The Crying Game · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Fergus keeps a photograph of a man in cricket whites. Nothing turns on it. It isn't evidence, nobody asks him for it, and he never shows it to anyone who could act on what it means. He just has it, and takes it out, and looks. The whole strangeness of The Crying Game is folded into that small habit: a thriller whose hero carries an object with no job in the plot, only in him.

Start with what the first hour promises. A soldier is lured off a fairground by a woman, Percy Sledge playing over the lights, then hooded and held for an exchange. That is a machine cinema has run on for a century: someone perceives a situation, acts, and the situation changes. Gilles Deleuze called it the movement-image, and its engine the sensory-motor circuit, perception in one end and action out the other, every cut serving the chain. Jordan builds it faithfully, on the template of Frank O'Connor's "Guests of the Nation," where captors and prisoner pass the hours with cards and small courtesies precisely so the execution will be unwatchable when it comes.

Then it doesn't come. Jody dies under the tracks of an armoured vehicle, and the killing Fergus had spent days steeling himself to commit is taken out of his hands by an accident. He is left holding a readiness with nowhere to put it. Deleuze's name for this failure is the crisis of the action-image: a character who still perceives perfectly but can no longer answer what he sees with anything that resolves it. Stephen Rea's performance is built for exactly that. He gives you a face registering cost rather than decision, and Kant Pan's cutting holds on it long past the point where information has been delivered. Deleuze would call him a seer, a man who watches and endures where the genre wants an agent. You end up watching him rather than watching to find out what he'll do.

Then the film breaks in half.

The join between the hostage drama and the London melodrama isn't a transition, it's a rupture, staged so the audience's disorientation runs parallel to Fergus's. Deleuze called a cut like this an irrational cut: instead of saying "and then," it says only "and," setting two unlike blocks side by side and leaving the gap for us to cross on foot. The colour changes across it. Ian Wilson shot Ireland in wet green-grey and London in reds and ambers, the Metro bar lit like a jewel box slightly past its best, separation built in front of the lens with gels and set dressing because 1992 had no digital intermediate to fix it afterward. That is close to Deleuze's colour-image, colour that absorbs a scene and its feeling instead of describing a place. Fergus walks out of a world with no colour into one drenched in it and cannot metabolize the change.

London is made of mirrors. The one behind Dil's hairdressing chair, the fish tank, the reflecting surfaces of the bar. Deleuze's crystal-image describes what happens when an image and its double stop being separable and you can no longer say which is the thing and which the reflection. Jordan inherits the staging from Performance, where a gunman hides out with an androgynous performer and identity is exchanged at dressing tables rather than in dialogue. But the crystal here sits in Fergus's looking. He arrived carrying a dead man's photograph, and finds a person he can love and at the same time use as a surface on which Jody stays visible. The film is honest enough to let that be a use.

Which is why the haircut lands so badly, in the right way. Fergus cuts Dil's hair and puts her in Jody's cricket whites, and the scene supports two readings at once: he is hiding her from a unit that wants her dead, and he is rebuilding his dead friend out of a living body, worked through mirrors, in the same coverage Hitchcock gave Scottie remaking Judy in Vertigo. Deleuze calls this an index of equivocity, a gesture that belongs to two situations and refuses to choose between them. Care and appropriation, performed by one pair of hands. The cricket kit carries its own charge: a colonial game, worn by a Black British soldier posted to Ireland, then transferred to an Irish republican on the run. That is Deleuze's gest, a costume that exposes a social relation nobody in the film ever states.

The reveal deserves the same precision. Jordan stages it as a single sustained look and declines to cut away at the moment every convention says he should. Fergus's revulsion arrives in his body before it reaches his thinking, and Deleuze's term for an encounter like that is the unthought: not a fact you receive but something that outruns the categories you had ready. What breaks is a habit. Deleuze's relation-image covers films whose meaning lives in what the audience already assumes, and its working currency is the mark, an object that means by custom. Cricket whites mean decency. A woman singing in a bar means a fatal woman. A hood means a hostage. The reveal is a demark, the anomaly that snaps a customary chain and forces interpretation to start again from nothing, and the chain it snapped belonged to us, not only to Fergus. Miramax turned that into money by asking a continent of critics to keep quiet, which could only have worked in the last years before the internet, when a secret still held for months.

A demark is a machine for reorganizing an audience's reflexes, and machines get borrowed. Ace Ventura had the beat as a gag within two years, and the convention of staging a trans woman's body as a shock for a straight man has been argued over since, most thoroughly in Disclosure. This film gave a trans character real interiority before there was any commercial precedent for it, and handed that trope to everyone after. Both are true.

Under all of it sits Jody's fable: the scorpion stings the frog carrying him across the river because it is his nature, and they both drown. Welles put it on film first, as a banquet toast in Mr. Arkadin. Jordan lifts it whole and makes it bookends, moving it from Jody's mouth into Fergus's at the end, through prison glass. It works as a symbol in Deleuze's narrow sense, the one object condensing the relation a film is organized around. And the plot spends two hours contradicting it. Fergus carries someone across the river and goes under for it, and never stings.

That reversal is Jordan's invention, and it's structural rather than thematic. Odd Man Out had already given Irish cinema the wounded gunman handed between strangers across one night, each host projecting a different meaning onto him. The Long Good Friday supplied the IRA crossing into the London underworld, and the long held take of a face arriving at comprehension, the duration bet Pan makes again on the reveal and the prison coda. Jordan's move was to put the rupture in the middle. The prestige twists that followed, The Usual Suspects and Se7en and The Sixth Sense, mostly put theirs at the end, where a reveal re-sorts information and the credits come up. Jordan puts his at the hinge, where the characters have to go on living for another hour with what has just broken. So do we.

Watch it again for the photograph. Watch what Rea's face does when nothing is being asked of it. The film never settles whether Fergus learned to love someone or only learned to remake someone, and that refusal is the most modern thing in it.