It is a great movie. However, having grown up in the midwest in a very small town, I wish there were a few more elements of people that were kind, educated and caring. Those are my memories and while not trans I certainly was not typical “farm boy” or even “small town boy” material. However, Swank was just amazing. I am not impressed by Eastwood, but look forward to what she’ll do in this new movie.
I didn’t grow up in the Midwest but I did grow up in a small city in Tennessee and lived for six months in Lincoln, Nebraska so I know not all people in either region are homophobic assholes. It was just a gut reaction and one I’m already over.
I hope this won’t lead to my first pitting but who knows.
Anyway I must say I hated this movie.
Like a few folks here, I have spent a lot of time in very untolerant places, both to race and sexual proclivities.
Like you folks here, I consider myself very accepting of people. Whatever makes you happy.
I do not in any way condone the acts that happened to the main character or the real life counterpart.
But I do have to say that there was a large element of personal risk here. Reading through the comments you see the back and forth posts of how people shouldn’t be killed for being themselves, and how the personal choice doesn’t make the actions of neanderthals ok, and all of that. But you also must realize, if this person grew up in this area, and this socio-economic bracket their whole lives, they were well aware of the sterotypes and reactions of these people. I kept watching as the Hillary Swank’s character kept putting her/himself in danger over and over again, in a few situations almost with a sense of danger/excitement (like when her brother or cousin or someone tells her to knock it off because she doesn’t know what she’s getting into. She looks almost impish like it’s a factor of adventure at that time).
There is no justification for killing or harming another human being. Saying someone “had it coming” maybe paints it as too much of a justification, but when people put themsleves into dangerous positions, they can hardly be surprised when something unseemly happens.
Does it make it right? Not in the least. Does it mean that we can all put on our happy thoughts caps and “good vibe” it away by making people accept others, most likely not. Look at the dragging death of the black man in Texas a while back (i forget his name), based entirely on predjudices that this country should have been long past. Well after segregation is gone and you would think most "sane " people would be beyond judging someone on their skin and doing awful things to them.
Then you look at the cases where someone is of a group of people who is currently heavily prejudiced against in this day and age, and that person puts themselves into a dangerous situation with the very people that they know hold these views against them. You can’t tell me that you don’t see a potential for violence, as ugly and wrong as it is.
We can sit around and bemoan all the injustices of the world and talk about equality for all and the terrible things that happen to people who are different. But the fact is sometimes people also have to take into account the danger they are getting themselves into as well.
Naaah. That’s nothing to Pit over. I do agree with you about the element of personal risk. However, I guess I take into condideration that this was the area Brandon grew up in. He was a bit naive and a bit troubled (he had a small rap sheet) I think he may have been blinded by his desire or need to fit in and be accepted as the person he was trying to become. He wanted street cred as a man and in that group of people he found it…for a while.
I believe Brandon was a high school drop-out (I could be wrong) but nonetheless in watching the interviews with family and friends he didn’t seem to be very educated. I don’t think he truly realized he would get quite that extreme of a negative reaction to his being transgendered. I don’t think he realized he would be found out.
I know for myself, being gay, I am proud but not an idiot. I will walk down the street holding hands with my partner and throw my arm around her while sitting in a bar but there are certain bars in which the clientele is just a little too skeevy and red-neckian. In those bars I remain silently proud but I don’t flaunt it in such a way that will get our heads bashed in in the parking lot. I have to admit, though, in my youth I was a bit more confrontational and even naive. So I can understand Brandon’s boldness. The whole thing is a damn shame. I’m just glad that Nissen and Lotter are paying for their crimes.
What The Chao said, BurnMeUp. That’s why I made the tempered response I did to Rex Fenestrarum – his point, that people do need to be cautious, given the world as it is and not as we would want it to be, is quite valid, though the idea that that licenses anyone to be violent is repulsive.
Stereotypes about FtM transsexuals? I would be surprised if people of that region and socio-economic bracket had any preconceptions at all about transsexual men, because most were probably completely unaware of their existence.
In fact, if not for the publicity around Brandon Teena’s murder and the subsequent movies, I think a great many Americans of various backgrounds would never have given a moment’s thought to transsexual men. There have been a few transsexual women in the public eye, and several movies and TV shows dealing with transsexual women characters, but when it comes to well-known transsexual men Brandon Teena is pretty much alone.
So Brandon had little to go by except his own experience. He’d been living at least part of the time as a boy since high school and had dated girls before. In Lincoln he’d told his family that he was transsexual, and told several people who knew him as a boy that wasn’t an ordinary bio-male. Sometimes he claimed to have been born intersexed, other times he said he was transsexual but sometimes pretended to be post-op already. Apparently no one ever reacted violently.
A lot of posters in this thread seem to have missed this point, but Brandon was not murdered because he was transsexual. That played into it, but the immediate motive was self-preservation on the part of his rapists. They had assumed that Brandon would be too ashamed and frightened to press charges. The “dangerous position” Brandon put himself in was that of a rape victim who refused to keep quiet and instead expected the law to protect him and punish his attackers. I think he did have some right to be surprised that local law enforcement refused to cooperate.
*I don’t think “Midwestern rednecks” are quite as bad a group as they’ve been painted as here, and I know the film did not portray them as simply brutal, ignorant bigots. As a teenager in the Midwest in the mid-90s I knew people of basically the same background, and I would have been stunned if any of them had ever attacked a transsexual person just for being transsexual. Many were more accepting than your average middle-class WASP. In fact, I knew one family that had a transsexual woman living with them. Although the teenaged son wasn’t happy about this arrangement and said all kinds of nasty things about her, his main problem seemed to be that he felt she was sponging off his family and taking advantage of his mother’s kindness.
Remember, these supposedly worthless redneck bigots were the people who took Brandon in when he had no where else to go. Lana’s mother did kick him out when his past came to light, but even after he was outed and raped, Lisa Lambert (called Candace in the movie) let him stay with her. Also staying with Lisa at that time was her sister’s boyfriend, Philip DeVine…a physically disabled black man. He was omitted from the screenplay for Boys Don’t Cry, but he was murdered along with Brandon and Lisa. I don’t see any reason to assume that Brandon’s new friends were particularly prejudiced people.
Anyway, it’s not lower-income Midwesterners in general who went after Brandon, it’s two specific men: John Lotter and Tom Nissen. Aside from being drunken ex-cons, it seems that Lotter was jealous of Brandon because of his relationship with Lana. It’s possible that Lotter would have attacked Brandon for that reason alone even if he hadn’t been transsexual, although I doubt he’d have raped him. Perhaps Brandon should have avoided association with Lotter and Nissen, but keep in mind that Brandon himself had a criminal record. And dropping Lotter and Nissen would have meant leaving Lana, Lisa, and his other new friends.