Gotta love a quick-draw with a comeback

[serai]

Heeheehee. Found this over at FW, and damn near choked on m'sammich!


First, check out this...geez, I'm not sure which adjective to use - ill-informed? blinkered? moronic? just plain wanky? - whatever...article on how Brokeback Mountain is raping the image of the Marlboro Man.

Go ahead. I'll wait....

...

...


Back now? OK, now take a look at this blogger's brilliant graphic comeback over here.


Now that's wit, in my opinion. All I want to know is why the hell can't I think of things like that?


P.S. Feel free to spread this around. I'm sure a lot of people will find it worthwhile!

Comments

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

Boy, does he miss the point. If Jack and Ennis could have married each other and lived happily ever after without being afraid of the neighbors, neither would have married a woman they eventually ended up leaving, and so that broader scope of ruined lives he talks about wouldn't have existed.

So that argument is out the window.

*shakes head*

No logic, no sense, no sensibility.

[serai1.livejournal.com]

I'm not so sure about that. I don't really hold with the idea that one attraction closes the door to anything else, at least for everybody. Heath has said in interviews that he doesn't think Ennis is gay, that what's going on is not that he loves men, but that he loves this guy. He never thought about a guy like that before, and never did again. It was always just Jack, which to me makes the story more interesting and complex. It's one thing to have a "sexual identity" (a modern notion invented by Freud) and deal with the troubles that can bring, but quite another to wrestle one's whole life with a deep and abiding passion that goes against everything else one is. Clearly Jack has much less trouble with the idea than Ennis does, and so is closer to being gay in the way we think of it, but Ennis is in a different place, I think.

And remember that traumatic sight of the corpse Ennis was forced to look at when he was a kid. He was clearly still freaked out about it years later. I don't know if, even had things been less dangerous, Ennis would happily go off with Jack. I think it would always be difficult and painful for him, and being the kind of guy he was, I doubt he'd ever make peace with his love for Jack, or be truly happy about it.

Man, talk about star-crossed! These two are gonna be ensconced firmly next to Romeo and Juliet for the bitterness of their fate.

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

Ah, but I don't think you have to be "gay" to marry where you love. In a society which accepted gays and gay marriage, Ennis would have been less likely to see a lynching, and having a strong attraction to Jack -- one which kept recurring -- he could have contemplated marriage to the person he obviously loved. And I think there would have been less of a feeling of "gotta marry a girl", too. The odds that neither man would have attached himself to a women and hurt her go up if they have a legitimate way to attach themselves to each other without condemnation.

Yeah, some people are going to be unfaithful, regardless -- or are built for angst and would find it where they find it -- but in the same way, there are people who could and would settle happily with their first great love and never look back. The article which I was arguing against thinks that making homosexuality more of a bane and a shame will somehow preserve and save the lives and happiness of the people on the periphery of a homosexual affair, and I think that notion is going at the problem exactly backwards.