A Second Opinion of Boys Don't Cry

In her introduction to her essay on Boys Don’t Cry, Brenda Cooper wrote that the film offered its viewers “narratives that challenge and confront societal boundaries related to gender and sexuality” (45). In last week’s reading, however, John Sloop criticized the ending of Boys Don’t Cry, noting that the ending is yet another example of reinforced heteronormativity in gender troubling cases. While the film does challenge some aspects of gender and sexuality, I have to agree with Sloop. Some aspects of Boys Don’t Cry, particularly the ending, reinforce heteronormativity rather than challenge gender binaries. Through its final love scenes and its portrayal of Brandon’s killers, the film seems quite closed-minded.  

Kimberly Pierce, the director of Boys Don’t Cry, adds small details to the story of Brandon Teena that imply that he (and arguably Lana) is a true lesbian by the end of the film. After Brandon is exposed as a biological female, Lana and Brandon have their first honest sexual encounter as two women. Pierce added this scene to the film despite Brandon’s friends and family’s insistence that Brandon was disgusted by lesbianism and considered himself a heterosexual male. He would never have had sex with Lana as a woman. The final sex scene implies that Brandon is ready to live a life as a lesbian, as he and Lana are prepared to run away together. This scene shatters Brandon’s ambiguous gender identity and reveals him to be a lesbian female, which would also allow him to perform female masculinity without punishment. Problem solved.

As Sloop wrote in Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex Identity in Contemporary U.S. Culture (2004), Lana and Brandon’s final sex scene “clearly opens an interpretive door that allows reading the two as now occupying a lesbian relationship. Such an interpretation both refigures Brandon’s life ‘as a man’ as fear of her own homosexuality and maintains a gender-as-genitalia equation” (72). To a mainstream heteronormative audience, Cooper’s more liberal interpretation that Brandon and Lana’s fluid sexuality challenges the dominant heteronormative ideology does not matter. Audiences will choose the interpretation that sticks to the status quo and does not challenge their worldviews.

Pierce’s portrayal of Brandon’s killers is also troubling. While I absolutely agree with Cooper that the film de-mythologizes the American heartland, I have trouble accepting other claims. Cooper noted that the film also problematized heterosexuality through its portrayal of Brandon’s killers, John Lotter and Tom Nissen. Cooper explained, “Heteromasculinity as exhibited through the characters of John and Tom, therefore, seems not only unnatural, strange, and lacking in virtue, but also a serious threat to society” (51). Indeed, John and Tom, the only significant heterosexual male characters in the film, are monsters; however, I believe that this portrayal oversimplifies the Brandon Teena case. John and Tom are portrayed as undeniably unhinged and dangerous. Tom self-mutilates and tries to convince Brandon to cut himself, too. John encourages Brandon to outrun the police and then throws everyone but Lana out of the car after Brandon receives a speeding ticket, even though it is not his car. John has a weird sexual obsession with Lana (whom we are told wrote letters to John as a child while John was in jail) and her mother. John and Tom are clearly mentally unstable, so it is no surprise that they kill Brandon. The film loses an opportunity to have its killers wrestle with moral complexity. The audience cannot identify with the killers and has no reason to think about why John and Tom feel Brandon has to die-- John and Tom are just insane. They never debate whether or not to kill Brandon. They never explain why they feel Brandon needs to die. The film could have directly confronted America’s discomfort with gender and sexual ambiguity with a well-placed monologue, but instead the killers simply kill Brandon because they are crazy. The end.

 While in many ways, Boys Don’t Cry and the Brandon Teena story complicate gender binaries as well as heteronormativity, the film also reinforces the dominant ideology by arguably turning Brandon and Lana into a lesbian couple and by coding Brandon’s killers as simply crazy. By refusing to stick to Brandon’s self-perceived heterosexuality, the film allowed the audience to interpret Brandon as a lesbian, simplifying his gender and sexual identity. Additionally, by making Brandon’s killers psychotic, the filmmaker sacrificed the opportunity to explore John and Tom’s discomfort with Brandon and perhaps turn a mirror on the America as a whole. Audiences could not identify with the killers, and thus, did not have to confront their own homophobia. I viewed the film as an enormous missed opportunity.