All right, I’ve just finished watching Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (I know, I know… took me over a decade but I finally got around to it) and thought it was an excellent film, but I have lingering questions.
Perhaps a wise Doper can explain this to me: Why was Dil a man? While it certainly added another dimension to the story, I never picked up on exactly what the reason was.
I know I’m going to get some responses like, “Duh, 'cause he/she was,” but I’m wondering if the film ever actually ever gave a cause for Dil’s life as a female impersonator.
Sub-question: The very first scene has Jodi lusting after the undercover Jude, and yet his back-home girlfriend is a man. Was Jodi straight and just never figured out Dil’s true gender (unlikely, I think), or was he gay and thought Jude was actually a man, too, or what?
I’m not quite sure what you’re asking. If you mean, “Why did Dil choose to live as a woman”, I guess it’s because she saw herself that way (and adopted the female gender identity so thoroughly that it would seem silly to call Dil “him”). I’m no expert on transvestites and transexuals, but for many, it’s not an impersonation so much as an attempt to live the way they really feel.
If you’re asking, “Why did Neil Jordan write Dil that way instead of as a regular woman,” I also wondered about that. After awhile it occurred to me that there’s an underlying theme about choosing one’s own identity instead of accepting what’s handed you. Dil chooses to live as a woman, and Fergus chooses to reject his IRA identity because it just isn’t him. This is brought together at the end of the movie, when Dil visits Fergus in prison, where he’s doing time after taking the rap for Dil’s thorough shooting of Jude (who had it coming). Fergus tells Dil the story of the frog and the scorpion, which is about acting according to one’s nature. It’s in Fergus’ nature to be compassionate, so IRA terrorism really wasn’t for him. It seemed to me that he only accepted this after Dil challenged him to accept her identity as a woman.
Or, I could just be talking through my hat here. Hope that helps.
Perhaps he was bisexual and was attracted to both. Perhaps he knew Dil was physically a man but fell in love with the heart and mind and the body was just a relatively unimportant anomaly.
I always thought that he was mostly heterosexual, but was able to cope with Dil being physically male. I also thought that this was the reason that he ran off after some available woman…to reassure himself that he was, in fact, mostly hetero, despite his long-term relationship with a physically male/psychologically female person.
I’m still pissed that I heard a DJ make a remark about how appropriate it was that Boy George had sung the title song, “since he’s something of a gender-bender himself.” I hadn’t seen the movie at the time and when I DID see it, I had already guessed most of the big secret.
I recently saw the movie again, and now after the second viewing I realize that there were giant hints to what was gonna happen later on.
For example, the scene where Jodi needed to pee, and Fergus had to hold his penis for him. “It’s just a piece of meat.”
Also, I can see now that the Metro is clearly a transsexual or gay bar, now that I know what to look for.
I interpreted Jodi’s character as seeing Dil as a woman, despite her (his) biology. To him, it didn’t matter what was hanging between Dil’s legs, because she was a woman as far as he was concerned. So he was attracted to her femaleness, which meant he could be attracted to someone else’s femininity too, like Jude’s own.
There’s also a line where Jodi (Forrest Whittaker) says something like: “I don’t know why I went with her [Jude, IRA bait woman]…she’s not my type, really…”
Implying that she would have been more of his type if she’d had a penis.
And then there’s Fergus’s dream where he sees Jodi in cricket gear laughing at him after he finds out Dil is a man. So Jodi had some sort of idea that meeting Dil would shake Fergus’s narrow world view.
AND, at the beginning of the movie, Jody says to Jude, “I’ve never held a woman’s hand before.” This is, of course, a rather odd thing to say when one supposedly has a girlfriend waiting back home.
He actually says something like “I’ve never pissed holding a girl’s hand before.”
I never thought Jody was technically gay. I always got the impression that Jody loved Dil for who she was, and the fact that she was biologically a man wasn’t a big deal for him. It was something he could look past because he cared so much for who she was inside. Fergus falls for Dil too, and then has to come to terms with the fact that being gay or straight has nothing to do with it. He’s fallen for Dil’s heart, and is thrown into a massive confusion of sexual identity when he discovers she’s a man. Of course, in the end, he’s still struggling with whether or not he can love another man, but he’s making great leaps and bounds.
That’s not the way I remember it, because as I recall the scene, he follows up that sentence with something like, “…but it feels really good.” I think that if I’m remembering right, that makes MUCH more sense with my version than with yours.
My take on it (which may be colored by the fact that I’ve only seen the movie once, when it first came out, years ago): Dil is not a man any more than I am. Dil looks for all the world to be a full-time transgendered individual, which means she’s not a female impersonator. It’s true that she works as one, but that doesn’t make her one. Lots of transgendered individuals do: it’s a job that works well for them. Sometimes the job comes before the decision to live full-time, sometimes it comes after; we don’t know which it is in Dil’s case but pretty clearly Dil is not dressing as female merely for professional reasons.
Jaye really nailed the role, too. This is one of my favorite movies, even though I’ve only seen it once. I think a lot of it is that it hits home very personally, being transgendered myself, and especially since I was really rather early in my own self-discovery when I saw it.
It also goes a long way toward humanizing Fergus, calling into play the sexual mores of Northern Ireland…it’s not so much a matter of whether Jody is or isn’t gay, the way I see it.
I’m still feeling last night, so I might be full of it.
I have always spoiled myself before going to movies, and in the case of The Crying Game, I was glad I did. Already knowing about the surprise let me focus on the movie and not the twist. It didn’t affect my enjoyment of the film in the least. I am an avid movie goer and I would list this among the very best movies of the nineties, if not of all time.
Much of the focus at the time was on the performance of Jaye, which was very good. Unfortunately it tended to overshadow the performances of Stephen Rea and Forrest Whittaker, two of the best character actors alive today. Too much attention is paid to those who Act with a capital A (Sean Penn, Al Pacino etc . . .). I find the quiet performances in this film to be much more realistic and nuanced than anything Penn has ever done.
The movie was as much about the relationship between Fergus and Jody as it was about either one of them and Dil. Dil was what they shared, it wasn’t meant to be the only focus of the film. Now I feel like renting this for about the tenth time. I should just give up and buy the damn thing. Is it on DVD?
