February 4, 2006
ANNIE PROULX, the author of Brokeback Mountain, doubted her story of illicit love in rural Wyoming could ever be filmed. Then she saw Ang Lee's movie and was overwhelmed.
AS A STUDENT OF history and a writer of fiction, I have focused my interest on social and economic change in rural communities - Vermont, Newfoundland, Texas, Wyoming. I am something of a geographic determinist, believing that regional landscapes, climate and topography dictate local cultural traditions and kinds of work, and thereby the events on which my stories are built.
March 5,2006
[轉貼] 斷背山"More powerful than my words" (by Annie Proulx)
Landscape is central to this rural fiction. I have been interested in the disappearance of dairy hill farms in New England, the collapsing fishing industry in Atlantic Canada and the slow fade of cattle-ranching in the west.
Close Range contains nine stories, including Brokeback Mountain, ostensibly concerned with the Wyoming landscape and making a living in hard, isolated livestock-raising communities dominated by white masculine values, but also holding subliminal fantasies. Most of the stories are loosely based on historical events, such as the botched castration in People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water. Brokeback was not connected to any one incident but based on a coalescence of observations over many years, small things here and there.
Some time in early 1997 the story took shape. One night in a bar upstate I had noticed an older ranch-hand, maybe in his late 60s, obviously short on the world's luxury goods. Although spruced up for Friday night, his clothes were a little ragged, boots stained and worn. I had seen him around, working cows, helping with sheep, taking orders from a ranch manager.
He was muscular in a stringy kind of way. He leaned against the back wall and his eyes were fastened, not on the dozens of handsome and flashing women in the room, but on the young cowboys playing pool. Maybe he was following the game, maybe he knew the players, maybe one was his son or nephew, but there was something in his expression, a kind of bitter longing, that made me wonder if he was country gay.
Then I began to consider what it might have been like for him - not the real person against the wall, but for any ill-informed, confused not-sure-of-what-he-was-feeling youth growing up in homophobic rural Wyoming.
A few weeks later, I listened to the vicious rant of an elderly bar-cafe owner who was incensed that two "homos" had come in the night before and ordered dinner. She said that if her bar regulars had been there (it was darts tournament night), things would have gone badly for them.
Brokeback was constructed on the small but tight idea of a couple of home-grown country kids, opinions and self-knowledge shaped by the world around them, finding themselves in emotional waters of increasing depth. I wanted to develop the story through a kind of literary sostenente.
The early 1960s seemed the right period. The two characters had to have grown up on isolated hard-scrabble ranches and were clearly homophobic themselves, especially the Ennis Del Mar character. Both wanted to be cowboys, be part of the Great Western Myth, but it didn't work out that way; Ennis never got to be more than a rough-cut ranch hand and Jack Twist chose rodeo as an expression of cowboy. Neither was ever a top hand, and they met herding sheep, animals most real cowpokes despise.
Although they were not really cowboys (the word cowboy is often used derisively in the west by those who do ranch work), the urban critics dubbed it a tale of two gay cowboys. No.
It is a story of destructive rural homophobia. Although there are many places in Wyoming where gay men did and do live together in harmony with the community, it should not be forgotten that a year after this story was published, Matthew Shepard was tied to the buck fence outside the most enlightened town in the state, Laramie, home of the University of Wyoming.
Note too the fact that Wyoming has the highest suicide rate in the country, and that the preponderance of those people who kill themselves are elderly single men.
In my mind, isolation and altitude - the fictional Brokeback Mountain, a place empowering and inimical - began to shape the story. The mountain had to force everything that happened to these two young men.
I have many times heard Wyomingites who have gone east for one reason or another, talk about how badly they missed their natural terrain, the long sight-lines, the clear thin air, how claustrophobic were trees and how dead the atmosphere without the constant flow of wind, and I find it so myself.
It seemed to me that the story could balance only on love, something all humans need and give, whether to one's children, parents, or a lover of the opposite or same sex. I wanted to explore long-lasting love and its possible steep price tag, homophobic antipathy and denial.
These characters did something that, as a writer, I had never experienced - they began to get very damn real. Usually I deal in obedient characters who do what they are told, but Jack and Ennis soon seemed more vivid than many of the flesh-and-blood people around me and there emerged an antiphonal back-and-forth relationship between writer and character. I've heard other writers mention this experience, but it was the first time for me.
As I worked on the story over the following months, scenes appeared and disappeared. (The story went through more than 60 revisions.) The mountain encounter had to be, shall we say "seminal"? - and brief. One spring, years before, I had been in the Big Horns and noticed distant flocks of sheep on great empty slopes.
From the heights, I had been able to see 100 miles and more to the plains. In such isolated high country, away from opprobrious comment and watchful eyes, I thought it would be plausible for the characters to get into a sexual situation.
That's nothing new or out of the ordinary; livestock workers have a blunt and full understanding of the sexual behaviours of man and beast. High lonesome situation, a couple of guys - expediency sometimes rules, and nobody needs to talk about it and that's how it is. One old sheep rancher, dead now, used to say he always sent up two men to tend the sheep "so's if they get lonesome they can poke each other".
From that perspective Aguirre, the hiring man, would have winked and said nothing, and Ennis' remark to Jack that this was a one-shot deal would have been accurate. The complicating factor was that they both fell into once-in-a-lifetime love. I strove to give Jack and Ennis depth and complexity and to mirror real life by rasping that love against societal norms that both men obeyed, both of them marrying and begetting children, both loving their children, and, in a way, their wives.
Many gay men marry and have children and are good fathers. Because this is a rural story, family and children are important. Most stories (and many films) I have seen about gay relationships take place in urban settings and never have children in them. The rural gay men I know like children, and if they don't have their own, they usually have nephews and nieces who claim a big place in their hearts.
For both characters to marry women enlarges the story and introduces two young wives who move from innocence and happy trust to some pretty hard lessons about real life. Alma and Lureen give the story a universal connection, for men and women need each other, sometimes in unusual ways.
It was a hard story to write. Sometimes it took weeks to get the right phrase or descriptor for particular characters. I remember vividly that driving on Owl Canyon road in Colorado down over the state line one afternoon and thinking about Jack Twist's father, the expression "stud duck", which I had heard somewhere, came to me as the right way to succinctly describe that hard little man, and a curve in the road became the curve that killed Ennis' parents. The scene for the kiss when Jack and Ennis reunite after four years occurred in its entirety as I drove past the Laramie cement plant - so much for scenery.
In fact, I did most of the writing while I was driving. The most difficult scene was the paragraph where, on the mountain, Ennis holds Jack and rocks back and forth, humming, the moment mixed with childhood loss and his refusal to admit he was holding a man.
This paragraph took forever to get right, and I played Charlie Haden's and Pat Metheny's Spiritual, from their album Beyond the Missouri Sky (short stories) uncountable times, trying to get the words. I was trying to write the inchoate feelings of Jack and Ennis, the sad impossibility of their liaison, which for me was expressed in that music. To this day, I cannot hear that track without Jack and Ennis appearing before me. The scraps that feed a story come from many cupboards.
I WAS AN AGEING FEMALE writer, married too many times, and though I have a few gay friends, there were things I was not sure about. I talked with a sheep rancher to be sure that it was historically accurate to use a couple of white ranch kids as flock-tenders in the early '60s, for I knew that in previous decades it had been mostly Basques who did this job, and today it is often men from the South American countries. But jobs were scarce in Wyoming in that period and even married couples with children got hired to herd sheep.
One of my oldest friends, Tom Watkin, with whom I once published a rural newspaper, read and commented on the story as it developed. I thought too much about this story. It was supposed to be Ennis who had dreams about Jack, but I had dreams about both of them.
I still had little distance from it when it was published in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997. I expected letters from outraged religio-moral types but instead got them from men, quite a few of them Wyoming ranch hands and cowboys and the fathers of men, who said "you told my story", or "I now understand what my son went through".
I still, eight years later, get those heart-wrenching letters. When I got Diana Ossana's and Larry McMurtry's request to option the story for a film with money from their own pockets - unusual for screen-writers - I was immediately beset with doubts.
I simply did not think this story could be a film: it was too sexually explicit for presumed mainstream tastes, the general topic of homophobia was a hot potato unless gingerly skirted, and, given Hollywood actors' reluctance to play gay men, it would likely be difficult to find a good cast, not to say a director. It was only because I trusted Larry's and Diana's writing skills, film experience, and especially Larry's incomparable knowledge of the west's mores and language that I signed the contract.
It didn't take them long. Within a few months I was reading their powerful screenplay constructed from the story, but richly augmenting it, adding new flesh to its long bones, filling out the personalities, introducing a little humour and new characters who moved the story along its close-set rails. Yes, the screenplay was beautiful, but my worries continued.
What producers would be interested in a story about homophobic gay Wyoming ranch hands? What actors would have the guts to do this? What director would take the risk? How severely would the screenplay be clawed to pieces? The freedom-granting, yet hostile, landscape, of course, would be utterly lost, and with it, the literal grounding of the story. I thought the screenplay was as far as the movie would go, and I wasn't sorry.
Screen-writers almost always deal with adapting novels to film, and necessarily great chunks are excised, crunched, plots straitjacketed, dialogue transmuted into television-speak. This was different. Larry and Diana were working with a short story that came with a sturdy framework. But there was not enough there.
I write in a tight, compressed style that needs air and loosening to unfold into art. They had to invent, enlarge and imagine. It was, in a real way, a collaboration. I began to wonder why movie people didn't prefer short stories to novels, since the opportunity for original work is built in.
Over the next few years, several producers and directors appeared on the horizon, but there were problems with all of them. Larry liked an interesting young filmmaker who had made a funny and original short feature. I met this fellow in Tucson, liked him, and hoped he would understand the place and the characters. We arranged to meet again in Wyoming so he could look at the terrain and possible scene sites. He came with a photographer, adviser, location person and others.
That meeting turned into something I think of as "The Wyoming Death Trip". From the start, everywhere the tender-hearted city-folk looked there was a dead animal. First, it was deer by the side of the highway, then squashed rabbits on the tarmac. We stopped at a sheep-herder's home quarters. He was out with the sheep, but, as it was spring, there was a makeshift pen with a few dozen bum lambs in it.
One of the film entourage spied a dead lamb by the side of the fence and freaked. He decided (erroneously) that the lambs were starving to death, and, a man of action, rustled around until he found a bag of feed, poured some into a pan and set it in the pen.
Keith, the ranch hand showing us around, blanched. I suggested we leave the lambs, hoping the sheep-herder paid to look after them would not pursue us with a machete. We went to an untenanted house that might work as Ennis' and Alma's place. But as soon as we stepped inside, there, near the hem of a long curtain that reached the floor, lay a dead mouse.
We finished the day at a lonely ranch house outside Ucross called "the old Childress place". Empty for years, the crawl space below was a haven for rattlesnakes, the interior home to other animals needing shelter. We looked into a dusty room with a hole in the ceiling where once the stovepipe exited.
The Los Angeles people sucked in their breaths as one, for on the floor lay the dried remains of a rabbit, discarded by an owl. That was it. These urban people just did not get it that Wyoming has a lot of wildlife and that the wildlife sometimes gets dead. Animals and rural places were clearly alien to them, and just as clearly I knew they could not make this film. And I pretty much gave up on the whole idea. It wasn't going to happen because there were no producers or directors who understood the rural west, the rural anything. Old story.
A long time later, Focus films showed interest. That was encouraging, as it, in an earlier incarnation known as Good Machine, had produced the successful film version of The Laramie Project. I had met one of the people involved with that film in Denver one night, and we had gone up the street looking for a CD of Jim White's Wrong-Eyed Jesus!, which was a great favourite of mine at that time.
So I was inclined towards Focus. They were suggesting Ang Lee as the director, and I thought, here we go again. Could a Taiwanese-born director, probably a thorough-going urbanite, who had recently recreated The Hulk, understand Wyoming and the subterranean forces of the place? I doubted it. But the wheels were rolling now. I didn't know what to expect and tried not to think about it.
On a New York visit I met James Schamus briefly, and Ang Lee in a funky boite far downtown. I was nervous about meeting Ang Lee, despite his reputation as brilliant and highly skilled. Would we have anything to say to each other? Were the cultural gaps surmountable?
We smiled and made small talk for a while and then, reassured by something in his quietness, I said that I was very afraid about this story, that making stories sometimes took me into off-limits places and that I feared the film would not follow that path. He said that he was afraid, too, that it would be extremely difficult to make into a film. He said he had recently lost his father. I remembered from my mother's death, a few years earlier, the vast hole in the world that opened and could not be pulled closed.
I had a glimmering that Ang Lee might use his sorrow creatively, transferring a personal sense of loss to this film about two men for whom things cannot work out, that he might be able to show the grief and anger that builds when we must accept severe emotional wounding. I felt we both knew that this story was risky and that he wanted to take the story on, probably for the creative challenge and, perhaps, (though he didn't say so) for the gasping euphoria when you get into unknown but hard-driving imaginative projects. However slender, there was a positive connection.
Later, there were some disagreements. In the written story the motel scene, after a four-year hiatus, stood as central. During their few hours in the Motel Siesta, Jack's and Ennis' paths were irrevocably laid out. In the film that Ang Lee already had shaped in his mind, the emotional surge contained in that scene would be better shifted to a later point and melded with the men's painful last meeting. I didn't understand this until I saw the film in September 2005 and recognised the power of this timing.
Although I have always known that films and books have different rises and falls, different shapes, it's easier to know that in the abstract than on the killing ground. At some point, I wrote a letter pleading for the motel scene, which went for naught. It was out of my hands, no longer my story, but Ang Lee's film. And so I said goodbye to Jack and Ennis and got on with other work.
Before I finally saw the film, I had heard from Larry and Diana that it was very good, that the language was intact, that the actors were superb. But I was not prepared for the emotional hammering I got when I saw it. The characters roared back into my mind, larger and stronger than they had ever been.
Here it was, the point that writers do not like to admit; film can be more powerful than the written word. I realised that if Ang Lee had been born in Barrow or Novosibirsk it would likely have been the same. He understands human feelings and is not afraid to walk into dangerous territory.
Seeing the film disturbed me. I felt that, just as the ancient Egyptians had removed a corpse's brain through the nostril with a slender hook before mummification, the cast and crew of this film, from the director down, had gotten into my mind and pulled out images.
Especially did I feel this about Heath Ledger, who knew better than I how Ennis felt and thought, whose intimate depiction of that achingly needy ranch kid builds with frightening power. It is an eerie sensation to see events you have imagined in the privacy of your mind, and tried hopelessly to transmit to others through little black marks on a page, loom up before you in an overwhelming visual experience.
I realised that I, as a writer, was having the rarest film trip: my story was not mangled but enlarged into huge and gripping imagery that rattled minds and squeezed hearts.
The film is intensely Wyoming. Although it was shot mostly in Alberta, the production designer Judy Becker toured Texas and Wyoming, noting landforms and long views. So visually accurate is the film that a few weeks after I saw it for the first time, I was driving through the Sierra Madre. It was a windless, brilliant day, the aspen lit by slant-handed autumnal light; hunting season and time for the fall shove-down when stockmen with Forest Service allowances move their cows and sheep to the lower slopes before the early storms.
As I came around a corner I had to stop to let a band of sheep cross the highway. In the trees on the upslope stood a saddled horse, bedroll tied on behind, rifle in scabbard; behind it stood a laden packhorse. No rider in sight. I thought I would wait a minute and see if Jack or Ennis might come out of the trees; then I shook my head, feeling wacky to have tangled the film and reality, and pretty sure that neither character was going to show.
Aside from the two-faced landscape, aside from the virtuoso acting, aside from the stunning and subtle make-up job of ageing these two young men 20 years, an accumulation of very small details gives the film authenticity and authority: Ennis' dirty fingernails in a love scene; the old highway sign "entering Wyoming" not seen here for decades; the slight paunch Jack develops as he ages; the splotch of nail polish on Lureen's finger in the painful telephone scene; her mother's perfect Texas hair, Ennis and Jack sharing a joint instead of a cigarette in the 1970s; the switched-around shirts; the speckled enamel coffee pot; all accumulate and convince us of the truth of the story.
節譯：宋瑛堂
「斷背山」與單一事件並無關聯，但創作的根據是經過多年的觀察點滴融合而成。故事成型的時間點落在一九九七年初。某天晚上，我在懷州北部一間酒吧注意到一名老牧場工，大約年近七十。他的表情透露出一種殷切渴望的意念，讓我懷疑他是鄉村型的同性戀者。隨後我開始思索他生長的情境──我指的並非背靠酒吧牆的這人，而是泛指所有生長於仇視同性戀的懷州鄉下、資訊貧乏、意識混沌、不確定內心感覺的年輕人。
「斷背山」的骨架小巧而緊緻，圍繞著兩名土生土長的鄉下男孩，思想與自覺皆由四週環境型塑，兩人卻發現涉足漸行漸深的情感水域。我當時希望透過一種文學sostenente（支架）來推演故事。
場景設定在六○年代初似乎對味。兩位主角必定生長於孤立而困苦的牧場，顯然自己也仇視同性情慾，恩尼司尤其忌諱。兩人都想當牛仔，想成為西部大迷思的一份子，無奈事與願違；恩尼司充其量只是粗獷的牧場工，傑克則走上牛仔競技的路，過過牛仔癮。兩人皆成不了氣候。後來兩人牧羊時結識，而正牌牧牛工多數鄙視牧羊的差事。
雖然兩人並非真正牛仔（在美國西部牧場業界，「牛仔」一詞通常貶多於褒），城市影評人卻標榜「斷背山」是兩名同志牛仔的故事。不對。本片敘述的是具摧毀暴力的鄉村恐同情結。懷州不乏同志家庭與鄰里和諧相處的例子，過去與現代皆然，但我們不應該忘記，「斷背山」一文刊載後一年，卻發生同性戀青年馬修．薛坡德（Matthew Shepherd）遭人捆綁於圍籬樁凌遲的慘案，案發地點忝為懷州大學的所在地樂壤彌，也是全州思想最開明的城市。同樣值得一提的是，懷俄明亦是全美自殺率最高的一州，而自戕的案主多數為單身老漢。
我認為本故事唯一能與大自然抗衡的事物只有愛，而愛是普世人類需要並付出的東西，無論對象是個人的子女、雙親或同性異性愛人皆然。我想探討歷久不衰的愛與可能付出的慘痛代價，探討仇視同性戀的情結與否認性向的堅持。我知道這故事將充滿禁忌卻仍執意動筆。
我極力為傑克與恩尼司製造縱深與複雜性，也極力映照真實生活，方法是讓戀情與兩人遵奉的社會準則產生摩擦，讓兩人各自成家生子，疼愛小孩，就某種意義而言也愛著妻子。許多男同性戀結婚生子，照樣是好父親。
由於本故事的背景是鄉野，家庭與兒女更形重要。我見過以同志關係為主題的多數小說（以及許多電影），場景皆設定在都會區，而且從未生兒育女。我所知的鄉村男同志喜歡小孩，如果自己膝下猶虛，通常侄甥輩會在他們心中劃出大片勢力範圍。若讓兩名男主角各與女人結婚，不僅能橫向擴充故事，也能介紹兩名女子的變化──從無知清純、歡心信任的少婦，演變為苦嘗人世辛酸的人妻。艾爾瑪與露琳使本故事獲得不分男女的迴響，因為男人與女人互相需要對方，有時候需要的方式逸出常態。
這故事難寫。有時為了替某角色找出貼切的文句或描述詞，往往一斟酌就耗上數星期。事實上，我從事「寫作」通常利用的是開車時間。最困難的一幕是恩尼司在山上摟著傑克哼歌搖擺，那一刻混合了童年失怙的情緒與拒絕承認自己抱的是男人的矛盾。
節譯：關影
這篇小說於1997年10月13日在《紐約客》刊登時，我仍對之感到有距離。我料想會收到一些衛道之士的憤怒信件，反之我收到了一些男士的信，他們之中有些是懷俄明農場工人和牛仔，還有一些是父親。他們說："你說出了我的故事”，或“現在我瞭解我的兒子經歷了什麼。”
8年後，我依然收到這種令人心碎的信。當歐莎娜(Diana Ossana)和莫特瑞(Larry McMurtry)要自陶腰包購買這個故事的版權改編成電影時，我感到了困惑。
我不認為這個故事能拍成電影：對主流口味來說，故事中的性向太外露，“恐同”（Homophobia)的題材宛若燙手山芋，除非小心經營，而且好萊塢演員一般不大願意演男同志，因此，要找到好演員非常難，更別說導演。基於我相信他們的寫作技巧、電影經驗，特別是莫特瑞對西部風俗和語言的瞭解，我簽了合約。
短短幾個月內，我便讀到了他們的劇本，發展得很好，豐富了角色的個性，加入了些許幽默和新角色。劇本寫得很好，但我的擔心還持續著。
哪個製片會有興趣拍這種關於懷俄明恐同的農場工人的同志故事？哪個演員有勇氣接下這個角色？哪個導演會冒這個險？劇本會否被處理得支離破碎？
接下來幾年內，有幾個製片和導演出現，但他們全都有問題。很久以後，Focus Films產生了興趣。他們建議李安執導，然後我想，一個出生在臺灣的導演，可能是一個都市人，他能否瞭解懷俄明和這地方的地形力量？我不認為。但輪子已開始轉動。我不知道可以期待什麼，也嘗試不要去想。
隨後，我跟夏慕斯(James Schamus)和李安在紐約碰面。我感到緊張。我跟李安會有話題嗎？能否打破文化藩籬？
我們微笑，談了一陣，我對他說，我很害怕拍攝這個故事會把我帶到禁區之內，而且害怕它會出軌。他說，他也害怕，要將小說拍成電影非常難。他說他的父親最近去世了。我也想起我母親幾年前的死，那個裂開在世界的大洞，無法縫合起來。
我隱約感到，李安或許能夠運用他的悲傷，將自己失去的感覺轉移到這部描述兩個無法解決問題的男人的電影之中，他或許能夠呈現那份當我們必須接受情感上的巨創而衍生的憂傷和憤怒。我們都知道這個故事具有風險，而他想要拍這個故事，或許是為了創意上的挑戰，又或者是為了，當你投入一項未知，但又難駕馭的計畫中所帶來的那種令人透不過氣來的快樂。儘管這個關聯微薄，總算正面。
後來，產生了一些爭論。在小說中，闊別4年的汽車旅館部分是故事的核心。在西斯塔汽車旅館的會面中，他們的道路已無可逆轉地鋪展在面前。在李安腦海中的電影裏，該部分的澎湃情感最好移到後面，融入最後一次痛苦的會面中。我無法理解，直到我在2005年9月看到電影，覺得這個安排非常有力。
雖然我知道電影和小說有不同的起伏和形式，知道跟面對是兩回事。我曾寫信為汽車旅館部分說情但徒勞。故事不再屬於我，它是李安的電影。因此我告別恩尼斯和傑克，繼續我其他的寫作。
觀賞電影時，我並沒有心理準備要面對情緒上的撞擊。這些角色回到我的腦海，比之前更強更巨大。
電影可以比文字更勝一籌
有時作者不願承認這點，電影可以比文字更勝一籌。我瞭解到無論李安出生在貝羅或新西伯利亞都一樣。他瞭解人類的情感，並且不怕走入禁區。
電影擾亂了我。我感覺如同古埃及人製造木乃伊時，用一枚細小的鉤從鼻孔鉤出屍體的腦袋般，演員和工作人員，也從我的腦袋中拉扯出影像。
我對希斯·萊吉的感覺尤甚。他比我更瞭解恩尼斯的感受和想法，他以叫人震驚的力量演繹了這個貧困的農場小子。看到一些原屬於你腦海中私密想像的情節，然後無望地嘗試將之轉成印在紙上的鉛字 ，以一種壓倒性的視覺效果進入你的視線時，是一種可怕的感覺。
作為作家，我經歷了一場罕見的電影旅程：我的故事沒有被破壞，反而擴大成巨大且扣人心弦的影像。
儘管大部分拍攝在加拿大的亞伯達(Alberta)完成，這部電影卻非常懷俄明。電影的影像準確，觀賞後數周內，我駕車穿越馬德雷山脈。那是個無風，燦爛的一天，白楊樹被秋之光點亮；狩獵季節而且已是飼養員將牛只和綿羊移向低斜坡的時候，以避開早到的風暴。
駛到拐彎處，我停下來讓綿羊經過。山坡上的樹群中，一匹馬佇立著，鋪蓋卷綁在後面，槍在鞘中：後面有一匹馱馬。看不到騎士。我以為我再等一會，會看到傑克或恩尼斯從樹群中出現。我搖搖頭，感到這想法有點瘋狂。然後肯定這兩個角色都不會出現。
除了地形風景，傑出的演繹，極好且精細的化妝技術來呈現兩個角色20年的經歷之外，一些小細節也賦予了電影一種真實性：在性愛場面中恩尼斯骯髒的手指；數十年不見的老舊高速公路路牌寫著“進入懷俄明州”；傑克隨著年紀長出來的肚腩；在痛苦的電話對話戲中，蘿琳指甲油上的斑點；她母親完美的德州人髮型、恩尼斯和傑克在1970年代共用大麻而不是香煙；調轉的襯衫；斑點滿布的咖啡壺……。
Close Range contains nine stories, including Brokeback Mountain, ostensibly concerned with the Wyoming landscape and making a living in hard, isolated livestock-raising communities dominated by white masculine values, but also holding subliminal fantasies. Most of the stories are loosely based on historical events, such as the botched castration in People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water. Brokeback was not connected to any one incident but based on a coalescence of observations over many years, small things here and there.
Some time in early 1997 the story took shape. One night in a bar upstate I had noticed an older ranch-hand, maybe in his late 60s, obviously short on the world's luxury goods. Although spruced up for Friday night, his clothes were a little ragged, boots stained and worn. I had seen him around, working cows, helping with sheep, taking orders from a ranch manager.
He was muscular in a stringy kind of way. He leaned against the back wall and his eyes were fastened, not on the dozens of handsome and flashing women in the room, but on the young cowboys playing pool. Maybe he was following the game, maybe he knew the players, maybe one was his son or nephew, but there was something in his expression, a kind of bitter longing, that made me wonder if he was country gay.
Then I began to consider what it might have been like for him - not the real person against the wall, but for any ill-informed, confused not-sure-of-what-he-was-feeling youth growing up in homophobic rural Wyoming.
A few weeks later, I listened to the vicious rant of an elderly bar-cafe owner who was incensed that two "homos" had come in the night before and ordered dinner. She said that if her bar regulars had been there (it was darts tournament night), things would have gone badly for them.
Brokeback was constructed on the small but tight idea of a couple of home-grown country kids, opinions and self-knowledge shaped by the world around them, finding themselves in emotional waters of increasing depth. I wanted to develop the story through a kind of literary sostenente.
The early 1960s seemed the right period. The two characters had to have grown up on isolated hard-scrabble ranches and were clearly homophobic themselves, especially the Ennis Del Mar character. Both wanted to be cowboys, be part of the Great Western Myth, but it didn't work out that way; Ennis never got to be more than a rough-cut ranch hand and Jack Twist chose rodeo as an expression of cowboy. Neither was ever a top hand, and they met herding sheep, animals most real cowpokes despise.
Although they were not really cowboys (the word cowboy is often used derisively in the west by those who do ranch work), the urban critics dubbed it a tale of two gay cowboys. No.
It is a story of destructive rural homophobia. Although there are many places in Wyoming where gay men did and do live together in harmony with the community, it should not be forgotten that a year after this story was published, Matthew Shepard was tied to the buck fence outside the most enlightened town in the state, Laramie, home of the University of Wyoming.
Note too the fact that Wyoming has the highest suicide rate in the country, and that the preponderance of those people who kill themselves are elderly single men.
In my mind, isolation and altitude - the fictional Brokeback Mountain, a place empowering and inimical - began to shape the story. The mountain had to force everything that happened to these two young men.
I have many times heard Wyomingites who have gone east for one reason or another, talk about how badly they missed their natural terrain, the long sight-lines, the clear thin air, how claustrophobic were trees and how dead the atmosphere without the constant flow of wind, and I find it so myself.
It seemed to me that the story could balance only on love, something all humans need and give, whether to one's children, parents, or a lover of the opposite or same sex. I wanted to explore long-lasting love and its possible steep price tag, homophobic antipathy and denial.
These characters did something that, as a writer, I had never experienced - they began to get very damn real. Usually I deal in obedient characters who do what they are told, but Jack and Ennis soon seemed more vivid than many of the flesh-and-blood people around me and there emerged an antiphonal back-and-forth relationship between writer and character. I've heard other writers mention this experience, but it was the first time for me.
As I worked on the story over the following months, scenes appeared and disappeared. (The story went through more than 60 revisions.) The mountain encounter had to be, shall we say "seminal"? - and brief. One spring, years before, I had been in the Big Horns and noticed distant flocks of sheep on great empty slopes.
From the heights, I had been able to see 100 miles and more to the plains. In such isolated high country, away from opprobrious comment and watchful eyes, I thought it would be plausible for the characters to get into a sexual situation.
That's nothing new or out of the ordinary; livestock workers have a blunt and full understanding of the sexual behaviours of man and beast. High lonesome situation, a couple of guys - expediency sometimes rules, and nobody needs to talk about it and that's how it is. One old sheep rancher, dead now, used to say he always sent up two men to tend the sheep "so's if they get lonesome they can poke each other".
From that perspective Aguirre, the hiring man, would have winked and said nothing, and Ennis' remark to Jack that this was a one-shot deal would have been accurate. The complicating factor was that they both fell into once-in-a-lifetime love. I strove to give Jack and Ennis depth and complexity and to mirror real life by rasping that love against societal norms that both men obeyed, both of them marrying and begetting children, both loving their children, and, in a way, their wives.
Many gay men marry and have children and are good fathers. Because this is a rural story, family and children are important. Most stories (and many films) I have seen about gay relationships take place in urban settings and never have children in them. The rural gay men I know like children, and if they don't have their own, they usually have nephews and nieces who claim a big place in their hearts.
For both characters to marry women enlarges the story and introduces two young wives who move from innocence and happy trust to some pretty hard lessons about real life. Alma and Lureen give the story a universal connection, for men and women need each other, sometimes in unusual ways.
It was a hard story to write. Sometimes it took weeks to get the right phrase or descriptor for particular characters. I remember vividly that driving on Owl Canyon road in Colorado down over the state line one afternoon and thinking about Jack Twist's father, the expression "stud duck", which I had heard somewhere, came to me as the right way to succinctly describe that hard little man, and a curve in the road became the curve that killed Ennis' parents. The scene for the kiss when Jack and Ennis reunite after four years occurred in its entirety as I drove past the Laramie cement plant - so much for scenery.
In fact, I did most of the writing while I was driving. The most difficult scene was the paragraph where, on the mountain, Ennis holds Jack and rocks back and forth, humming, the moment mixed with childhood loss and his refusal to admit he was holding a man.
This paragraph took forever to get right, and I played Charlie Haden's and Pat Metheny's Spiritual, from their album Beyond the Missouri Sky (short stories) uncountable times, trying to get the words. I was trying to write the inchoate feelings of Jack and Ennis, the sad impossibility of their liaison, which for me was expressed in that music. To this day, I cannot hear that track without Jack and Ennis appearing before me. The scraps that feed a story come from many cupboards.
I WAS AN AGEING FEMALE writer, married too many times, and though I have a few gay friends, there were things I was not sure about. I talked with a sheep rancher to be sure that it was historically accurate to use a couple of white ranch kids as flock-tenders in the early '60s, for I knew that in previous decades it had been mostly Basques who did this job, and today it is often men from the South American countries. But jobs were scarce in Wyoming in that period and even married couples with children got hired to herd sheep.
One of my oldest friends, Tom Watkin, with whom I once published a rural newspaper, read and commented on the story as it developed. I thought too much about this story. It was supposed to be Ennis who had dreams about Jack, but I had dreams about both of them.
I still had little distance from it when it was published in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997. I expected letters from outraged religio-moral types but instead got them from men, quite a few of them Wyoming ranch hands and cowboys and the fathers of men, who said "you told my story", or "I now understand what my son went through".
I still, eight years later, get those heart-wrenching letters. When I got Diana Ossana's and Larry McMurtry's request to option the story for a film with money from their own pockets - unusual for screen-writers - I was immediately beset with doubts.
I simply did not think this story could be a film: it was too sexually explicit for presumed mainstream tastes, the general topic of homophobia was a hot potato unless gingerly skirted, and, given Hollywood actors' reluctance to play gay men, it would likely be difficult to find a good cast, not to say a director. It was only because I trusted Larry's and Diana's writing skills, film experience, and especially Larry's incomparable knowledge of the west's mores and language that I signed the contract.
It didn't take them long. Within a few months I was reading their powerful screenplay constructed from the story, but richly augmenting it, adding new flesh to its long bones, filling out the personalities, introducing a little humour and new characters who moved the story along its close-set rails. Yes, the screenplay was beautiful, but my worries continued.
What producers would be interested in a story about homophobic gay Wyoming ranch hands? What actors would have the guts to do this? What director would take the risk? How severely would the screenplay be clawed to pieces? The freedom-granting, yet hostile, landscape, of course, would be utterly lost, and with it, the literal grounding of the story. I thought the screenplay was as far as the movie would go, and I wasn't sorry.
Screen-writers almost always deal with adapting novels to film, and necessarily great chunks are excised, crunched, plots straitjacketed, dialogue transmuted into television-speak. This was different. Larry and Diana were working with a short story that came with a sturdy framework. But there was not enough there.
I write in a tight, compressed style that needs air and loosening to unfold into art. They had to invent, enlarge and imagine. It was, in a real way, a collaboration. I began to wonder why movie people didn't prefer short stories to novels, since the opportunity for original work is built in.
Over the next few years, several producers and directors appeared on the horizon, but there were problems with all of them. Larry liked an interesting young filmmaker who had made a funny and original short feature. I met this fellow in Tucson, liked him, and hoped he would understand the place and the characters. We arranged to meet again in Wyoming so he could look at the terrain and possible scene sites. He came with a photographer, adviser, location person and others.
That meeting turned into something I think of as "The Wyoming Death Trip". From the start, everywhere the tender-hearted city-folk looked there was a dead animal. First, it was deer by the side of the highway, then squashed rabbits on the tarmac. We stopped at a sheep-herder's home quarters. He was out with the sheep, but, as it was spring, there was a makeshift pen with a few dozen bum lambs in it.
One of the film entourage spied a dead lamb by the side of the fence and freaked. He decided (erroneously) that the lambs were starving to death, and, a man of action, rustled around until he found a bag of feed, poured some into a pan and set it in the pen.
Keith, the ranch hand showing us around, blanched. I suggested we leave the lambs, hoping the sheep-herder paid to look after them would not pursue us with a machete. We went to an untenanted house that might work as Ennis' and Alma's place. But as soon as we stepped inside, there, near the hem of a long curtain that reached the floor, lay a dead mouse.
We finished the day at a lonely ranch house outside Ucross called "the old Childress place". Empty for years, the crawl space below was a haven for rattlesnakes, the interior home to other animals needing shelter. We looked into a dusty room with a hole in the ceiling where once the stovepipe exited.
The Los Angeles people sucked in their breaths as one, for on the floor lay the dried remains of a rabbit, discarded by an owl. That was it. These urban people just did not get it that Wyoming has a lot of wildlife and that the wildlife sometimes gets dead. Animals and rural places were clearly alien to them, and just as clearly I knew they could not make this film. And I pretty much gave up on the whole idea. It wasn't going to happen because there were no producers or directors who understood the rural west, the rural anything. Old story.
A long time later, Focus films showed interest. That was encouraging, as it, in an earlier incarnation known as Good Machine, had produced the successful film version of The Laramie Project. I had met one of the people involved with that film in Denver one night, and we had gone up the street looking for a CD of Jim White's Wrong-Eyed Jesus!, which was a great favourite of mine at that time.
So I was inclined towards Focus. They were suggesting Ang Lee as the director, and I thought, here we go again. Could a Taiwanese-born director, probably a thorough-going urbanite, who had recently recreated The Hulk, understand Wyoming and the subterranean forces of the place? I doubted it. But the wheels were rolling now. I didn't know what to expect and tried not to think about it.
On a New York visit I met James Schamus briefly, and Ang Lee in a funky boite far downtown. I was nervous about meeting Ang Lee, despite his reputation as brilliant and highly skilled. Would we have anything to say to each other? Were the cultural gaps surmountable?
We smiled and made small talk for a while and then, reassured by something in his quietness, I said that I was very afraid about this story, that making stories sometimes took me into off-limits places and that I feared the film would not follow that path. He said that he was afraid, too, that it would be extremely difficult to make into a film. He said he had recently lost his father. I remembered from my mother's death, a few years earlier, the vast hole in the world that opened and could not be pulled closed.
I had a glimmering that Ang Lee might use his sorrow creatively, transferring a personal sense of loss to this film about two men for whom things cannot work out, that he might be able to show the grief and anger that builds when we must accept severe emotional wounding. I felt we both knew that this story was risky and that he wanted to take the story on, probably for the creative challenge and, perhaps, (though he didn't say so) for the gasping euphoria when you get into unknown but hard-driving imaginative projects. However slender, there was a positive connection.
Later, there were some disagreements. In the written story the motel scene, after a four-year hiatus, stood as central. During their few hours in the Motel Siesta, Jack's and Ennis' paths were irrevocably laid out. In the film that Ang Lee already had shaped in his mind, the emotional surge contained in that scene would be better shifted to a later point and melded with the men's painful last meeting. I didn't understand this until I saw the film in September 2005 and recognised the power of this timing.
Although I have always known that films and books have different rises and falls, different shapes, it's easier to know that in the abstract than on the killing ground. At some point, I wrote a letter pleading for the motel scene, which went for naught. It was out of my hands, no longer my story, but Ang Lee's film. And so I said goodbye to Jack and Ennis and got on with other work.
Before I finally saw the film, I had heard from Larry and Diana that it was very good, that the language was intact, that the actors were superb. But I was not prepared for the emotional hammering I got when I saw it. The characters roared back into my mind, larger and stronger than they had ever been.
Here it was, the point that writers do not like to admit; film can be more powerful than the written word. I realised that if Ang Lee had been born in Barrow or Novosibirsk it would likely have been the same. He understands human feelings and is not afraid to walk into dangerous territory.
Seeing the film disturbed me. I felt that, just as the ancient Egyptians had removed a corpse's brain through the nostril with a slender hook before mummification, the cast and crew of this film, from the director down, had gotten into my mind and pulled out images.
Especially did I feel this about Heath Ledger, who knew better than I how Ennis felt and thought, whose intimate depiction of that achingly needy ranch kid builds with frightening power. It is an eerie sensation to see events you have imagined in the privacy of your mind, and tried hopelessly to transmit to others through little black marks on a page, loom up before you in an overwhelming visual experience.
I realised that I, as a writer, was having the rarest film trip: my story was not mangled but enlarged into huge and gripping imagery that rattled minds and squeezed hearts.
The film is intensely Wyoming. Although it was shot mostly in Alberta, the production designer Judy Becker toured Texas and Wyoming, noting landforms and long views. So visually accurate is the film that a few weeks after I saw it for the first time, I was driving through the Sierra Madre. It was a windless, brilliant day, the aspen lit by slant-handed autumnal light; hunting season and time for the fall shove-down when stockmen with Forest Service allowances move their cows and sheep to the lower slopes before the early storms.
As I came around a corner I had to stop to let a band of sheep cross the highway. In the trees on the upslope stood a saddled horse, bedroll tied on behind, rifle in scabbard; behind it stood a laden packhorse. No rider in sight. I thought I would wait a minute and see if Jack or Ennis might come out of the trees; then I shook my head, feeling wacky to have tangled the film and reality, and pretty sure that neither character was going to show.
Aside from the two-faced landscape, aside from the virtuoso acting, aside from the stunning and subtle make-up job of ageing these two young men 20 years, an accumulation of very small details gives the film authenticity and authority: Ennis' dirty fingernails in a love scene; the old highway sign "entering Wyoming" not seen here for decades; the slight paunch Jack develops as he ages; the splotch of nail polish on Lureen's finger in the painful telephone scene; her mother's perfect Texas hair, Ennis and Jack sharing a joint instead of a cigarette in the 1970s; the switched-around shirts; the speckled enamel coffee pot; all accumulate and convince us of the truth of the story.
節譯：宋瑛堂
「斷背山」與單一事件並無關聯，但創作的根據是經過多年的觀察點滴融合而成。故事成型的時間點落在一九九七年初。某天晚上，我在懷州北部一間酒吧注意到一名老牧場工，大約年近七十。他的表情透露出一種殷切渴望的意念，讓我懷疑他是鄉村型的同性戀者。隨後我開始思索他生長的情境──我指的並非背靠酒吧牆的這人，而是泛指所有生長於仇視同性戀的懷州鄉下、資訊貧乏、意識混沌、不確定內心感覺的年輕人。
「斷背山」的骨架小巧而緊緻，圍繞著兩名土生土長的鄉下男孩，思想與自覺皆由四週環境型塑，兩人卻發現涉足漸行漸深的情感水域。我當時希望透過一種文學sostenente（支架）來推演故事。
場景設定在六○年代初似乎對味。兩位主角必定生長於孤立而困苦的牧場，顯然自己也仇視同性情慾，恩尼司尤其忌諱。兩人都想當牛仔，想成為西部大迷思的一份子，無奈事與願違；恩尼司充其量只是粗獷的牧場工，傑克則走上牛仔競技的路，過過牛仔癮。兩人皆成不了氣候。後來兩人牧羊時結識，而正牌牧牛工多數鄙視牧羊的差事。
雖然兩人並非真正牛仔（在美國西部牧場業界，「牛仔」一詞通常貶多於褒），城市影評人卻標榜「斷背山」是兩名同志牛仔的故事。不對。本片敘述的是具摧毀暴力的鄉村恐同情結。懷州不乏同志家庭與鄰里和諧相處的例子，過去與現代皆然，但我們不應該忘記，「斷背山」一文刊載後一年，卻發生同性戀青年馬修．薛坡德（Matthew Shepherd）遭人捆綁於圍籬樁凌遲的慘案，案發地點忝為懷州大學的所在地樂壤彌，也是全州思想最開明的城市。同樣值得一提的是，懷俄明亦是全美自殺率最高的一州，而自戕的案主多數為單身老漢。
我認為本故事唯一能與大自然抗衡的事物只有愛，而愛是普世人類需要並付出的東西，無論對象是個人的子女、雙親或同性異性愛人皆然。我想探討歷久不衰的愛與可能付出的慘痛代價，探討仇視同性戀的情結與否認性向的堅持。我知道這故事將充滿禁忌卻仍執意動筆。
我極力為傑克與恩尼司製造縱深與複雜性，也極力映照真實生活，方法是讓戀情與兩人遵奉的社會準則產生摩擦，讓兩人各自成家生子，疼愛小孩，就某種意義而言也愛著妻子。許多男同性戀結婚生子，照樣是好父親。
由於本故事的背景是鄉野，家庭與兒女更形重要。我見過以同志關係為主題的多數小說（以及許多電影），場景皆設定在都會區，而且從未生兒育女。我所知的鄉村男同志喜歡小孩，如果自己膝下猶虛，通常侄甥輩會在他們心中劃出大片勢力範圍。若讓兩名男主角各與女人結婚，不僅能橫向擴充故事，也能介紹兩名女子的變化──從無知清純、歡心信任的少婦，演變為苦嘗人世辛酸的人妻。艾爾瑪與露琳使本故事獲得不分男女的迴響，因為男人與女人互相需要對方，有時候需要的方式逸出常態。
這故事難寫。有時為了替某角色找出貼切的文句或描述詞，往往一斟酌就耗上數星期。事實上，我從事「寫作」通常利用的是開車時間。最困難的一幕是恩尼司在山上摟著傑克哼歌搖擺，那一刻混合了童年失怙的情緒與拒絕承認自己抱的是男人的矛盾。
節譯：關影
這篇小說於1997年10月13日在《紐約客》刊登時，我仍對之感到有距離。我料想會收到一些衛道之士的憤怒信件，反之我收到了一些男士的信，他們之中有些是懷俄明農場工人和牛仔，還有一些是父親。他們說："你說出了我的故事”，或“現在我瞭解我的兒子經歷了什麼。”
8年後，我依然收到這種令人心碎的信。當歐莎娜(Diana Ossana)和莫特瑞(Larry McMurtry)要自陶腰包購買這個故事的版權改編成電影時，我感到了困惑。
我不認為這個故事能拍成電影：對主流口味來說，故事中的性向太外露，“恐同”（Homophobia)的題材宛若燙手山芋，除非小心經營，而且好萊塢演員一般不大願意演男同志，因此，要找到好演員非常難，更別說導演。基於我相信他們的寫作技巧、電影經驗，特別是莫特瑞對西部風俗和語言的瞭解，我簽了合約。
短短幾個月內，我便讀到了他們的劇本，發展得很好，豐富了角色的個性，加入了些許幽默和新角色。劇本寫得很好，但我的擔心還持續著。
哪個製片會有興趣拍這種關於懷俄明恐同的農場工人的同志故事？哪個演員有勇氣接下這個角色？哪個導演會冒這個險？劇本會否被處理得支離破碎？
接下來幾年內，有幾個製片和導演出現，但他們全都有問題。很久以後，Focus Films產生了興趣。他們建議李安執導，然後我想，一個出生在臺灣的導演，可能是一個都市人，他能否瞭解懷俄明和這地方的地形力量？我不認為。但輪子已開始轉動。我不知道可以期待什麼，也嘗試不要去想。
隨後，我跟夏慕斯(James Schamus)和李安在紐約碰面。我感到緊張。我跟李安會有話題嗎？能否打破文化藩籬？
我們微笑，談了一陣，我對他說，我很害怕拍攝這個故事會把我帶到禁區之內，而且害怕它會出軌。他說，他也害怕，要將小說拍成電影非常難。他說他的父親最近去世了。我也想起我母親幾年前的死，那個裂開在世界的大洞，無法縫合起來。
我隱約感到，李安或許能夠運用他的悲傷，將自己失去的感覺轉移到這部描述兩個無法解決問題的男人的電影之中，他或許能夠呈現那份當我們必須接受情感上的巨創而衍生的憂傷和憤怒。我們都知道這個故事具有風險，而他想要拍這個故事，或許是為了創意上的挑戰，又或者是為了，當你投入一項未知，但又難駕馭的計畫中所帶來的那種令人透不過氣來的快樂。儘管這個關聯微薄，總算正面。
後來，產生了一些爭論。在小說中，闊別4年的汽車旅館部分是故事的核心。在西斯塔汽車旅館的會面中，他們的道路已無可逆轉地鋪展在面前。在李安腦海中的電影裏，該部分的澎湃情感最好移到後面，融入最後一次痛苦的會面中。我無法理解，直到我在2005年9月看到電影，覺得這個安排非常有力。
雖然我知道電影和小說有不同的起伏和形式，知道跟面對是兩回事。我曾寫信為汽車旅館部分說情但徒勞。故事不再屬於我，它是李安的電影。因此我告別恩尼斯和傑克，繼續我其他的寫作。
觀賞電影時，我並沒有心理準備要面對情緒上的撞擊。這些角色回到我的腦海，比之前更強更巨大。
電影可以比文字更勝一籌
有時作者不願承認這點，電影可以比文字更勝一籌。我瞭解到無論李安出生在貝羅或新西伯利亞都一樣。他瞭解人類的情感，並且不怕走入禁區。
電影擾亂了我。我感覺如同古埃及人製造木乃伊時，用一枚細小的鉤從鼻孔鉤出屍體的腦袋般，演員和工作人員，也從我的腦袋中拉扯出影像。
我對希斯·萊吉的感覺尤甚。他比我更瞭解恩尼斯的感受和想法，他以叫人震驚的力量演繹了這個貧困的農場小子。看到一些原屬於你腦海中私密想像的情節，然後無望地嘗試將之轉成印在紙上的鉛字 ，以一種壓倒性的視覺效果進入你的視線時，是一種可怕的感覺。
作為作家，我經歷了一場罕見的電影旅程：我的故事沒有被破壞，反而擴大成巨大且扣人心弦的影像。
儘管大部分拍攝在加拿大的亞伯達(Alberta)完成，這部電影卻非常懷俄明。電影的影像準確，觀賞後數周內，我駕車穿越馬德雷山脈。那是個無風，燦爛的一天，白楊樹被秋之光點亮；狩獵季節而且已是飼養員將牛只和綿羊移向低斜坡的時候，以避開早到的風暴。
駛到拐彎處，我停下來讓綿羊經過。山坡上的樹群中，一匹馬佇立著，鋪蓋卷綁在後面，槍在鞘中：後面有一匹馱馬。看不到騎士。我以為我再等一會，會看到傑克或恩尼斯從樹群中出現。我搖搖頭，感到這想法有點瘋狂。然後肯定這兩個角色都不會出現。
除了地形風景，傑出的演繹，極好且精細的化妝技術來呈現兩個角色20年的經歷之外，一些小細節也賦予了電影一種真實性：在性愛場面中恩尼斯骯髒的手指；數十年不見的老舊高速公路路牌寫著“進入懷俄明州”；傑克隨著年紀長出來的肚腩；在痛苦的電話對話戲中，蘿琳指甲油上的斑點；她母親完美的德州人髮型、恩尼斯和傑克在1970年代共用大麻而不是香煙；調轉的襯衫；斑點滿布的咖啡壺……。
引用URL
http://cgi.blog.roodo.com/trackback/1209918