[dissention]

Originally Posted by sparky

I am not so sure how I feel about all of this role model business being applied to the film. I just don't think that is what this movie is about or what it was for. If one must take away real lessons from a piece of art, this one offers many.

I don't quite understand the assertion that this movie should be looked at as some sort of "role model" to begin with. It's about a certain period in time and involves characters who live their lives based on how those times dictated they should. This wasn't a movie that was made with the intent of gay people watching it and being influenced into living "lies" about who they are and who they might love. If anything, the movie demonstrates just how destructive and self-defeating doing so can be.

First off - don't lie about your identity or what you need. Granted, their lie was situational, and this is a period piece, but tell that to all the people still lying today. There are a staggering number of them. Also, we need to think about what it is we need, and who we are. It is not a new idea that the unexamined life is not worth living, but one of these characters in particular did not do this at all. He was not able to, for many reasons. If he had, I guess we wouldn't have the tragedy or what I consider to be probably the greatest love story I have ever seen committed to film.

These lessons lead up to the corker - If you are lucky enough to find love, you better grab it and hold on to it for dear life. And I am not talking about pedestrian crushes. I am talking the real deal. The kind that makes your hands sweat. The kind that leaves you, when you merely see the person, slightly breathless, with your pulse racing. Their touch sends a jolt of electricity through you so powerful that it makes you wonder if you were ever really even alive before you met them. Holding them makes your heart beat so hard that it threatens to bust out of your chest. When you are with them, you know that you have finally found a place you can call home. This is not something to take lightly, or walk away from.

There is a scene in the movie, after Jack and Ennis have a nasty fight, when they spew out everything they have been holding back for twenty years. It is crushing. However, they seem to come back to a kind of peace before parting ways. It is at that moment that Jack relives a moment from their first summer together. He is standing and nearly asleep by the fire. Ennis comes up behind him, embraces him, and begins to sing lightly in his ear. It is a song Ennis has pulled up in his mind from the past, one his mother used to sing to him when he was little. Jack drifts back to the present and this is the stage direction from the script :

"WE ARE BACK TO THE PRESENT as JACK, much older now, watches the pickup truck, and his other half, fade away into the distance, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives."

Of this scene, I read a review which said, and I paraphrase, that sometimes we experience a flash of love so bright that it is able to illuminate a lifetime of loneliness.

I find that I cannot judge these characters or their actions. I do not for a second believe that was the intent of the author or the filmmakers. I am quite frankly so moved by the film, and this scene in particular, that it crystallizes in stark relief for me one message and one message only. If you are lucky enough, you may one day experience that fleeting flash of love. One that is so bright it can illuminate what seems like, or could be, a lifetime of loneliness. If you do, you must catch it, you must save it, and you must protect it with every ounce of strength you have, for you may never have the chance again.

Poetry. You already know I adore you, but damn. That's pretty much what I came away with after seeing it, not "Man, those poor queers lived a lie, what a bad message." It's not about any of that surface stuff as much as it's about love. It demonstrated in the most human way that love is such a powerful thing that it can ruin you one moment and then make your life worth living the next, even after all the **** you may have went through for those brief moments of bliss where nothing else mattered. It made it painfully obvious that once you find a love as powerful as the one you described above, you have to take hold of it or else. You lose, that's it. The movie can even be seen as a cautionary tale about how not grasping onto the love that's in front of you and holding onto it as tightly as possible can wreak havoc on you emotionally for the rest of time.