Anyone else think that the relationship between Major Rane and Johnny was a little queer?
Perhaps they had pleasured each other while stuck in the prison camp together.
There are a few subtle moments between them that seem to suggest more than what is said.
If I am crazy please feel free to say so, but I swear there is something slightly gay about the way they interact with each other.
No, I see it as a brotherhood and "trust with ones life" type friendship. I think that shows how they were able to survive in the camp.
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of course they're gay, it's impossible since the beginning of time for two men just to be close friends. as a matter of fact, anytime you see a man look at another man in any film, it means they had a homosexual relationship.
shareBrotherhood, absolutely 100% brotherhood. Everything else they kept bottled up inside themselves.
shareI've never been in the military, but combat vets I've known say that being in desperate circumstances together creates deep bonds, more like brotherhood than ordinary friendship.
Their military and POW experience was an entirely male environment. When Johnny says, "It's hard to get used to being home again . . . being with a woman" I think he means that they'd gotten used to a world of hard edges and nothing gentle. It's nothing to do with sex.
Johnny might be as dead inside as Raine is; they can't communicate with normal people who haven't been through the horrors they have. Although Johnny is living peacefully with his family in El Paso, he doesn't hesitate to go on what might well be a suicide mission. When he puts on his dress uniform and says goodbye to his father, I don't think he's expecting to come back.
During the shootout, both men look more alive and engaged than at any other point in the movie. There's nothing more dangerous than a man who's truly not afraid of dying.
"The truth 24 times a second."
I've always thought that having his wife and child die gave him a reason to live, and brought him out of his coma.
shareI had a feeling someone was going to mention the relationship between John and Charles, but I saw it more like and older / younger brother (or leader / mentor) bond than anything else. There was another book I read about POW’s forming a gay relationship called Some Kind of Hero (I never saw the movie), but that more based out of a need for human interaction. The pair played off well together, you had the younger Tommy Lee Jones almost mirroring the slightly older Devane’s explosive violence and inability to adjust to live back home. While Rane’s plans just fell apart after he had everything all planned out, the younger John simply signed back up to the service and shut everyone (except his father) out.
What a movie, though. I must have rented that at least a dozen times when VHS was still the way to go. Someone found me a copy on tape around 1990 and it lasted for years. I can’t wear a pair of aviator shades without thinking of good old Major Rane.
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Its not a sexual gay thing necessarily, but they loved each other in a way they couldn't love anyone else anymore because of their bond. So I'd put it on the gay continuum, yes.
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