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From the very first scene in Boys Don't Cry, we are inducted into a world of looking. We start in motion, with the streak of car lights and a highway spooling out under our gaze in a classical conceit of Hollywood Americana, the yellow dividing lines pulsing like a strobe. Here we are: on the road. The image is all movement, the illusion of speed, time travel. In the audience we sit suspended, fixed in our seats but seemingly hovering above the pavement zooming away from us on the screen. And cinema works its magic again. The dead stillness of thousands of flat two-dimensional images glides in sequenced animation and flickers to life: we are flying.
Juxtaposed against this ecstatic slide of mobbing pictures, the fixed stare of Brandon comes into view, only his eyes caught in the reflection of a rear-view mirror. Brandon is looking through the mirror, back at his pursuer, a cop and a dusty road with signal lights flashing. But what he sees is us. Or rather, we suddenly see ourselves. It's as if the whole screen has suddenly been transformed from a portal on a fast-moving world into a mirror that captures our own gaze, that shows us our own eyes, that catches us looking on.
Wo es war, soll ich werden, wrote Freud. Literally, where there was it, shall there be I. Out of the id emerges the ego. The first few moments of the film could be a cinematic gloss of that famous dictum. First the spinning vortex of lights in which we hover disembodied, a kind of pure flow of drive, and then out of that river of sensation, the emergence of a pair of human eyes reflected in the mirror, setting a place for us that we can call our