Neil Jordan's The Crying Game

In Neil Jordan's 1992 film The Crying Game, a British soldier named Jody (Forest Whitaker) is taken hostage by a group of Irish terrorists. In the course of his brief captivity, he develops a friendship with one of his captors named Fergus (Stephen Rea). Realising that he may never emerge from his ordeal alive, Jody shows a picture of his girlfriend Dil to Fergus and tells him to look her up when the dust settles if anything happens to him. After Jody is killed in a freak accident, Fergus heads to London and locates Dil, only to fall in love with her. To his great horror and to the audience's considerable surprise, Dil turns out to be a cross-dressing male.

The Crying Game was the film industry's sleeper hit in 1992, making about $62 million at the box office. The success of the movie was largely related to the way it was marketed —namely, a film with a secret that nobody, not even the critics, was revealing. This shrewd strategy drew people because they thought they were going to see a thriller rather than a love story with strong homosexual themes. Once the audience took their seats in the darkened theatre, they watched a narrative unfold that repeatedly set up situations only to knock them down. In the opening scene, ironically accompanied by a blaring rendition of ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’, Jody tries to pick up a woman at a carnival. The audience assumes that Jody is a straight male. The first jolt is delivered when they discover that the woman he has picked up is a terrorist who has laid a trap for him.

The next twist is that one terrorist is nothing like a terrorist at all. Instead, the audience enjoys the development of a poignantly close relationship between Jody and Fergus, one that is homo-erotically tinged by a scene in which Fergus must hold the penis of Jody (whose hands are tied) so he can urinate. While the major surprise is the discovery that Dil (Jaye Davidson) is actually a male, a more profound and unexpected development is that Fergus continues t