One for Sorrow

Yes, EXACTLY. Word to the, uh, wordth. I think what so many have found so frustrating about this movie is that is refuses to be an "issue" movie with a "message" that identifies a "problem" and gestures toward a "solution." I just wrote in someone else's LJ that the strength of the movie for me is that it isn't "about" social prejudice or about Ennis's personal terrors; rather, it shows us how those are indistiguishable from one another: it's, among other things, a portrait of a particular exercise in internalizing the bigoted gaze, and when Ennis says "If you can't fix it, you've got to stand it," he honestly doesn't know where "fixing" stops and "standing" begins, or where "society" stops and his own sense of himself, of who he is, begins. And the movie doesn't put US in any better of a position to know that than Ennis himself, which is its (and Lee's) strength IMO. The director doesn't put any ironic distance between Ennis and the audience; the (non-narcissistic) viewer has no more material with which to put together a workable solution than the character does, which is why people's efforts on LJ to force a solution ("They should have come out!" "They should have moved to San Francisco!" "They should have called it quits and not cheated on their wives!") have tended to be exposed as failures the minute the comments start coming....