The Crying Game
The Crying GameEver since the Stonewall riots and the Gay Liberation movement of the 1970’s, most people might agree that being openly homosexual is much more socially acceptable than it was in the notoriously homophobic 1950’s. While this increasing attitude of acceptance is wonderful, it isn’t by any means all-inclusive. What are we to make of people who consider themselves as transsexual, transgered, or not any gender at all? If we look at the media, we can usualy see transsexuals represented in only two ways: as sexual deviants on talk shows like The Jerry Springer Show, or as campy drag queens in movies such as Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. In 1993, Irish director Neil Jordan made a movie that dealt with transsexualism and gender identity that became a critical hit and even received an Academy Award. This movie, The Crying Game, poses interesting questions about gender identity; many of these questions echo the sentiments of other writers about gender and sexuality. At the same time, the movie contains contradictions which make the message of the movie difficult to decipher.
Before analyzing the movie, the framework of the plot needs to be explained. Members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) kidnap Jody, a soldier, and hold him hostage. Fergus, an IRA volunteer is assigned to keep watch over the prisoner, and the two end up developing a friendship. Before he dies, Jody asks Fergus to look after his “girl”, Dil. Fergus carries out the request and goes to England to hide from the IRA and to meet Dil, who he ends up falling in love with. Before they consumate their relationship, that she is not really a woman, but a man. Although his first reaction is one of anger and shock, Fergus hesitantly continues their relationship. Claiming that it is for her protection, he asks Dil to cut her hair and wear Jody’s clothes. One of the IRA members, Jude, comes to kill Fergus for disobeying orders. Instead, Dil murders her and Fergus chooses to take the blame for the murder and goes to jail.
One of the first interesting questions that this movie raises is how we identify who is a man and who is a woman. Dil appropriates to herself as many physical gender attributes as she can. Her hair is long and curly, she wears dresses, she wears make-up and talks in a high pitched voice. According to Kate Bornstein’s book, Gender Outlaw, there are also other gender attributes which people use. Some of those include behavioral cues, textual cues, mythic cues, power dynamics as cue and sexual orientation as cue. Dil certainly tries to adopt as many of the gender attributes as possible that would identify as a woman. This certainly makes sense because Dil wants to pass as a woman, but what does it mean that she conforms to socially and culturally constructed views of what gender is?
Bornstein argues that even people that are transsexual shouldn’t stick to a such rigid ways of definining gender. “There are many ways to transgress a prescribed gender code . . . they range from preferring to be somewhat less than rigidly-gendered, to preferring an entirely non-definable image,” she says. Bornstein’s point of view seems to be that even people who think they are breaking the rules of gender might be merely reinforcing a fixed and static way at looking at gender. For example, why did Dil choose to wear dresses and high heels, traditionally strictly feminine clothes? It could be more interesting if she chose the gender attributes that she felt she identified with, not the ones that she thought were necessary for the world to view her as a woman. If everyone did that, soon they would stop being gender attributes and become simply attributes.
The movie both refutes and supports Bornstein’s views on gender identity. In addition to having Dil embody all the typical female attributes, there are times when Jordan succumbs to the most cliché of all sterotypes about transsexuals; he has Dil act like the drag queens we may see in other movies. In one of the scenes, Dil is dressed in a dress made entirely out of gold sequins while performing a campy version of the song “The Crying Game”. This can give the viewer that Dil must give a performance as a woman in order to pass as a woman to everyone, and possibly even herself. While drag queens and camp are certainly valid forms of expression and no doubt are self-empowering to some people, not all transsexuals identify with either one. Nevertheless, they are sometimes automatically linked to those two sub-genres of transsexualism.
At the same time, the movie also conveys a hopeful message about what Bornstein calls “gender fluidity”, or “the ability to freely and knowingly become one or many of a limitless number of genders”. Fergus is presumably homosexual at the onset of the movie. When Dil reveals to him that she has a penis, and is therefore (by standard conventions of gender) technically a man, Fergus reacts by first hitting her and then going to the bathroom to vomit, presumably disgusted with the idea that he’s been physically involved with another man. Whether this is homophobia or just a reaction to the shock he has received, he somehow overcomes this initial aversion. He realizes he has fallen in love with Dil as a person, and the fact that she has a penis and is medically considered a man ultimately doesn’t seem to overrule his feelings for Dil. If one chooses to read the movie this way, then Jordan’s message might appear to be that love is above gender and sex; love can not be reduced to cultural conventions of what is appropriate.
Yet even the idea that Fergus’ love ultimately conquers all is still considered problematic by some. In Kristin Handler’s article “Sexing The Crying Game: Difference, Identity, Ethics”, she challenges the idea that Fergus completely accepts Dil the way she is. Although Fergus nobly sacrifices himself by serving the jail term that rightfully belong to Dil, Handler asks viewers to note that “although Dil persists to the end in casting Fergus as the man she loves, Fergus resists as assiduously the possibility of a sexual relationship with Dil after it’s revealed that she’s not the woman of his dreams”. This goes along with Handler’s theory that the film, at the expense of the other characters, is really all about Fergus’ “accession to full humanity” and that Jordan sympathizes the most with Fergus as someone who should be praised for being more open-minded and accepting than society expects him to be.
In addition to Dil, Jordan also plays with the gender of other characters. Handler states that “Fergus absorbs feminine gender attributes into his identity through the desublimation of homoeroticism, but the film doesn’t want him to become too feminized”. Fergus shows compassion, kindness, affection; all attributes that society likes to appropriate to women. Yet Handler continues to argue that the film refuses “to slip from the homoerotic into the homosexual”. Someone that would agree that Jordan is glorifying Fergs might be Marjorie Garber. In her essay “Spare Parts”, she points out how it has become almost standard in the medical field to believe that the penis is at the crux of male transvestites’ issues with gender identity, and that female transvestism is almost natural; what woman doesn’t secretly long to be a man?
Although that viewpoint certainly has some validity, I’d like to look at Fergus through the eyes of Bornstein. Yes, Fergus has some attributes that are currently labeled as feminine, and he also has some that are labeled masculine, but this isn’t a bad thing. In Bornstein’s ideal world, everyone would have this balance of characteristics, and even that wouldn’t be stable; it could change every day, depending on the mood of the person. Bornstein doesn’t seem to want a gender-free world as much as she wants a world in which other things—love, desire, age, personality—take precedence over something so restrictive as gender.
Although The Crying Game can definitely give mixed signals at times and contradict itself, that’s to be expected. The movie was made more than seven years ago, and even now our ideas about gender haven’t changed radically. The same confusion and contradiction contained in the movie is present in modern-day discussion about gender and transsexualism. With this movie, Neil Jordan made a big step in the direction of loosening some of the rigid guidelines with which we think about gender.