Movies That Molded Our Lives

[Ginger]

Originally Posted by guihong

Brokeback Mountain-which happened to be released not long after I came out. Sometimes you see a movie and have the sense that you are watching greatness. This was like watching my autobiography, my story. I was deeply moved but emotionally OK until the scene where Ennis is holding the damn shirts in the closet, and then I lost it completely. I was very shaken and yet comforted by this film.

I went to Brokeback Mountain in the East Village when it first came out. My sister had been gone for several years by then, but that scene you mention— where he is gently touching the clothes in the closet, and weren't there also some belongings in a paper bag?—took me back to those two weeks she was in a coma, and I would go into my parent's bedroom when the house was empty, open the brown paper grocery bag that held her clothes, the jeans and top the ER staff had cut off of her. The bag held her sweet perfume-and-hairspray, cigarette smell, and it gave me a way to be close to her during those two weeks.

Anyway, I lost it in Brokeback Mountain, at the end when that scene you mention happened, and when the lights came up I still sat there with my alarmed friend, sobbing in a way that frightened us both.

I am reading this thread and remembering movies by the emotional experience I had watching them. Movies are like smells, they take you back to that place in your life really fast, or at least they do for me.