Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain

In 2005, director Ang Lee adapted Annie Proulx’s 1998 short story Brokeback Mountain, and while they both tell the same story with the same characters, the message and take away from each version is different. This story, in both the book and film, follows the lives of two cowboys from Wyoming in the 1960s who have an affair and are eventually torn apart. Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar face opposition in their affair both from the outside world because of the conservative era they live in, and from inside and their internalized homophobia. Both the book and the film manage to tell the story of these men but do it in different ways. While many scenes and exact excerpts of dialogue from the book are incorporated into the movie (rather faithfully),

In Proulx’s story, these two men are not typically attractive. Jack is described having buckteeth, a short stature, and more heavy-set; Ennis has a crooked nose and narrow face and e cave-chested frame (Proulx). This is very different from the attractive actors that play them in the film. Both Jake Gyllenhaal and Hearth Ledger portray Jack and Ennis as sexy strong men. In one scene, Ledger’s character is sunk down naked by a river washing himself (Brokeback). Jack (and the audience) can enjoy this seemingly non-sexual moment because of the actor’s attractiveness. This difference in how the characters are portrayed affects how the interactions between Jack and Ennis and their sex is received. In an article by Clifton Snider, he calls this decision a wise choice to cast more typically attractive men in the roles of Jack and Ennis because it broke away from stereotypes and gay male viewers could identify with them (Snider). That being said, the film characters are more eroticized because of their appearance and the tragic story tends to get lost. Besides appearance, the characters in the book and film also differ in apparent

Many people who watch the film, and Proulx herself, feel that its main focus is the love story between Jack and Ennis, and not necessarily the homophobia as Proulx had intended with the book. While Proulx’s book and Ang Lee’s film tell the story, the way things like the characters’ age, appearance, sex, family lives, and childhoods are told create a different feel between the two versions and, in the end, really leave readers/viewers with a different story to take away. Annie Proulx has stated she regrets writing the story of Jack and Ennis because of how the film has been misinterpreted (Wyatt). Instead of the horrific homophobia message, viewers have made it about Jack and Ennis. She attributes this to the broader audience the story was able to reach through Lee’s film (Wyatt). The way that the film changed the characters by casting more well-known actors like Ledger and Gyllenhaal and adapted Jack and Ennis’s storyline to the screen certainly changed the story. Jack and Ennis on screen were pretty revolutionary for that time and brought a story to an audience that had never seen anything with that kind of mainstream budget before. Lee’s film did not set out to tell Proulx’s story. He wanted to tell the story of Jack and Ennis in a way that made them relatable and sympathetic. Though the homophobia aspect of their story was not the overall takeaway from the