Boys Don't Cry · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Kimberly Peirce's debut sustains a deliberate friction between two film grammars. Jim Denault's camera first works in the mode of vérité / direct cinema: handheld and close, it renders the convenience stores, bars, and trailers of rural Nebraska in available-feeling light that announces itself as witness rather than artifice, grounding Brandon Teena's world in the texture of material poverty. Against this, Peirce and Denault periodically lift the film into lyrical reverie — the streaking, time-lapse skies and flat Nebraska plains that punctuate Brandon's early courtship of Lana — a direct inheritance from Terrence Malick's Badlands, whose Great Plains fugitive-romance template Denault consciously reprises: magic-hour skies, accelerated clouds, regional flatness as both prison and horizon of longing. The result is a mise-en-scène held in deliberate tension, its two registers conducting the film's argument: Brandon's inner life is suffused with lyric even as his social world is documented with the grain of reportage. At the center of both registers is Hilary Swank's performance, organized entirely around the affection-image — the face in close-up as the site of feeling before speech or action resolves it. Swank's close-ups do not illustrate emotion; they constitute it, registering Brandon's exhilaration at belonging, his tenderness with Lana, and, in the film's harrowing second half, a stunned, uncomprehending terror the camera holds without relief. It is the face that authors Brandon's identity as legible and real, and the face the film returns to when the world refuses to see him.