Return to Sender

Facebook messages with stickers are the postcards of the early 21st Century. You can quickly send a message to your friend, along with a little picture of a cat baking cupcakes or a cute little bunny pooping in the grass. Charming.

But in Jack and Ennis's day, they communicated via postcards. It's a weird world where a message that isn't even concealed in an envelope is a secret method of communication, but there you go.

The postcards are recurring images that reveal a lot about our characters. For one, it reveals their education level. Jack writes, "Drop me a line if your there," showing that he snoozed through the lesson on the difference between "you're" and "your." Tsk, tsk.

Also, the choice of postcards shows that these are men of few words. They use the promise of fishing trips as their code for hookups. (Hook-ups. Get it?) And Ennis often responds simply, "You bet." But they aren't just using the medium of postcards because they're both closed-mouth cowboy types. They also need to be men of few words—thick love letters would raise red flags, but chipper, transparent postcards are deceptively open-seeming.

But there's a more straightforward reason for using postcards to chart Jack and Ennis' love affair: these postcards show us the passage of time. Each card is stamped with a postmark showing us the year, so we can see time progressing.

Finally, there's a tragic parallel between the postcards themselves as Jack and Ennis' love affair. Their meetings are tiny little snapshots. They're brief and unsatisfying. And, much like postcards, the love affair in Brokeback is full of memories—memories of beautiful locations, pleasure, and time spent with loved ones—that are held onto long after they're gone.