LOVE AND TRAGEDGY, BUT "BOYS DON’T CRY"

This intensely sad little number (well it isn’t actually little really but that’s the way the saying goes, right?) is one of the more famous examples of “queer cinema”. It won awards and Oscars all over the place ten or something years back when it first hit the screens and rightly so. Hilary Swank shines as Brandon Teena – whom she apparently modeled on James Dean, two tough calls at once for an actress! – and the story is so emotionally charged that you cannot help by feeling deeply saddened by the prejudice and hatred revealed by this film. It is possibly all the more sad because this is a true story; the true story of a young life cut down by prejudice.
So, meet Brandon Teena. He arrives in a small town in the mid-west in the United States, looking for work and planning on starting a new life. He soon gets in with the young bucks of the neighborhood and even starts a passionate affair with local problem child Lana. However, Brandon has a secret… Brandon Teena’s real name is Teena Brandon and anatomically speaking he is a woman. He is, however, saving up every penny he can get his hands on for a sex-change operation and in the meanwhile doing his best to hide his “anatomical” differences as he doesn’t feel comfortable in a woman’s body. Things seem to go really, really well for him for a while. However, like almost every secret, Brandon’s secret will out in the end… And people do not like secrets like that in small towns…
I see no harm in giving a bit of a spoiler here. Not least because the story back in the day was all over the news. After being “outed” as a transsexual, Brandon is raped and murdered by two local men (one of them Lana’s ex) at age 21. Ironically the two men who murdered him were known as good friends of his before, or seemed to be good friends at any rate… This is the advantage of starting off with a good story; this was director Kimberley Pierce’s first feature film if memory serves and so long as you have a decent cast (don’t get me wrong Hilary Swank is waay more than decent, I’m just talking in general here) and stick to the story, you have a winner. And although the hate portrayed in the film is sad, at least it brings the topic to the table to be discussed. This is especially important in a world where homosexuality in general and female homosexuality in particular is still a tough topic to discuss in certain quarters.
However, there are a few points about the film that show us that sadly, it still isn’t as easy as one might first think to talk about these things. One thing you will notice (and so did critics) about the film is that we almost never see Brandon as he was before he changed his name and appearance. There are hints and a ten-second clip hinting at his life back in the day and that’s it. The whole issue of transsexuality and the difficulties, the transformation are all ignored. Brandon leaps onto the screen fully formed, as a man – or almost at any rate. The probable cause for this is that Pierce, the director, who by the way is also gay, wanted to make the film as “palatable” as possible for general audiences; a story of doomed love will always go down well, there is no real reason to throw in complicated discussions if the aim is commercial success. In all of her interviews Pierce points out that she wanted the story to be about the love between Brandon and Lana, about their very real passion for eachother . And I mean, fair enough; love is love at the end of the day. There is a valid argument for saying that we should be able to view love stories as just that, regardless of whether the couple is “gay” or “straight”, placing the two on an equal footing as it were. And just because a director is gay, is he / she obliged to make every single piece of his / her work a source of activism? Of course not. However, with Brandon’s story a chance to have an in-depth discussion about things that are still difficult to talk about in our enlightened times. This is an admirable and deeply emotional film that grips the viewer by the heartstrings and forces them to take a good hard look at society today. The thing is though, if it had just stepped out of its own shell it could have been so much more…