Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Boys Don't Cry
1999 · Kimberly Peirce · Boys Don't Cry on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Brandon get dressed in front of the mirror. (performance)
A sock in the jeans, the binding, the hat tilted to the right angle, the walk tried out. Peirce films it as practice, not as a trick being rigged. Swank built the part from these externals.
Payoff: Manhood here is assembled in front of you, piece by piece. The film shows the labor rather than asking you to guess at an interior. In the reading: the gest. The reading calls this a gest: a way of holding the body that shows how a role is built and kept upright.
Look at the clouds racing while Brandon stands still. (camera)
Denault shoots time-lapse skies streaking over a flat Nebraska horizon and puts a motionless figure underneath. The device returns at moments of longing and again when the pressure rises.
Payoff: He does not move through his landscape. It moves around him, which tells you who is being carried and who is choosing. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: the figure goes still and the world does the moving instead.
Notice how the light warms when Lana is in frame. (light)
The courtship scenes run saturated and golden. The same interiors cool and harden as the story turns. Denault keeps the small-town light otherwise plain and available.
Payoff: The palette tracks how safe Brandon is. Warmth is not decoration here. It marks the stretch where he gets to be believed.
Look at the trailers, kitchens, bars, and roller rinks. (setting)
Peirce shoots working-class rural Nebraska without picturesque distress and without condescension. The places are specific, worn, and ordinary. Beer, cars, and dares fill the hours.
Payoff: The world is not a backdrop for the violence. It is the set of pressures and dead ends that produce it.
Listen for how thin Nathan Larson's score keeps itself. (sound)
Larson works with guitar and texture, not orchestra. Around it the film uses country, rock, and pop from the bars and car radios of the place, so most of the music comes from the world itself.
Payoff: With almost no orchestral cueing, nothing tells you how to feel. The dread has to come from the room and the faces in it.
Once you have seen it
Watch Swank's face in the beats before anyone speaks. (performance)
Peirce keeps cutting to stillness. Early, the held close-ups carry wonder. As the second half tightens, the same held face carries small movements of fear gathering under the skin.
Payoff: The film puts the change in one face. Track it and you can date the exact scene where his world stops being survivable. In the reading: icon of power (threshold face). The reading calls that a threshold face: an expression building toward something that has not broken out yet.
Watch Sevigny's eyes in the scenes where Lana could ask. (performance)
Lana is watchful and tender and repeatedly declines to push. Sevigny plays a woman who half-knows and decides what not to find out, scene after scene.
Payoff: Her not asking is the film's definition of love. She agrees to see him the way he needs to be seen.
Count how many group scenes turn on a dare. (staging)
Peirce blocks the drinking and hanging-out so that someone is always being tested. Sarsgaard and Sexton play men who are entirely legible as products of this place, not as monsters visiting it.
Payoff: The catastrophe is staged as latent in the room from the first beer. Nothing arrives from outside the group that does it.
Time how long the giddy stretch runs before the film slows. (cutting)
Percy and Granger cut the courtship loose and elliptical, the way infatuation moves. Then the rhythm lengthens and tightens, and the last movement is handled with a control that neither exploits nor looks away.
Payoff: The buoyancy is built so it can be taken. Knowing where the tempo changes is knowing where the film stops letting you hope.
Carry this in: Watch how often Brandon holds still while the world moves around him. The film keeps telling you who is being carried.