But last night I took a break from one war of attrition to entertain myself with another, watching Neil Jordan's 1992 film The Crying Game (it's on my Irish list and thus, technically, "work"). [I'm assuming we've all got the Boy George goods on this film, but in case I'm mistaken: SPOILER ALERT.]
The film begins with the seduction and kidnapping of Jody (a British soldier, originally from Antigua, played by Forest Whitaker) by the IRA, who will shoot him unless one of their political prisoners is freed. Eye-for-an-eye. Stephen Rea's character Fergus begins to identify with this soldier, another colonial, and befriends him. Jody tells Fergus about his "girl" in London, Dil. When the time comes to shoot the captive, Fergus hesitates, Jody runs, and is "hit by a Saracen" as the British pull up to blow the IRA holdout to pieces. Fergus escapes to London where he assumes the name Jimmy and seeks out Dil, with whom he begins an affair; he is constantly asking questions about Jody and having visions of him wearing cricket whites, pitching a wicked "wrong 'un". Then there's the big penis-reveal (actually, not that big) and Fergus's past comes back to haunt him (another dominatrix Kathleen ni Houlihan in the form of Miranda Richardson), and so on. (I don't want to spoil the whole thing.)
What I noticed on a second viewing of the film is the way the retributive economy of the opening scenario (eye-for-an-eye) is tested and rethought in the films second and third acts as the characters attempt to take one another's places, subjectively crossing divides of gender, race, nationality and sexuality (I-for-an-I). The plot is an ingenious attempt to extricate a "mate" from "stalemate", and it possesses all the optimism, ultimately, of a romantic comedy (an alternate ending, included on the new DVD of the film, ends with Jimmy/Fergus telling Dil, "nobody's perfect," a la Some Like It Hot; the true ending blares "Stand by Your Man" with a triumphant wink).
Insofar as Fergus, calling himself Jimmy in London, wants to take care of Dil in Jody's place, he continually speaks from the position of the dead, with whom he can never entirely identify. This is something I'm working through right now, especially in relation to poets like Owen and Rosenberg, and for my elegy list. So more on it soon.
But the film also comes in a tradition of cross-dressing and gender play in Irish drama which may have it's best start in Synge's Playboy of the Western World (where Christy exits in drag, having cocked up his stab at Oedipal violence) and continues in the plays of Frank McGuinness. McGuinness's 1985 play Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Toward the Somme provides a shrapnel-scarred narrative of homosocial institutions and homosexual prohibitions in the traumatic landscape of "No Man's Land." McGuinness, like Jordan and Synge (and, I think, like Owen too, in his melodramatic, sado-masochistic anti-elegies), is investigating the potential for "camp" to subvert nationalism (by, as they say in the trenches, "going over the top") when he stages the ghosts of the 36th Ulster Division.
[[Of course, the name "Fergus" brings me to look back at Yeats's "Who Goes with Fergus?" and, though it doesn't connect particularly, it has one great effect worth noting here: check out how Yeats collapses all the sounds of "dance upon the level shore" in line 3 into the single word "dishevelled" (as in "dishevelled wandering stars") in the last line. Neat!]]
