert, too long in the tropics, too long in solitude.
And I find it when I am reading the love story of Jack and Ennis. I know about that kind of love, love that is found in difficult places, the crush of it. And love that is lived in short bursts, and the crush of that. And the long hours and weeks and months in between. The waiting. Interminable waiting.
For the gay community, the doorway into "Brokeback Mountain" is a little more accessible, a little wider. But Proulx never set out to write exclusively for a gay readership. She regards the story first and foremost as a love story. "It has been called both universal and specific, and I think that's true. It's an old, old story. We've heard this story a million times; we just haven't heard it quite with this cast."
While the movie of Brokeback Mountain has had enormous impact worldwide, in Australia the story has had additional implications. On the morning of the 2006 Gay Mardi Gras, the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper ran the headline "Meet Heath's Mate, The Real Gay Cowboy". Below was an arresting colour photograph of a young man cradling a horse. The issue set a five-year sales record for the paper and the image became Photograph Of The Year. The young man in the photograph was Adam Sutton, a horse wrangler who had become a friend of actor Heath Ledger on the set of Ned Kelly. When Ledger first read the script for Brokeback Mountain, he told Sutton "It sounds a lot like you". Sutton subsequently spent some time on the film set and the experience forced him to confront his sexuality and eventually to make the decision to come out in a very public sense, beginning with the Herald article. Sutton went on to become something of a celebrity, leading the 2007 Mardi Gras Parade alongside British actor Rupert Everett, starring in a documentary on ABC's "Australian Story" and more recently writing a memoir titled Say It Out Loud.
Sutton's story has highlighted the difficulties of growing up gay in rural Australia, where until recently, homosexuals were barely visible. However all that is changing, as evidenced by the The ChillOut Festival, a rural gay and lesbian festival which this year had Sutton as its guest of honour. The festival began in 1997 with opposition from locals and no more than a hundred visitors. This year the festival attracted over 25,000 people and is estimated to generate over $30 million in direct and flow-on benefits.
Following the publication of his book, Sutton was reportedly overwhelmed by the hundreds of letters from readers in response to his story. "There's this guy of 83, he's on his death bed, he's told his sister and his dog, and never told anybody else. I rang him and spoke to him, and I heard over the duration of his last few weeks how his voice changed. I could feel him getting happier, you know, until he was telling random strangers things that he'd never told anybody before."
Proulx also has had letters in response to her story. "In the years since the story was published in 1997 I have received many letters from gay and straight men, not a few Wyoming-born. Some said, 'You told my story,' some said 'That is why I left Wyoming,' and a number, from fathers, said 'Now I understand the hell my son went through.' I still get these heart breaking letters."
Proulx hoped that "Brokeback Mountain" would promote tolerance and compassion, not only for the people who are gay, but in the wider context of humanity. She says "I hope that it is going to start conversations and discussions, that it's going to awaken in people an empathy for diversity, for each other and the larger world."
Over ten years after the story was first published, the legacy of "Brokeback Mountain" continues. Recently Proulx gave permission for distinguished modernist composer, Charles Wuorinen, to compose an opera based on her short story. Gay opera fan sites on the internet are reportedly full of speculation about what Wuorinen's opera may be like and who might be cast.
But perhaps it is in the smaller, more personal and intimate ways that "Brokeback Mountain" has had the most effect. As I surf the web a final time, I am struck by the universal impact this story has had. Somewhere in Argentina a young man is laboriously translating the latest instalment of his story about Jake and Ennis into English. An old man in a small rural town in Canada is crying as he writes about a relationship that ended fifty years ago. In Taiwan a teenager is sitting in his bedroom recording a tribute song to Brokeback Mountain for broadcast on YouTube. In Australia a woman is watching the film for the twenty-fourth time.
A short story can travel a long way, can clock up thousands of miles, can cross continents and borders and languages. It can take you to places you have never been and transport you back through your own experiences in a sentence. As Proulx says it is "something small and yet large at the same time." "Brokeback Mountain" is a short story, which began with a writer's observations of an old man sitting in a bar, watching some men play pool. It is only thirty-five pages long. There is a full stop at the end of it, but another story, the one that goes from the Academy Awards to a songwriter's bedroom, is still finishing. Still writing itself. Still coming down the mountain.
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...und traten zusammen hinaus in den Nebel, der den Fuß ihres Leuchturmes immerwährend umgab. Und nach ein paar Schritten waren sie ganz darin verschwunden. (Nachtschatten)
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