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You retrace your steps and find your way back
to Candi Dasa’s pirate DVD store. The boss
from Perth emerges fat and sweaty from a nearby
café or jungle compound. ‘Didn’t
Brokeback work?’ he asks by way of introduction.
Clearly his employees keep him in the loop. The
DVD pirate’s eyes bulge through magnified
glasses and his front tooth has snapped to a vampirish
point. There’s definitely something of the
Marlon Brandos about this guy. Something about
the way he slinks from the shadows, crazed, maybe,
from too many years beyond the Do Lung Bridge.
Instead of the horror, however, all this Marlon
wants to talk about is the second season of the
HBO television series Deadwood. He just loves
it, just can’t get enough of the all-swearing,
all-whoring saloon owner Al Swearengen.
You choose some more DVDs and the Apocalypse
Now guy insists on putting them into his DVD player
and playing the endings to show how well they
work. Many don’t, but he says the problem
is his stuffed DVD player not his discs. Marlon
can’t boast enough about the quality of
his illegal merchandise. ‘They’re
second and third generation,’ he says, as
if you have the faintest idea what he’s
talking about. ‘Nothing like that crap they
sell in Kuta.’ Of particular pride to him
is the FBI copyright warning at the start. Later
you realise this proves they weren’t video-d
over people’s heads in cinemas the way they
used to be. You walk into the night with Marlon
calling King Kong after you. He can’t believe
you don’t want to buy it.
When you finally find your way back to your hotel,
you juggle another ginger martini up to your room
and watch Brokeback Mountain on your laptop, which
overheats as you balance it on your knees in bed.
The DVD’s volume is almost too low to hear
the dialogue and every so often a warning flashes
up saying the disc is for award consideration
only. You switch on the subtitles.
In the original movie, Jack Twist makes an impassioned
plea to his cowboy lover Ennis del Mar during
one of their trysts on Brokeback Mountain:
You count the damn few times that we have been
together in nearly twenty years and you measure
the short fucking leash you keep me on and then
you ask me about Mexico and you tell me you kill
me for needing something that I don’t hardly
never get. You have no idea how bad it gets. I’m
not you. I can’t make it on a couple of
high altitude fucks once or twice a year.
In the pirate version, the subtitles for this
lengthy monologue are reduced to a pithy 39 words.
‘You count several times we with time, last
is you ask I,’ they read (if read is not
too optimistic a verb). ‘And you inform
I to kill, for something that I have never done.
You is nothing; there is no ugly idea how that.
I cannot be, biannual.’
You wonder whether these idiosyncratic deviations
from E. Annie Proulx’s original text have
anything to do with Indonesia’s growing
Islamic backlash against the depravities of Western
culture. A proposed anti-pornography law outlaws
tight clothes and public dancing to pop music,
imposing daunting jail terms on husbands and wives
who kiss in public as well as on anyone flaunting
a ‘sensual body part’ such as their
navel. It’s bad news for Australian sheilas
sunbaking on Kuta beaches as well as gay cowboys
in American DVDs.
You fall asleep as unsensually as possible as
thunder claps and late-night roosters crow between
the tireless sets of the Iguana Café covers
band.
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