MCI Academic Journal #3: The Crying Game

Most of the movies we're required to watch for the study abroad trip I either haven't seen or its been long enough since my last viewing to not remember enough of the film for further critical analysis required for these academic journals.

I don't remember seeing the The Crying Game; maybe it was because Gene Siskel ruined it for everybody. While the "secret" is a big moment, and for many Americans, the key moment of the film, (at least how Miramax marketed the picture), it is one of the lesser themes of importance for my interest. Sure the appearance of an unexpected tallywhacker is a shock to the puritanical American audience whose purile interest is piqued in a frank discussion of gender identity and sexual politics, but the adults in the room, different themes abound.

For me, how the film dealt with race was a far more interesting discussion. Having not set foot in the Emerald Isle, it is something I am sure I will observe and pay attention to. But most Americans view Ireland as a rather homogenous nation of gingers and rogues with brogues. The Crying Game skates upon the issue with such brevity, that I felt a bit cheated.

Sure there's a short conversation about cricket being a black man's game, but the film is wrapped up so much into the nature of man, that this smaller yet profoundly important topic is left behind, brushed aside with little discussion beyond the earlier parts of the film.

In one of these early scenes, Forrest Whitaker's soldier spits "you people" to his IRA captors, and my first instinct was to think about his kidnappers' race. But he was actually referring to the IRA as terrorists, lacking in the more complex ideas of race. There are further discussions of northern Ireland being a kind of backwards hillybilly-esque land of bumpkins, but beyond the discussion of cricket as a black man's game and Dil referred to as "the black girl," the honest discussion of race in Ireland was quite lacking.

Britain is shown to be far more diverse, and not just in sexual preference. The Metro hosts not only the gay and the transgendered, but a variety of ethnicities and races are shown dancing the night away to Boy George and Carroll Thompson.

I wrote of my time in Sweden that I was surprised by the relative diversity in Göteborg; whites, blacks, Latinos, all speaking perfect Swedish with an occasional foreign language thrown into the auditory mix. Heck, even the Chinese restaurant I ate at was run by actual Mandarin speaking Chinese. The world is too big for this not to be the case in Dublin, so I expect a far more cosmopolitan state of affairs than that of the film.

Granted, I don't know how many shacks in the wilderness I'll be holed up in with four IRA members, but you just never know.