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.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch how often Brandon holds still while the world moves around him. The film keeps telling you who is being carried.