The Best Movies You've Forgotten: The Crying Game and Boys Don't Cry
Sarah Jaffe, wInk magazine, October 2002

When I was told that the theme for the October issue of wInk was costuming, I racked my brain for days to think of a movie that went along with that idea. Finally, I came up with these two films, and I hope you'll forgive me if you were hoping for something more obscure.

Gender theorist Judith Butler puts forth the idea that masculine or feminine gender is a performance, rather than a fixed attribute. In other words, we costume ourselves as male or female, depending on how we feel, or more likely, how we've been trained. Putting on lipstick, high heels, skirts and nail polish is not ingrained on the X chromosome any more than belching in public and not calling the next day are ingrained on the Y chromosome. In these two movies, the conflict is between those who see gender as a performance versus those who see it as innate.

If nobody's told you the secret of The Crying Game yet, then you might not want to read any further. Unfortunately, someone told me before I saw it, (and I hate you as much as the person who told me the secret of The Sixth Sense), so I knew coming into it that, "She's a guy!" Since I knew that sitting down to watch the movie, I thought that poor Fergus was blind not to notice, but maybe some of you were fooled and felt as betrayed by Dil's performance as Fergus did when she finally took off her clothes.

Fergus bought into her everyday performance as a woman, and wasn't even unnerved by her draggy rendition of the movie's title song at a club that, at a closer look, was obviously a gay club. The film toys with the notion of gay and straight from the beginning, with Fergus's close relationship with Jody and the dreams of him afterward, but I wouldn't call Fergus gay--he is attracted to Dil as a woman, and she is a woman in everything but genitalia. When Fergus tries to force her back into masculine clothing, she seems if anything more feminine, looking more like a girl trying to pass for a boy than anything else. Dil plays the stereotypically feminine role better even than Jude, the film's only biological woman.

Boys Don't Cry has more in common with The Crying Game than just a similar title. This film lets you in on the secret from the beginning: Brandon Teena is really Teena Brandon. The tough part for director Kimberly Peirce is convincing the audience, who know that Hilary Swank is a girl, to buy into the idea of her as a boy well enough to sympathize with her. Rather than resorting to trickery, as Neil Jordan does in The Crying Game, Peirce simply places her in masculine roles, saving a girl in a barfight, walking girls to their door at the end of the night, and playing silly prove-your-manhood games like tailgate surfing.

Hilary Swank won an Oscar for her performance, but Brandon got no such accolades from his friends, who reacted even more violently than Fergus at discovering that Brandon was in fact a girl. Again, the movie brings up the gay/straight question at the very beginning--Teena's cousin telling her to "admit you're a dyke," but Teena refutes this: she isn't gay, she's a boy. Lana, Brandon's girlfriend, also believes this--in their final love scene, in the shed, when Brandon has been revealed as Teena, Lana says, "I don't know how to do this," meaning make love to another woman. Lana cannot completely deal with the revelation of her lover's biological sex, but she does try to save Teena/Brandon from their friends who are spurred to violence by the idea that their manhood is only a figment of their imaginations, something easily imitated by a girl.

Both these movies are disturbing, not only for the violence in each of them, but more importantly for the notion they explore: that femininity is just something we can put on, as Dil does, or do away with, as Brandon does. Our everyday clothing and grooming is part of a costume that we wear, a part that we play.