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Director: Kimberley Pierce
Distributor: Fox Searchlight
Boys Don't Cry, written and directed by Kimberley Pierce, is a film provoked by the 1993 rape and murder of Teena Brandon/Brandon Teena, a 21-year-old transsexual. Brandon was killed in rural Nebraska, to which he had fled from Lincoln, where, Pierce sketchily, and light-heartedly, informs us, life had been laced with the intermittent pleasures and steady difficulties of trying to live as though a boy. Once relocated, Brandon won the friendship of a number of the town's young men, and the love of one of its most desired young women. When Brandon's neurotic penchant for acting out leads to yet another brief stay in a local jail, personal history and biological gender combine to expose her. This exposure eventually leads to her rape and murder.
Pierce, a New Yorker, dropped everything to attend the trial and, for months afterwards, lived amongst people who had constituted Brandon's last circle of intimates. The film, then, is a kind of case report. But rather than primarily study Brandon's transsexuality, the film presents her transsexual inclinations as a series of euphoric conquests. The film focuses on a range of anxious reactions to her transsexuality. Its strategy is comparable, perhaps, to using the particulars of the Dora case not for what they might reveal about female hysteria, but for what they might reveal about misogyny. The internal anguish wrought by and determining Brandon's sexual confusion is mostly left for the viewer to imagine and fill in. This gap will be particularly noticeable to a clinically inclined viewer. As viewers, we are given only intermittent glimpses into the costs of Brandon's daily sexual transgressions. These glimpses are, in part, meant to remind us of the costs of our own daily economies of transgression and compliance.
In her film, Pierce inserts the unconventional problems of transsexuality into a conventional narrative structure. Throughout the film Brandon is presented as a d