Boys Don't Cry

Gender was more interesting when we knew less about it. When we continued from dark instincts rather than easy understanding. Roger Ebert said in his review, “Consider the Victorians, slipping off to secret vices and how much more fun they had than today's Jerry Springer guests ("My girlfriend is a dominatrix"). The intriguing border between the genders must have been more inviting to cross when that was seen as an opportunity rather than a pathology.” One of the many features of “Boys Don’t Cry,” one of the best films of 1999, is that never once does it say the cliched line, “I am a man trapped in a woman’s body.” Its motto instead could be, “Girls just wanna have fun.” Teena Brandon doesn’t think of herself as a gender case study. Nothing in her background has given her that word. She is a lonely girl who would rather be a boy, and one day she gets a short haircut, puts a sock down the front of her jeans and goes into a bar to try her luck. She is not a transsexual, a lesbian, a cross-dresser, or a member of any other category in the long list of gender identities. She is a girl who thinks of herself as a boy, and when she leaves Lincoln, Nebraska, and moves to the town of Falls City in 1993, that is how she presents herself. By then she has become Brandon Teena, and we must use the male pronoun in describing him.

All of this is true. Ebert mentioned, “There is a documentary, "The Brandon Teena Story," that came out earlier in 1999 and shows us photographs of Brandon, looking eerily like Hilary Swank, who plays the role in "Boys Don't Cry." In that film, we meet some of the women he dated ("Brandon knew how to treat a woman"), and we see the two men later charged with Brandon's rape and, after the local law authorities didn't act seriously on that charge, murder a few days later. Like Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, Brandon died because some violent men are threatened by any challenge to their shaky self-confidence.”

Ebert continued, “"Boys Don't Cry" is not sociology, however, but a romantic tragedy--a "Romeo and Juliet" set in a Nebraska trailer park.” Brandon is not the smartest person on the block, especially at judging what types of risks to take, but he is one of the nieces, and soon he has fallen in love with a Falls City girl named Lana, played by Chloe Sevigny. For Lana, Brandon is arguably the first nice boy she has ever dated. We meet two of the other local boys, John (Peter Sarsgaard) and Tom (Brendan Sexton III), neither the smartest boys, both violent offspring of dangerous backgrounds. They have the same belief about women that a trigger-happy person has about prying his dying fingers off the revolver.

The film is about hanging out in gas stations and roller rinks and lying slouched on a couch looking with rounded eyes at television, and dead-end jobs, and about six-packs and country bars and Marlboros. There is a reason county music is sad. In this desolation, which is all Lana knows, comes Brandon, who brings her a flower.

The Lana character is important to the movie, and despite Hilary Swank deserving all the praise for her performance as Brandon, it is Devigny who gives our entrance into the story. Representing the several women the real Brandon dated, she sees him as a warm, gentle, romantic lover. Does Lana know Brandon is a girl? At some point, certainly. However, at what point exactly? There is a stretch when she knows, and yet she doesn’t know, because she doesn’t want to know. Romance is built on illusion, and when we love someone, we love the illusion they have created for us.

Kimberly Peirce who directed this movie and co-wrote it with Any Bienen, was faced with a project that could have gone wrong in so many ways. She finds the right area. She never takes the story above the level it’s comfortable with. She doesn’t emphasize the vacuousness of the local law-enforcement officials because that’s not necessary. She sees Tom and John not as simple murderers but as the tools of deep ignorance and inherited anti-social pathology. (Tom knows he’s trouble. He holds his hand in a flame and then cuts himself, explaining, “This helps control the thing inside of me so I don’t snap out at people.”) The whole story can be explained this way: Most everybody in it behaves exactly according to their natures. Ebert said, “The first time I saw the movie, I was completely absorbed by the characters--the deception, the romance, the betrayal. Only later did I fully realize what a great film it is, a worthy companion to those other masterpieces of death on the prairie, "Badlands" and "In Cold Blood." This could have been a clinical Movie of the Week, but instead it's a sad song about a free spirit who tried to fly a little too close to the flame.”

This is an emotionally difficult movie to watch. But that doesn’t mean that it is bad. It just talks about a situation that is still happening today and raising awareness on it. So many members of the LGBTQ+ community have been murdered because of who they are, and that needs to end. I might be wrong, but I think transgenders have been the ones that have been murdered the most. The time for this must end and this movie explains why. It’s a true story that everyone should watch to see and know about. I had never heard of Brandon Teena, but I was only a child during the time he must have been murdered. However, Hilary Swank did a good job and she even admitted this was a hard movie to recover from, getting emotional about it during her interview on Inside the Actors Studio. See it for yourself because it must be seen to be believed.

Now that we have discussed this, check in next week when we look at another biographical film in “Pride Month.”