A Film Canon

It makes sense that The Crying Game built its reputation on an American audience, not so much because of any supposed ignorance or indifference to Anglo-Irish politics, but because it's an idiosyncratically British take on a quintessentially American genre: neo-noir. In particular, Neil Jordan fuses the lush wandering of neo-noir with a more timely British narrative of rural-sexual migration, structuring his screenplay around a quest for political deterretorialisation - the IRA troubles, here condensed to their early 90s crisis-point - that segues into a quest for sexual deterretorialisation, when IRA soldier Jimmy (Stephen Rea) moves to London to track down assassinated hostage Jody's girlfriend, Dil (Forest Whitaker, Jaye Davidson).

What could have been a fairly standard analogy between political and personal liberation is offset by Jordan's superbly vertiginous tone, which never quite depoliticises the IRA, nor suggests that Jimmy is following any agenda beyond his own desire, and gives the lie to the frequent critical suggestion that the film's originality lies in effectively being two distinct films, in instating a kind of formal or conceptual binary. In fact, what remains original about the film is its continuous discontinuity - and, more specifically, the way in which Jordan generalises Jody and Dil's disembodied voices into a kind of queer sociolect, less interested in recognisable or stereotypical queerspeak than in a pervasive, melancholy bathos, just as the film's queer spaces are simply those where language tends to be ceremonially performed or repeated; a fusion of Hitchcock's late, American languor with the refined archness of his first - and most - English period, Vertigo meets The Lady Vanishes.

A soundscape fronted by Boy George and backed by the Pet Shop Boys completes a mnemosexual ambivalence that gives way to the most powerful and poignant instance of libidinal education since Double Indemnity - a drama in which men don't merely light each other's cigarettes, but share them - and a wry take on noir's essential fear of effeminacy; or, rather, the very essentialism which could make effeminacy an anxiety, as evinced in the central, essentialist parable, which migrates from an object of pathos to a synecdoche for the ironic, essentially optimistic second conclusion.