The Crying Game is a 1992 film written and directed by Neil Jordan. It stars Stephen Rea, Miranda Richardson, Jaye Davidson, and Forest Whitaker, with Adrian Dunbar, Ralph Brown, and Jim Broadbent.
While the theme of the marginalization of race, sex, and sexuality is placed at the forefront of this film, another issue, the right for the self-determination of nations, is also there, but it’s…well, marginalized, as I’ll discuss in more detail in the paragraphs below.
The Crying Game was a critical and commercial success, having won the BAFTA Award for Best British Film and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. It also got Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Rea), Best Supporting Actor (Davidson), and Best Film Editing. The British Film Institute named The Crying Game the 26th-greatest British film of all time in 1999.
Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the complete film (minus the credits).
The proper political and historical context of The Crying Game is to be seen in the Northern Ireland conflict, also known as “The Troubles,” which went on for about thirty years, from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. Mainstream Western culture generally looks on the IRA as a bunch of fanatical, cold-blooded terrorists who indiscriminately killed out of a frenzied, passionate nationalism. What is ignored in this kind of judgement against them is the centuries of brutal British imperialist rule that provoked Irish resistance all the way up to the Troubles that began in the late 1960s.
The Crying Game, as well as The Cranberries’ song “Zombie,” are bourgeois liberal portrayals of the IRA as mindless, violent killers rather than embodying legitimate armed resistance against a colonial oppressor, which is recognized in international law and the UN. Ireland was England’s first colony. The Emerald Isle has been invaded again and again from as early as the 12th century, with the Anglo-Norman invasion. Indiscriminate massacres of the Irish, including women and children, went on countlessly. Just as the Palestinians have a legitimate right to armed struggle against Zionist settler-colonialism, so have the Irish had that right against British imperialism.
To go into more detail about this issue would be beyond the scope of this analysis; the links provided above and below should help with the details left out here. Still, I needed to bring this issue up and give it proper attention because The Crying Game fails to do so; just as blacks and transgender people are marginalized in the real world, so is Irish liberation tossed to the side and ignored, in the real world and in this film.
Granted, it is perfectly legitimate to sympathize with blacks and transgender people when they suffer prejudice and bigotry. The problem with The Crying Game is how the film uses these otherwise justified sympathies as forms of identity politics to keep us on the side of imperialist, colonial British rule. The fact remains that, in order to ensure and maintain the liberation of such marginalized groups as blacks and transgender people, the first thing that must be done is to overthrow the capitalist, imperialist system that uses marginalization as a weapon to keep the working class divided; and the IRA, with their leftist ideology, are one of many groups dedicated to that very overthrow.
One of the things the IRA does in The Crying Game, though, is something that very much divides the common people, in this case, the sexes–they have pretty Jude (Richardson) lure a British soldier named Jody (Whitaker) with a promise of sex, in order to kidnap him and threaten to execute him if an imprisoned IRA member is not released by the UK in three days. Jody curses at Jude for being such a Delilah to him. Well, what can I say? The capitalist/imperialist system must end first, then we can work on ending the social divisions.
As I said above, the real aims and purposes of the IRA are not properly explored in this film. As far as The Crying Game is concerned, these people are just a bunch of “extremist,” terrorist bad guys. Jody will be shot in three days, just because the UK authorities won’t free a fellow IRA man. Towards the end of the film, they want to assassinate a British judge: they don’t care who he really is–he’s just “a legitimate target.” As you can see, the IRA are portrayed as killers for the sake of killing, not as freedom fighters.
Note that the film came out in 1992, just after the disastrous dissolution of the Soviet Union, and thus neoliberalism could really get going without a leash on its neck. All sympathy for the poor and marginalized would be given within a liberal, non-socialist framework.
As Jody is held by the IRA for the last three days of his life, he cleverly establishes a bond with Fergus (Rea), a Provisional IRA member with long hair (I’ll get into the significance of that later). Jody talks about his girlfriend and his love of playing cricket. This bonding will make it harder for Fergus to shoot Jody when the inevitable third day comes, for the UK government will deem Jody expendable, anyway. From the point of view of the film, and the anti-IRA/pro-British imperialist message it’s trying to convey to audiences, this bonding will humanize Jody for us, making us want to sympathize with him, and therefore with the British side.
One of the ways he gains our sympathies is by complaining about the frank, blunt racism of the Irish that he, as a black man, has to put up with while stationed among them as a British soldier. This otherwise legitimate problem is used to distract us from another legitimate one: UK rule over Northern Ireland. Stereotyping the Irish as crass racists also camouflages their victimhood.
One could relate this racism, the using of a woman to lure a man into a trap, and even Irish collaboration with the UK, to Jody’s story about the Scorpion and the Frog, and how doing what’s against one’s interests is nonetheless in one’s nature.
Jody, as a member of the proletariat no less than Jude, Fergus, or Peter (Dunbar), should be concerned with the interests of the global working class (including other blacks, of course) over those of empire; instead, he chooses the job of British soldier for easy remuneration, and gets stationed in a place where not only will he be openly taunted as a “nigger,” but also where he’s at risk of being kidnapped and killed by the very kind of people who would otherwise be contributing to the fight for the kind of world in which that slur won’t be used anymore. Jody chooses easy money over liberation and safety, though, because it’s in his nature to choose what’s easy over what’s hard.
Jude, in going along with the plan to use her body to lure Jody in, rather than use some other, non-objectifying method, is going against her own interests as a woman, thus having to endure hearing Jody’s slurs of “bitch” and “whore.” Recall how, above, I compared her to Delilah (I’ll go into more Samson symbolism later); her name suggests another Biblical betrayer. Still, being a woman who can’t help having internalized the sexist attitudes of her society (including having to serve Jody, the man who now hates her, food and drink), she can’t help it: it’s in her nature.
The Northern Ireland Unionists, generally Protestant and therefore worried that a unified Ireland–being mostly Catholic–would marginalize them, side with the UK and its terroristic atrocities on the Irish in the hopes of preserving their version of Christianity (or so they rationalize). Instead, by siding with the IRA and its leftist agenda, they could help deal a blow to imperialism–which thrives on such forms of divisiveness as racism, sexism, and religious intolerance–which could lead eventually to a kind of world that would do away with such divisions and liberate us all. Still, it’s in one’s nature to choose the quick and easy solution over the long and hard road of ending capitalism.
Fergus, too, chooses the quick and easy solution of sympathizing with Jody, and later, Dil (Davidson), over sympathizing with his fellow Irish. This latter sympathizing would, as I explained above, ultimately lead to the liberation of everyone, including transgender people, if it were to succeed on a global level. Such a path, though, is long and hard, and Fergus can’t help it–it’s in his nature–to reject such a path, leave the IRA, and even go to jail for Dil’s murder of Jude.
To get back to Jody’s clever manipulating of Fergus to win his sympathy, Jody goes beyond just telling him the story of the Scorpion and the Frog, but he also tells Fergus about his girlfriend, Dil, back in London. He has Fergus take out his wallet so Fergus can see a photo of her, to see how pretty she is. By doing this, Jody humanizes both himself and Dil for Fergus. To humanize himself even more, Jody actually has Fergus take his penis out of his pants so he–his hands tied behind his back–can take a piss!
All of these tactics, of course, make it well-nigh impossible for Fergus to shoot Jody in the woods when the dreaded day comes, for the UK authorities–the ‘good guys,’ recall!–have no intention of saving Jody, only of finding the IRA hideout and killing all of the resistance.
Ironically, it’s the British forces who end up killing Jody by hitting him with an armoured vehicle on the road that he accidentally runs out on. They don’t mean to kill him there, but that doesn’t matter: they’ve never taken seriously the need to save one of their own. As I said above, they consider Jody to be expendable: such an attitude is proven by how the UK flies planes over the IRA hideout and reduces the entire shelter to flames, without a thought that Jody could be in there somewhere.
This moment of British viciousness gives us a taste of the might of Western imperialism, hinting as to why the IRA is resisting them in the first place…if we’d pay close attention. Still, the liberal slant of The Crying Game would have us see this viciousness as an example of how ‘there is bad on both sides.’ Little consideration is given to the fact that one side is much more powerful than the other, and that that powerful side has historically caused much more killing than the other. This same false moral equivalency is used in the worsening situation in Gaza, which is characterized in the mainstream media as a ‘war’ between the IDF and Hamas, rather than as an ongoing genocide of unarmed Palestinian civilians.
Fergus, keeping his promise to Jody to go to London and find Dil, has left the IRA–assuming that Jude and Peter are dead–and renounced their revolutionary ways. He changes his name to Jimmy, and he has his hair cut short, symbolic of Samson losing his strength when Delilah has a servant cut his own hair short. Fergus’s haircut thus can be seen to symbolize his giving up of his strength, a symbolic castration, his renouncing of solidarity to Ireland. His changing of his name only reinforces his turning his back on what he once believed in, as well as lying to Dil that he’s Scottish when she gives him a trim in her hair salon. Really: if he was so half-hearted about the IRA, then why did he join in the first place?
Along with losing his strength, “Jimmy” seems to have lost much of his intelligence, too, for he follows Dil to a gay bar, being attracted to her as a cis-woman, and never cluing into what anatomy she might have under her clothes. Though he falls in love with her, he gets a big surprise when her clothes come off as the two of them are about to be intimate, and his reaction is…as we on the left would say…reactionary.
Some might consider these elements to be coincidental, but leaving the IRA (an example of something that Mao would have called backsliding into liberalism), then being a creep and following a girl at night from her place of work to the local bar, and hitting her when he realizes she’s a transwoman…some of us see a meaningful connection here. This sort of thing is why some of us don’t think that liberals have the best solutions to dealing with marginalized people. When he tells Jody not to take being called a “nigger” seriously, that was bad enough. Look at how far he’s fallen since then.
“Jimmy” gets a job in London as a day labourer, and while he’s had dreams of Jody playing cricket, and he tries to identify with Jody by imagining himself playing the game while on the job as he sees other men playing it, he has to put up with a nagging boss, Mr. Deveroux (played by Tony Slattery), who hardly sympathizes with his apparent athletic aspirations. You chose to sell out to the capitalist world, “Jimmy”; you made your bed–you lie in it.
It’s remarkable after his having come to this gay bar, The Metro, and presumably having seen men with men, and women with women, and he needs the bartender, Col (Broadbent) to tell him that Dil is a transwoman (though Col never gets around to telling him). Dil is onstage, singing “The Crying Game,” a song fittingly covered by Boy George on the movie soundtrack.
“Jimmy” has to help Dil get rid of an abusive boyfriend named Dave (Brown, who you may recall played Danny in Withnail and I, and who also appeared in Alien 3 and Star Wars: Episode I). One night in Dil’s apartment with “Jimmy,” they hear Dave outside on the street calling up to her as if he were Stanley Kowalski calling “Hey, Stella!” Dave isn’t so lucky though: instead of her coming back to him, Dil throws his clothes and his goldfish out the window.
“Jimmy” is touched by how she keeps Jody’s old things: his clothes and old photos of him. As we can see, Jody is still being humanized even after his death. Even though “Jimmy” is initially repulsed to learn that Dil is a transwoman, he still has feelings for her, and so in his conflict over her, she is still being humanized for us. No humanizing of the IRA is anywhere to be seen, though.
She appears at his place of work, walking on the field where the cricket games are played, and therefore reinforcing in his mind the association of her and Jody when he sees her coming. The other workers are whistling at her: I doubt they’d be doing that if they knew what’s under her clothes. He breaks a window frame in his shock at her arrival, angering Mr. Deveroux. It’s interesting how LGBT issues can intersect with other leftist issues like labour (“Jimmy” will be docked pay for the damage), yet not with anti-imperialism.
There’s such mutual alienation between “Jimmy” and Deveroux that the latter calls the former “Pat.” (I suppose that the Irishman can be comforted that at least his boss isn’t calling him “Mick.”) Fergus is thus doubly alienated from himself with these two false names. Deveroux’s sexist attitude to Dil the “tart” is enough to make “Jimmy” want to stand up for her–fair enough–but centuries of British oppression of Ireland aren’t enough for Fergus to stand up for his people. Bonding with Jody is all it takes to make him end his commitment to Irish liberation.
So, “Jimmy” manages to reconcile himself with a transwoman, but he can never reconcile himself with the IRA…and this is when Jude suddenly comes back into his life–Delilah with a new hairstyle of her own. Her new, “tougher look” makes us dislike the IRA all the more–how fitting, for the purposes of this movie.
Her hair isn’t much shorter, though, so she still has her strength–aptly shown when she takes out her phallic pistol. Her hair has gone from blonde to a dark red; her clothes are also darker, all of which reinforces our sense that she’s one of the ‘bad guys.’ Her implicit threat on Dil’s life, if Fergus doesn’t comply with the IRA’s plan to assassinate the judge, also reinforces our sense of antagonism to her.
From here on, we’re meant to see the IRA as not just a bunch of nationalists who are a little too militant for their own good, not just one of ‘two bad sides,’ but as just pure, unmitigated evil. The evil side of the Western empire isn’t even to be considered as such: they’re just ‘mainstream society’ now; in the neoliberal new world order that just defeated the Soviet Union, this globalizing capitalist ‘rules-based order’ is just the way things are. If you try to rebel against it, you won’t just be killed, you’ll be forgotten by most people; history will vilify and blacken your name, and you’ll be marginalized in ways that not even blacks and LGBT people are these days.
The man Fergus is supposed to hit is an aging, arthritic judge. He’s to be shot on the street as he’s struggling to get out of his car and go with his security men into a building. His weakness is again to elicit our sympathy for him, as Jody was sympathized with. We’re not meant to feel any sympathy for, say, the unarmed Irish protestors who were gunned down on Bloody Sunday, for that sort of thing is never mentioned in the film.
Because he wants Dil to be unrecognizable to Jude (who’s seen him with her), Peter, and any other IRA members, Fergus takes her to her hair salon and cuts her hair short. He’d have her without makeup and dressed in Jody’s old cricket clothes. This removal of her feminine trappings thus strips her of her sexual power, not only depriving Dil of the femininity she wants to be able to express to the world, but also of what makes her feel desirable to him, thus making her feel especially insecure and vulnerable to his leaving her.
There is thus more Samson symbolism here, in Dil’s loss of power through her haircut from her–as she suspects–male Delilah, for she fears that he’ll betray her and leave her. In another reversal of sex roles, her dressing like Jody is what, from a transwoman’s point of view, would truly feel like cross-dressing. Still, her dressing like Jody must feel like, from Fergus’s point of view, his successful protecting of Jody where he previously failed to do so.
This Samson and Delilah symbolism brings up some important themes in The Crying Game, including loyalty vs betrayal, and having vs lacking the strength to fight one’s enemies. Samson eventually grows his hair back, the source of his strength, and defeats his enemies. He’s betrayed by Delilah, as Jody is betrayed by Jude, and Dil–jealous that Jude is about to steal “Jimmy” from her–fears his betrayal. But the greatest betrayal of all, though not properly reflected on by the average viewer of this film, is Fergus’s betrayal of Ireland, and his weak caving in to the UK through Jody and Dil, as symbolized by his haircut.
Fergus finally tells Dil, who’s drunk and in her flat, about the IRA plot to kidnap and kill Jody, and Fergus’s involvement in the plot. So betrayed does she feel by “Jimmy” that, while he’s asleep on her bed, she ties his hands and feet to the bedposts; she also takes out a pistol. Since he can’t shoot the judge now, Peter does it instead and gets killed by the judge’s security. Jude goes over with her pistol to Dil’s flat to confront Fergus.
Dil is in a most ironic situation here: a transwoman dressed like a man and thus feeling symbolically (though, of course, not literally) castrated, that is, having lost her sexual power. Still, with that phallic pistol in her hands and pointing it at Jude, she’s as much a phallic woman (!) as armed Jude is in a symbolic sense.
Knowing that Delilah-Jude used “those tits and that arse” to lure Jody in, Dil shoots and kills her. Fergus, however, takes the blame for the murder and goes to jail so Dil can go free.
It’s interesting how, in this confrontation between Dil and Jude, we see a case of strong women–be they cis or trans, it doesn’t matter–as part of a camouflaging of and a distraction from anti-imperialist struggle, just as the issues of prejudice against blacks and LGBT people have been used as such camouflage in this film. As I said above, eradicating capitalist imperialism–and its alienating divisiveness–is the best way to ensure an enduring protection for these people against these prejudices, but liberals wish to maintain the privileges of that imperialism while pretending to care about eradicating those prejudices–hence, this film.
Indeed, how does the film end?…with an Irishman in jail for a murder of an Irishwoman committed by a UK citizen. His sacrifice is seen by Dil as a Christ-like love (John 15:13), and Christ was crucified for having attempted to rise up against Roman imperialism, by the way. As far as other relevant Biblical references are concerned, when Dil visits Fergus in jail several months later, we see her hair growing back, like Samson’s–she’s getting her power back.
Now, remember, a British armoured vehicle is what actually hit and killed Jody, not any of the IRA, who were fighting to liberate Ireland from British imperialism. All the IRA agents in the film are dead. Fergus has given up his liberty to save that of a Brit.
The real crying game of this film thus is how sympathy is generated for marginalized people–blacks and LGBT people–which is in itself perfectly warranted, but done so here at the expense of an historically victimized people whose side of the story is never told, not even in passing. The Irish are the truly marginalized people in The Crying Game: denigrated, vilified…never heard.
Infinite Ocean 