Boy George, ‘The Crying Game’: The film’s complicated legacy

Boy George
‘The Crying Game’

Highest UK Top 40 position:
Number 22 on September 20, 1992

1.

As a society, we’ve never been as divided as we are in 2022. We’re all locked in a bitter culture war, constantly yelling at (and being yelled at by) family, friends and even strangers.

But at least we can all agree on one thing:

People who share spoilers are weapons-grade assholes.

‘Twas not always thus. Personally, I had almost every big twist of the 90s spoiled for me before I got to see the movie. I knew the end of Fight Club and The Sixth Sense. I knew who Keyser Soze was. I knew who was Luke’s dad, and whether Ilsa gets on the plane.

And of course I knew the big surprise in The Crying Game.

I knew it even before it was spoilered in The Simpsons in 1994. Everyone knew about The Crying Game by then. For a while, it’s all anyone talked about.

2.

The Crying Game has a fairly standard neo-noir plot.

Fergus (Stephen Rea) is part of an IRA cell that kidnaps British squaddie Jody (Forrest Whittaker). The two men bond, and Jody asks Fergus for a favour: if he dies, he wants Fergus to go to London and take care of his girlfriend, Dil.

Jody dies, and Fergus goes to London. He finds Dil and the two begin a passionate affair.

But the IRA hasn’t forgotten about Fergus. They blackmail him into another mission, which goes pear-shaped. At the worst possible moment, Dil discovers that Fergus played a role in Jody’s death.

In the end, Dil rescues Fergus by killing the IRA leader. Fergus takes the fall for Dil and goes to jail—the film ends with Dil visiting Fergus in prison, and the two make plans for what they’ll do when he gets out.

Like most noirs, there is a lot of psychosexual stuff happening under the surface.

In many ways, The Crying Game is actually Fergus’s coming out story. He’s first presented as a straight bloke (what could be more hetero than terrorism?), but his relationship with Jody is flirtatious, and soon turns to love. There’s a scene where Fergus gets a blowjob from Dil, and just as he’s about to orgasm, he has a vision of Jody. Dil asks Fergus a repeated question, but it’s not “do you accept me?”—“do you wish I was him?”

Fergus doesn’t really know if he’s gay, straight or what. He’s spent so long presenting as a Normal Bloke that he’s lost sight of his true nature. That’s the main theme of the film: the conflict between your innate self and the persona that society forces you to adapt.

Stephen Rea is a really interesting choice for this kind of split personality role, especially as his straight persona is an IRA soldier.

From 1988 until 1994, people associated with the IRA weren’t allowed to speak on British TV. BBC came up with a bizarre workaround: they showed footage of people like Gerry Adams, but dubbed them with actors.

So, you would see Gerry’s lips move, but someone else’s voice came out of his mouth.

That voice? Stephen Rea.

3.

The penis shows up around the halfway mark.

It’s not played like a big horror movie jump scare or anything. Fergus and Dil are kissing, he undresses her and moves down her body, the camera follows his movement, and then… it’s just there.

Fergus roughly shoves her aside and runs away to vomit. When he returns, Dil says, “…I thought you knew.”

A lot happens afterwards. Fergus gets over it. He comes back to Dil, apologises, and still loves her. The rest of the movie mostly plays as a traditional boy/girl romance.

Dil isn’t portrayed as a predator, which was kind of a big deal in 1992. In movies, trans characters were often portrayed as villains—or even serial killers, as in Psycho, Dressed to Kill, and 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs. In real life, people were using the “trans panic” defense as justification for assault or even murder.

But still… that’s the scene people remember. The scene was parodied in two 1994 comedies: The Naked Gun 33&1/3 and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.

In Ace Ventura, when Ace realises he kissed someone with a penis, Jim Carrey spends a full minute violently decontaminating himself in the style of the shower scene in Silkwood. Boy George’s version of ‘The Crying Game’ plays in the background throughout:

3.

Of course, spoiler etiquette is not the only thing to have changed since 1992.

I don’t know if you noticed, but gender is a bit of a contentious issue right now. Also, there’s also an ongoing debate about appropriation, and whether you should tell stories about a group if you’re not a member of said group.

(Neil Jordan and Stephen Rea are, as far as I know, cishet men. Jaye Davidson is a cisgendered gay man.)

When I went exploring the contemporary recation to The Crying Game, I was half expecting to find that it was hated as much as Birth Of A Nation or the movie adaptation of Rent.

Actually, there’s a lot of deep addection for the film in the LGBT community, especially from people who felt represented for the first time. A commenter on Quora said:

“I remember watching it before I had heard of the word transgender. I instantly was able to relate to Jaye Davidson’s character (Dil). I understood her femininity, her drive to live a normal existence…It brought a little ray of light into my otherwise dark prison of forced masculinity.”

Another person on a Reddit forum listed the reasons they supported the movie:

Forgive me for taking nothing but delight out of a movie that ends with [a] Black transfemme—

• not detransitioning;
• not dying;
• not beaten up, r*ped, or otherwise miserable as some kind of sick object moral lesson about how we deserve to be punished for simply existing;
•still genuinely loved by the protagonist;

Of course, the film also plenty of critics. One essayist on Medium says flatly, “It is nearly impossible to overstate the damage this film has done to trans women.”

Sam Feder, director of the 2020 documentary Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen said this:

The Crying Game is a masterful piece of filmmaking. It’s political. It’s beautiful. And it was one of the most damaging representations of trans people I saw as a teenager.

When The Crying Game came out, there was this huge media campaign around the secret: Don’t tell the secret… The secret is that the woman is trans. And the reaction to her being trans is about 45 seconds of vomiting by her lover.

It was one of the first images I saw of a trans body — and it was one of the first movies I loved. For me, it’s important to ask: How do we hold things accountable? How do we love them critically? I think that it can be healing to embrace this contradiction.

These are excellent questions.

Our current moment is defined by this endless war between Gammons and Snowflakes. It leaks into how we look at culture, and culture just becomes this endless game of “Who Can Cancel This Fastest?” or “Let’s Own The Libs”.

If we want to have meaningful conversations about culture, we have to navigate a path between the two extremes. As Feder says, we have to hold things accountable while loving them critically.

The Crying Game is actually a good subject for that kind of conversation. There’s a lot to love in this film. There’s also some stuff that should be held to account. Talking about both aspects can, I think, be healing.

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