October 21–28, 1999

movie shorts

Boys Don’t Cry

Directed by Kimberly Peirce
A Fox Searchlight Pictures release

recommended

Standing in the back of a pickup truck, Brandon Teena whoops and yells, a big smile on his face. The truck bucks and turns in sloppy circles, careening past a crowd of kids drinking on the sidelines. When Brandon loses his balance, he hits the ground and bounces, then gets up and goes again. Bruised and muddied as he might be, Brandon’s happy to be here, drinking beer with the guys and impressing the girls. That is, doing what you’re supposed to do when you’re a boy.

Or so he thinks. As becomes clear in Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry, 18-year-old Brandon’s efforts to understand and follow the being-a-boy rules are infinitely complicated by the fact that he was born Teena Brandon. Based on a true story and co-written by Peirce and Andy Bienen, the movie opens with Teena (Hilary Swank, in an incredible performance) checking herself out in the mirror, taping down her breasts, donning jeans and a cowboy hat in preparation for an evening at the roller rink. She knows she’s courting danger, given that she’s a known troublemaker (car thief) in her hometown of Lincoln, NE, not to mention that homophobia almost passes as a local sport, but she can’t help herself. She knows what she wants: to live as a boy, fall in love with a girl and live happily ever after.

Self-imagined and convincingly transformed, Brandon does meet a girl at the roller rink. But he’s found out by the girl’s male friends, who, incensed and afraid, chase Brandon to the trailer where he’s staying with his best friend, Lonny (Matt McGrath). Being gay himself, Lonny knows something about bashing and risks that aren’t worth taking. When the girl’s friends start throwing shit through the windows, Lonny tells Brandon he needs to face facts: He’s a girl, and no one’s going to let him be anything else.

Brandon leaves town soon after, sort of by accident. Defending Candace (Alicia Goranson), he gets in a bar fight, takes off in a hurry, and finds himself in an alley with John (Peter Sarsgaard) and Tom (Brendan Sexton III), who offer him a ride to a party out in Falls City, a night’s drive away. The next morning, waking at Candace’s house, Brandon is proud of his shiner and happy to be accepted for what he sees in himself. He decides to stay.

When, soon after, Brandon hooks up with John’s ex, Lana (the ever-generous and superb Chloë Sevigny), he feels able to believe his own dream-life. In his bedroom, he poses again in front of the mirror: sock or dildo? bangs mussed or combed? Thrilled by his passing, he falls a little in love with the act, and with the reality he finally sees within his reach. Everyone invites Brandon into his or her life: the guys, Lana, her friend Kate (Alison Folland) and Lana’s mom (Jeanetta Arnette). They’re as impressed by his determination and beauty, his gentleness and daring, as Brandon himself seems to be, and their participation invites yours. It hardly seems a suspension of disbelief to see Brandon as he sees himself.

The film’s approach is a risky one. Rather than speculating about who knew what when, pathologizing or sensationalizing Brandon’s performance like a Jerry Springer episode, the film asks you to understand both his wish to be himself and his new family’s need to love and accept him, their willingness to share the illusion. When Brandon’s past finally does catch up with him, Lana is perplexed and hurt, and John and Tom are horrified. Lana chooses to believe their relationship: She loves Brandon, her man. But the guys feel betrayed by their own socializing: What does it say about them, that they would believe, like and even feel attracted to a girl posing as a boy? To fix the situation, to reestablish the familiar order of gender and power, they rape Teena and tell her to keep quiet. And so another truth comes out, again, and Brandon must confess his own crime — that he has a vagina — at the same time he narrates the rape for the cops. John and Tom are undone, and they can only destroy the person who represents their loss of self-assurance, their questions about themselves.

The tragedy is tremendous. But the film never makes it seem freaky or startling, or even deviant. In fact, the great achievement of Boys Don’t Cry is its respect for all its characters and situations. Small-town Nebraska has never looked so seductive as it does through Brandon’s eyes (and Jim Denault’s ravishing, hyper-real cinematography): Time-lapse footage makes the sky seem alive and watchful, while the cramped trailer-park interiors and nighttime waterside where Lana and Brandon hang out are pulsing with color and possibility. It’s tempting to see their love as transcendent, but it’s more confused and fervent than that. They share an experience that’s more solid than the world around them, less fraught with distrust and fear.

Boys Don’t Cry contextualizes Brandon and Lana instead of explaining their actions; it explores how they see each other through the lens of desire, and how they understand themselves in relation to the other. And so, the film ends up posing precisely the questions that face Brandon and his friends: What does it mean to be a man? How does violence become a conceivable response to the chaos and frustration of daily life? Why and how is transgression erotic? How is desire shaped? How do you know who you are?

Such questions seem to be in the mass cultural air recently. They’re the same ones raised by Summer of Sam, American Beauty, Susan Faludi’s Stiffed, Fight Club and Bringing Out the Dead. Men feeling betrayed and cheated and desperate makes a compelling subject, no doubt. But gender roles and sexual desires were never so fixed as they might seem to those tending toward nostalgia for such stability. Boys Don’t Cry imagines multiple, unresolvable perspectives. Peirce’s movie doesn’t produce answers so much as it complicates the process of asking. It doesn’t even pretend that it delivers the truth about Brandon Teena. It offers instead a mix of stories, brief glimpses of truth, shimmering like Brandon, unfixed and seductive.

—Cindy Fuchs