Boys Don\'t Cry Movie Review:

Boys Don't Cry

Movie Review: "Boys Don't Cry"

Director Kimberly Peirce's "Boys Don't Cry" (1999) starring Hillary Swank as Brandon Teena depicts the life and death of a young woman who believed that she should have been born a man. Teena concealed her female gender and successfully convinced almost everyone she knew that she was really 'Brandon,' while she was living in a small town in Nebraska. But then, Teena's real identity was discovered, and she was raped, beaten and killed by some 'good 'ol boys' who were threatened by his/her ambiguous gender.

Teena, when her identity was concealed, was first accepted as one of the boys, and she even began a romance with a woman named Lana, who loved 'Brandon' because Brandon was the first person Lana had ever dated who was kind and sensitive. Brandon Teena first won Lana's heart when 'he' gave Lana a flower, something that Lana had never received before from a lover.

However, although Brandon Teena was very different from many of the cruel lovers Lana had known in the past, in the persona of Brandon, the central character was very much one of the boys. In some ways, this was the paradox of Brandon's ambiguous identity. Brandon was not a politically correct or socially aware transgendered person. S/he was very much a part of the highly 'gendered' society of the American West, where men were men and women were women. Part of Brandon's confusion lat in the fact that he did not know anyone else like 'himself,' he only knew that no available female identities suited him, so he assumed the persona of maleness. Maleness for Brandon still meant hanging out in bars, drinking, and hanging out with petty criminals. Ultimately, Brandon Teena's story and the movie "Boys Don't Cry" condemns the stifling limits of American cultural conceptions of both maleness and femaleness, as well as the limited mindset of the characters that victimize and act violently towards Brandon and Lana.