[News/Film] [USA] Trans Awareness: Boys Don’t Cry

[Stephanie Stevens]

So So Gay, UK


Trans Awareness: Boys Don’t Cry

Posted by: David William Upton in Film 24 May 2013


The title of Boys Don’t Cry makes reference to the sort of gender
stereotype that is compounded by the violence ensconced within the
film. When John (Peter Sarsgaard) and his group of friends discover
the secret at the heart of the film, their hateful, regressive and
violent response is emblematic of news stories still heard all over
the world to this day. The desire to fight your own biology might seem
to go against nature itself, but only from the physical standpoint of
the exterior eye. To Brandon Teena, the natural was life lived as a
boy – prescribing to the same cropped hair, checked shirts and petty
theft of his peers, only without a dick in his pants.

Boys Don’t Cry closely followed Susan Muska and Gréta Olafsdóttir’s
documentary film, The Brandon Teena Story, which told the real-life
story of Brandon Teena, born Teena Brandon, a transgendered person who
was murdered in rural Nebraska in 1993. Brandon’s brave, tenacious,
naive desire to live not as the biological female he was raised as,
but as the man he feels he is, is brought to life with astonishing
vibrancy and tenderness by director Kimberley Peirce. Not only does
the film fearlessly present Teena’s (played by Hilary Swank)
aforementioned desire as solid fact, disregarding his inner struggle
for the one he must engage with in the smalltown America he frequents,
Peirce gives the story a delicate, romantic quality by heavily
focusing on Brandon’s love affair with Lana Tisdel (Chloë Sevigny),
and Lana’s difficulty with accepting the revelations of her lover’s
body and how they can’t fit into the very divided gender roles she’s
been accustomed to.

So Boys Don’t Cry refrains from making overt political commentary
about the status of transgender people within American society,
instead presenting the events as romantically and horrifyingly as they
unfold. Brandon remains a recognisable person, rather than a focal
point for a sexual question, confronting the audience with the typical
behaviour of a teenage boy and mixing it with the biological facts of
Brandon’s transformation. Hilary Swank, who won her first and most
deserved Oscar for the role, plays Brandon as someone who, until
forcefully confronted with the very real facts of his body, is
confident in being a man because he wants to be. Instead of focusing
on the sexual conflicts – which Brandon simply isn’t interested in –
Swank centralises the adolescent sexual charge of Brandon’s
interactions with Lana, the irrepressible smile that beams from his
face on her every appearance.

Swank makes this innocence sympathetic, charming, but also hopelessly
foolish – Brandon can’t even conceive of his fantastical dreams as
being ridiculous even when someone’s yelling in his face that they’re
impossible. His confidence in his performative male self is endearing
even as we see him hold a cigarette in an unusual, gingerly fashion,
or disobeying the unwritten rule that males just don’t sleep on a
girl’s shoulder. He’s still wary, cautious about the fold he’s
accepted into, constantly glancing around at his new friends for cues
to laugh, or smile, but the innocent confidence in his new sexual
identity is only questioned by Lana’s physical touch. Boys Don’t Cry
keenly explores the separation between our presented selves and the
people we are inside, a conflict central to the emotional journeys of
transgender people in particular because they are forced to live it so
visibly.

Boys Don’t Cry, fourteen years on, and almost twenty years since
Brandon Teena’s murder (Teena and two other people, Phillip DeVine and
Lisa Lambert, were shot on December 31 1993), remains an enormously
powerful film, both a careful legacy and a reminder of the violence
that sadly continues around the world. Thanks to Kimberley Peirce’s
sensitive, vibrant direction and the erotic frisson between Swank and
Sevigny, Brandon’s story has been captured forever as a tragic but
romantic tale that celebrates the desire and need to be true to
yourself as much as it laments the reaction of bigoted people who
refuse to let their fellow humans do that.

[Video: <http://youtu.be/pVyeHPUEAnQ> Boys Don't Cry (1999). Official Trailer]

Boys Don’t Cry is available to purchase on DVD from Amazon
<http://www.amazon.co.uk/Boys-Dont-Cry-Hilary-Swank/dp/B00005UWNB/> .


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