more tales from Browback Pudding

I went over to WorldNetDaily and saw me a negative article on the movie “Pudding Eater Mountain” and in reading the article a section really struck me.

Four years later, Jack sends Ennis a postcard saying he's coming to town for a visit. When the moment finally arrives, Ennis, barely able to contain his anticipation, rushes outside to meet Jack and the two men passionately embrace and kiss. Ennis's wife sadly witnesses everything through the screen door. (Since this is one of the film's sadder moments, I wasn't quite sure why the audience in the Portland, Oregon, theater burst out in laughter at Alma's heartbreaking realization.)

((Maybe because the audience found the whole exchange ludicrous))

Jack suggests they buy a ranch where the two can live happily ever after, presumably abandoning their wives and children. Ennis, however, is afraid, haunted by a traumatic childhood memory: It seems his father had tried to inoculate him against homosexuality by taking him to see the brutalized, castrated, dead body of a rancher who had lived together with another man – until murderous, bigoted neighbors committed the gruesome hate crime.
Eventually, life with Ennis becomes intolerable and Alma divorces him, while Lureen, absorbed with the family business, only suspects Jack's secret as they drift further and further apart. When, toward the end of the story, Jack dies in a freak accident (his wife tells Ennis a tire blew up while Jack was changing it, propelling the hubcap into his face and killing him), Ennis wonders whether Jack actually met the same brutal fate as the castrated "gay" cowboy of his youth.
Ultimately, Ennis ends up alone, with nothing, living in a small, secluded trailer, having lost both his family and his homosexual partner. He's comforted only by his most precious possession – Jack's shirt – which he pitifully embraces, almost in a slow dance, his aching loneliness masterfully projected into the audience via the film's artistry.
To what this film says before I go into the meat of my objection I want to add in this. My mother was born and reared in a rural section of Missouri. She had an uncle who was clearly gay (even to the folks with cold war edition gay-dar) but nothing bad ever happened to him of that nature.
On to the second part…. Why is it that we are being encouraged to empathize with folks who are rather horrifically bad. One guy uses his wife’s distance to justify and carry on the affair and the other ends up just not being respectful of his wife and destroys their marriage and ruins their life. And the one who came up with the idea of being together and the distant wife….ended up “dying” or for lack of a better word not being fully reciprocal. In other words it’s the married man who always promises to leave his wife for you…only in this movie he dies so you get to embrace the fantasy of it which may not even be true. Why does the industry of film make any of these behaviors sympathetic? Because In real life none of those behaviors are sympathetic at all in any way shape or form.
Instead of trying to make the focus on characters you could use to lionize the theme of gay love we have characters who are really awful and in their own way selfishly use the other.
Add in the concept I hear ( and I am waiting to find the short story to see if it is there) that all the hot and heavy moments were entirely dream sequenced the movie becomes a more hollow awful piece of cinema that will serve only to make America a worse place.

Just like The Passion of the Christ this is a film that has the movie industry at its worst.