The opening credits of Neil Jordan’s film, The Crying Game, are accompanied by the song, “When a Man Loves a Woman”. The song tells us that a man’s love for a woman will cause him to lose all judgment, to give up his money, his friends, even his life. If she is bad, he will not see it. The film’s first scene confirms the song’s philosophy.
Jody, a black British soldier in Northern Ireland, is at a carnival with a local girl, Jude, whom he has just met. While Jody urinates behind a tent flap, Jude glances back at another man, Fergus, who has been following them. Jody takes Jude away from the carnival and begins to make love to her. He is on top of her, with his hand under her skirt, when Fergus points a pistol down at him and clicks it to get Jody’s attention. Other men grab Jody, putting a hood over his head and carrying him off in a car. They take him to a cabin in the woods, where Jude joins them by motorcycle. They tell Jody that he has been taken hostage by the Irish Republican Army. As the song has warned, Jody’s passion for a woman has resulted in betrayal and disaster for him.
The theme has been set that women are dangerous. In his captivity, Jody echoes the theme, hurling all his anger at Jude, and describing her as dangerous. She reinforces the impression, by becoming increasingly sarcastic and then smashing the captive on the side of his face with a gun butt. It is Fergus who gradually befriends Jody. Jody explains Fergus’ behavior in terms of a parable that opens a second important theme.
He tells Fergus that there are two kinds of people, frogs and scorpions. According to the parable, a scorpion convinces a frog to take him across a river, only to sting him, causing both to drown. When the frog asks the scorpion why he has stung him, the scorpion replies that it is his nature. Although the parable is open to multiple meanings, one of Jody’s meanings is clear: that the two kinds of people are scorpions and frogs, not men and women. Fergus has a kind nature, is a frog, while Jude, despite her outward femininity, is a scorpion with a stinger.
The second theme that I alluded to is that anatomy is not destiny, that a penis is not a crucial signifier, and is, in fact, displaceable. When Fergus takes Jody with his hands tied outside to urinate, he is reluctant to touch Jody’s penis to pull it out of his pants and put it back. Jody tells him, “It’s just a piece of meat.” As the film develops, Fergus is increasingly presented as being passive, while Jude becomes more phallic, the one who is aggressive and wields a gun.
This theme culminates in the film’s “secret.” During captivity, Jody shows Fergus a picture of himself with his girl, Dil. He tells Fergus that Dil is not like Jude. Knowing he will die, Jody asks Fergus to look Dil up in London to tell her that Jody was thinking about her before he died. Fergus is chosen to shoot Jody, but when Jody starts running, he cannot shoot him in the back, demonstrating his kindness, his phallic inhibition, and, perhaps, his homophobia. Jody runs into the road and is killed by a tank that has come to help save him.
Fergus finds Dil and becomes involved with her, only to find out, with intimacy, that Dil is a man. This is the film’s “secret.” Horrified at the sight of Dil’s penis, Fergus runs to the bathroom to vomit. On the surface, Dil is a transsexual, played with believable femininity, but on the fantasy level, Dil, like Jude, can be seen as a phallic woman. Fergus tries to stop seeing Dil, but a combination of affection, kindness, and circumstance cause him to stay with Dil. (I will do my best to avoid the difficult personal pronoun.) The circumstance is that Jude and Maguire, the leader of the I.R.A plot, have found Fergus. Jude threatens him that if he does not help them with an assassination, they will kill Dil. At this point, Jude has lost any look of soft femininity and innocence. She is tough, aggressive, and ready to threaten Fergus with her pistol.
Fergus decides that he will disguise Dil as a man. This highlights a third, related theme, that heterosexuality is dangerous. Jody dies because of it. The target of the I.R.A.’s assassination is an elderly judge, who is shot after he visits his mistress. On the surface, Fergus wishes to disguise Dil from the terrorists, but at the fantasy level, he is hiding his own heterosexuality.
These themes are further established through another source. The Crying Game has a twin, another film written and directed by Neil Jordan, entitled Mona Lisa, released in 1985. Since it has been reported that the original script for The Crying Game was written several years ago, these two films may have been conceived more closely in time to one another than appears at first blush.
Mona Lisa begins with Nat “King” Cole’s rendition of the song, “Mona Lisa”. It also warns about the dangers of a woman, but with more subtlety and ambiguity than “When a Man Loves a Woman”. It tells of a beautiful woman who lets dreams die on her doorstep and ends with the question, “Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa, Or just a cold and lonely lovely work of art?”
The enigmatic woman of the film is the call girl, Simone, who bears a striking resemblance to Dil. George, who does not look like Fergus, is newly released from jail. He gets a job from his “friend”, Denny, working as Simone’s chauffeur. Denny is the head of a large prostitution and pornography ring, but his big money comes from blackmailing customers. George develops a relationship with Simone, and agrees to help her find a young girl she had befriended, Cathy, who was still under the control of Simone’s former pimp. George searches through the world of peep shows, brothels, and pornography. He finally finds and rescues Cathy only to discover that Simone has a homosexual obsession with the girl. The film reaches a climax at a seaside resort, vaguely suggestive of the carnival in The Crying Game. He has taken the two women there to escape from Denny’s ring, just as Fergus attempted to disguise and hide Dil in The Crying Game. Denny and his henchman corner them in their hotel room. When Denny slaps Simone, she pulls out a gun that George has given her and shoots him. As the pimp runs in, she shoots him, too, then turns the gun at George, but does not shoot. He grabs the gun from her, yells, “You would have shot me, too,” and leaves.
The parallels are striking. Each film is about a violent, but naive man who falls in love with a tall, thin, attractive black woman, but is disappointed and disillusioned to find out that she is homosexual. In each film, the black woman shoots the villain near the end of the film to avenge herself and protect her lover. The scenes are very reminiscent of one another. The major difference between the films is that in one the black woman is a female homosexual and in the other a male homosexual. What is most striking is the remarkable physical resemblance between Simone, the black call girl in Mona Lisa, and Dil in The Crying Game.
In Mona Lisa, the male protagonist uncovers a world of sexual abuse and perversion, culminating in the realization of his girlfriend’s homosexuality. In The Crying Game, the male protagonist makes a more sudden discovery of a world of homosexuality and transsexualism about which he was unaware. In each film, the audience discovers along with the protagonist, gradually in Mona Lisa and suddenly in The Crying Game.
The Crying Game reaches a climax strikingly similar to the shooting scene at the end of Mona Lisa. Having heard from Fergus that he had killed Jody, Dil ties him to the bed while he sleeps, but cannot harm him. Because he is bound, Fergus is unable to carry out the I.R.A. assassination. Maguire shoots the judge instead, and he is killed by the bodyguards. Jude comes looking for Fergus, intent on shooting him, but as she enters the bedroom, thinking she is catching him in bed with his girlfriend, she is confronted by Dil pointing Fergus’ loaded gun at her. Dil shoots Jude just as Simone had shot Denny and the pimp, with Fergus lying helplessly on the bed like the young girl, Cathy, in Mona Lisa. When Fergus frees himself from the bonds and leaps out of the bed, Dil points the gun at him, as Simone had pointed the gun at George, but cannot shoot him. Fergus takes the gun from Dil and arranges things so that he will be held for Jude’s murder instead of Dil.
These scenes from the two films are visually similar. In each case Dil/Simone shoot the “scorpion-like” intruders upon their homosexual romance. The only difference is that in Mona Lisa, the homosexual lovers are women and the intruders are men, and in The Crying Game that is reversed. Both films interdict heterosexuality and end with violent defense of a homosexual couple by a gun-wielding “phallic woman.” Mona Lisa ends with George in asexual bliss in the company of a male friend and George’s teenage daughter. The Crying Game ends with Fergus being visited by a devoted Dil in jail.
The themes of distrust of women, interdiction of heterosexuality, and the displaceability of the penis are relatively near the “conscious” surface of The Crying Game, but their presence is not yet explained. Other themes that are not so readily available to the casual viewer and are probably outside the conscious awareness of the filmmakers help to provide a motive force for these ideas.
The first has to do with looking and the search for the female phallus. In Mona Lisa, George’s simple views of the world are changed as he searches through peep shows and amongst prostitutes for Simone’s friend. He finds a world of corruption and depravity of which he had little ken. Similarly, Fergus is the only one, along with the unwitting audience, who does not see the homosexual world into which he has entered. They are like children, trying to understand the mysteries of the world, and particularly of human anatomy.
The hoopla around The Crying Game‘s secret highlights the excitement of the search for the hidden penis. In both films, the woman being wooed by the hero proves to be phallic. It would be nice if there were clear evidence in either film of fear of the sight of female genitalia and “female castration.” It is evident only in its denial. In The Crying Game, there are two interdictions as a man attempts to put his hand up a woman’s skirt, first with Fergus interrupting Jody as his hand rides under Jude’s skirt, and later when Fergus is stopped from putting his hand under Dil’s skirt. Of course, in the latter case, it is the penis that is being hidden.
But the looking has a more specific meaning than the child’s confused researches into anatomy and the search for the female phallus. There is clear evidence in both films that the looking is connected with derivatives of the primal scene.
Films that emphasize primal scene derivatives tend to focus on the act of spying. In Mona Lisa, this is an important theme, as we see George searching for Cathy in peep shows and pornographic establishments. He finds a video tape which features Simone performing fellatio on her former pimp. He is clearly upset and jealous at what he sees. In a later scene, he finds Simone’s friend, Cathy on a country estate operated as a rich men’s brothel by Denny. She is with an elderly man behind a one way mirror. A camera is set up outside the mirror to provide pictures that Denny can use for blackmail. George sees the old man enacting the beginning of a sadistic fantasy with the young girl. When the man is not looking, George opens a door and pulls Cathy out, leaving the man baffled.
The primal scene is also evoked when George repeatedly drives Simone to a mansion where she meets a very wealthy Middle Eastern man, named Raschid. George waits in the car for her. Denny asks him to find out what she does with Raschid. When Simone discovers that it is Denny who is asking, she tells George to tell him that they drink tea. The next time she visits the mansion, a butler brings tea to the car for George, with a Polaroid photograph of Simone drinking tea with Raschid.
The Crying Game opens with a sequence that is very suggestive of the primal scene. While the credits roll, the camera eye moves slowly, as if from a barge, across a body of water at a carnival. This creates a sense of curiosity and confusion since we do not know where to focus our attention, mimicking the probable perceptual confusion of the small child watching the primal scene. After the credits, we focus on Jody and Jude. Soon we see that Fergus is watching them. As they begin to make love, the observer interrupts them.
The film contains two sets of recurring imagery referent to the primal scene. After Fergus meets Dil, he follows Dil and Dave, Dil’s sadomasochistic boyfriend, to Dil’s apartment, much as he had followed Jody and Jude. Standing on the street, Fergus looks up at the window, where he sees Dil and Dave together in silhouette. In a later scene, the situation is reversed. Now Dave is following Fergus and Dil. Standing at the top of the stoop, Dil tells Fergus that if they kiss, it will really make Dave jealous. They do kiss, and then enter Dil’s apartment. Now it is Dave looking up at the silhouettes in the window. This image is presented once more when Jude and Maguire drive Fergus to the assassination site. While they are explaining that the judge meets his mistress there, there is a brief glimpse of a lit window behind them, nearly hidden at the top of the screen, with the silhouettes of a woman and a man embracing. This time the image is nearly subliminal, and no one is looking up except the film viewer. The setting, with the assignation and the elegant building, is reminiscent of the mansion in Mona Lisa at which Simone meets Raschid.
The second set of images has to do with a violent interruption of the primal scene by an observer. In the opening scene, Fergus interrupts Jody and Jude’s lovemaking by pointing a pistol at Jody, and then kicking him in the face. When Jody is in captivity, Jude interrupts his conversation with Fergus and ends up pistol whipping Jody. (During the captivity, there is much made of Jody wearing a sack over his head and whether or not he can see his captors, another issue related to the primal scene.) In a later scene, Fergus follows Dave and Dil into a lot. Seeing Dave being rough with Dil, he interrupts them by kneeing Dave in the groin, knocking him to the ground. Finally, in the climactic scene of the film, Jude comes into Dil’s apartment, gun in hand, thinking that she is surprising Fergus in bed with his lover. Dil emerges from behind a curtain, says, “You didn’t knock, honey,” and shoots her.
Although there has been some debate about the traumatizing effect of the primal scene, it is clear that witnessing parental intercourse presents a problem and a challenge for the young child. The young child is flooded with intense and confusing imagery. The parents are clearly excited and absorbed with each other. They may easily appear to be hurting each other. The scene is probably very confusing, with the intertwining of bodies, the changing positions, and the child’s limited perspective. The child is also confronted with vivid evidence that we do not all have the same parts. The boy can see that there are people without penises, contributing then or later to his castration anxiety, his fear that women and girls have been castrated and that he will also be disfigured. The girl discovers that there are people who, unlike them, have another appendage that can grow and shrink and can be used to penetrate. It is natural to envy what we do not have.
Arlow (1980), who used the film Blowup as an example, stressed the child’s jealousy and rage at being left out of the primal scene resulting in a wish to get revenge. The child is like the fly on the wall, ignored by the excited parents who are clearly involved with one another. The child’s feeling of betrayal by the mother is reflected in George’s hurt in Mona Lisa on recognizing that Simone’s true love is for Cathy. It provides a powerful impetus for the intense distrust of women expressed in The Crying Game.
Arlow describes the revenge as being expressed primarily by enactment of a fantasy in which the child is engaged in the central action with others left to watch. He sees this as leading to parents contriving to have their own children observe them in intercourse. We see a clear example of such a reversal in The Crying Game when Fergus and Dave reverse places in the window and the street. We also see it when Fergus starts to make love to Dil with Jody’s picture staring at them. In fact, he has chosen to be with Dil in order to replace Jody. (It is implied that Fergus consciously sees it as an act of friendship and repayment of a debt to the man whose death he’d caused to take responsibility for his “girl.” Before he knows that Dil is a man, he expresses some discomfort over whether Jody would approve of his being there.) In the climactic scene in which Jude enters Dil’s apartment, the film’s original primal scene scenario at the carnival is reversed, with Jude and Fergus trading places.
Bertolucci’s The Conformist, which is inundated with primal scene imagery, contains evidence for a subliminal fantasy in which revenge is expressed through the interruption of the primal scene and the murder of both parents. We see a representation of this fantasy in The Crying Game in the murder of Jody after he has been interrupted in his attempt to make love to Jude and in the assassination of the judge who has just left his lover. Since his assignation is reminiscent of Simone’s meetings with Raschid, the judge’s assassination provides revenge for George’s having to endure the frustration and jealousy of sitting outside while they make love.
The Crying Game and Mona Lisa offer a new “resolution” for the problems presented by the primal scene. As we have already seen, “female castration” is undone through the fantasy of the phallic woman. Furthermore, both methods of revenge are represented, reversal of the primal scene, in which the observer becomes the participant, and interruption of the primal scene with the murder of the offending parent. But the combination of the child’s jealous rage and wish to be a participant creates a problem. If the observer becomes the participant, then he will be subject to the jealous rage of the new observer, with the danger of castration and death. We saw at the end of LA Confidential the price of Oedipal and primal scene victory. The victorious Bud White is in the car with the beautiful woman, Lynn, but he is in the back seat with bandages and tubes, weakened and damaged.
In Mona Lisa, George does not act on his jealous rage. The violence is done by Simone, the phallic woman, who protects her union with her female lover by killing the male intruders. George gives up his heterosexual ambitions, setting up an asexual family with his male friend and his own teenage daughter. He is deeply hurt and jealous when he sees Simone with her female lover, but he survives at the expense of his sexuality.
In The Crying Game, the resolution is more creative. Again, the murderous rage is displaced to others. Although Fergus is supposed to kill both Jody and the judge, he shoots no one. In fact, he takes a passive role throughout the film, courting Dil with shrugs of the shoulders and evasive smiles, a defensive measure taken frequently by people in analysis wishing to avoid responsibility and consequence for their impulses. Maguire shoots the judge and is killed in return. Dil, the phallic woman, kills the intruding Jude while Fergus lies helpless and passive in the bed, like Cathy in Mona Lisa. By giving up heterosexuality and an active role, Fergus is protected from the return of his own violent impulses. Nevertheless, he is able to take his place as a participant in the primal scene rather than as an envious observer, like George. In the final scene, he has taken Jody’s place as he recites to Dil, through jail bars, the story of the scorpion and the frog.
In The Crying Game, a man’s envy and rage over the primal scene leads to a fear of the intense danger of women and heterosexuality. The problem is solved through a shell game in which the penis moves from character to character, seemingly faster than the eye can see.
Arlow, J. (1980), The revenge motive in the primal scene. J. Amer. Psa. Assn., 28:519-542.
This film essay was published previously in The PANY Bulletin and in Double Feature: Discovering Our Hidden Fantasies in Film by Herbert H. Stein, EReads