Having somehow missed all the media coverage of the Brandon<->Teena murder case when it occurred, I watched this film unaware that it was based on a true story. After slogging the entire way through the ugly, depressing, predictable ending; and wondering what, beyond its undoubted brilliance in acting and cinematography, was the point, I discovered this fact only by reading on the screen, just before the credits rolled, that the perps were serving life sentences. Oh. That changes everything. Or does it?
My hypothesis was confirmed, incidentally, that (with just a few exceptions such as the refreshingly un-PC _About_a_Boy_) the unlikeliest recent book or movie to feature a real boy character is one with the word "boy" in the title. Have you noticed?
Being transgendered must be a very difficult card to be dealt in life, much more painful than being merely gay. Brandon easily won my sympathy on those grounds, but it was strained by the company he chose to keep. The moral of this story is very clear: Any young person with his condition and lack of career ties, with or without his stated ambition to live in Memphis or some-such metropolis, should head there immediately-- by sticking out a thumb on the highway if necessary-- rather than hanging around small towns in the American "heartland."
There is a reason why gay people are such a presence in New York and San Francisco, and why they gravitate to urbane "cultural" occupations: while we will inevitably encounter individuals who don't like us very much, at least they are civilized enough not to stoop to actual mayhem and murder. And there's a reason why "civilized" derives from the Latin for "city". We have appreciated this for decades if not centuries. Many of us have also read _Lord_of_the_Flies. In this sense, the adjective "disturbing" for this film and its denouement is not only a cliché but a curiously naive one. Would someone who finds the word insightful please elaborate as to which of their assumptions it has disturbed?
There is some cold comfort, I suppose, in pondering that social developments may soon, for awhile, make Teena's affliction obsolete. Other than semen, whose necessity biological research has not yet managed to eliminate, there is less and less said for maleness. One reads, for example, of a revival of beekeeping as a hobby. Is it surprising that many of the revivalists are women who readily explain how they admire the social structure of the hive? From the queen on down, most of the work is done by females. The drones are luxuries, grown in great numbers during prosperous times, but idle, powerless (literally with no sting), and summarily banished and left to starve or freeze as soon as the weather changes.
In the post-industrial West, too, women's liberation means the ability to go anywhere and do anything, reducing masculinity to ornamental pastimes (often via tough and noisy motor vehicles) which our feckless Johns, Toms, and Brandons pursue with ever-more-desperate swagger. They may live in a midwestern backwater (which Mark Twain, I think, said would be the best place to be when the world is ending, because everything happens ten years later), but even they are by now children of their time.
In one regard, however, Brandon's instincts were old-fashioned: when appealing to the "opposite" sex, he was all courtesy and chivalry-- and, despite having from all appearances yet to reach puberty, this approach was successful. Maybe there's hope yet.
My hypothesis was confirmed, incidentally, that (with just a few exceptions such as the refreshingly un-PC _About_a_Boy_) the unlikeliest recent book or movie to feature a real boy character is one with the word "boy" in the title. Have you noticed?
Being transgendered must be a very difficult card to be dealt in life, much more painful than being merely gay. Brandon easily won my sympathy on those grounds, but it was strained by the company he chose to keep. The moral of this story is very clear: Any young person with his condition and lack of career ties, with or without his stated ambition to live in Memphis or some-such metropolis, should head there immediately-- by sticking out a thumb on the highway if necessary-- rather than hanging around small towns in the American "heartland."
There is a reason why gay people are such a presence in New York and San Francisco, and why they gravitate to urbane "cultural" occupations: while we will inevitably encounter individuals who don't like us very much, at least they are civilized enough not to stoop to actual mayhem and murder. And there's a reason why "civilized" derives from the Latin for "city". We have appreciated this for decades if not centuries. Many of us have also read _Lord_of_the_Flies. In this sense, the adjective "disturbing" for this film and its denouement is not only a cliché but a curiously naive one. Would someone who finds the word insightful please elaborate as to which of their assumptions it has disturbed?
There is some cold comfort, I suppose, in pondering that social developments may soon, for awhile, make Teena's affliction obsolete. Other than semen, whose necessity biological research has not yet managed to eliminate, there is less and less said for maleness. One reads, for example, of a revival of beekeeping as a hobby. Is it surprising that many of the revivalists are women who readily explain how they admire the social structure of the hive? From the queen on down, most of the work is done by females. The drones are luxuries, grown in great numbers during prosperous times, but idle, powerless (literally with no sting), and summarily banished and left to starve or freeze as soon as the weather changes.
In the post-industrial West, too, women's liberation means the ability to go anywhere and do anything, reducing masculinity to ornamental pastimes (often via tough and noisy motor vehicles) which our feckless Johns, Toms, and Brandons pursue with ever-more-desperate swagger. They may live in a midwestern backwater (which Mark Twain, I think, said would be the best place to be when the world is ending, because everything happens ten years later), but even they are by now children of their time.
In one regard, however, Brandon's instincts were old-fashioned: when appealing to the "opposite" sex, he was all courtesy and chivalry-- and, despite having from all appearances yet to reach puberty, this approach was successful. Maybe there's hope yet.