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Says Peirce: "The negative can be so powerful, especially on film. My goal was always: Don't judge the characters and don't diminish the characters -- make their motivations as rich and as true to real-life people as possible. The heart of the material came from my interview with Lana."

Teena's girlfriend told Peirce that she freaked out when she saw the director at her door. "I thought you were Brandon," she said. Peirce says, "I don't look anything like Brandon. But when something like that happens you must figure out what the need is. Lana wanted to communicate with Brandon. She wanted to tell her story but also to tell Brandon's story."

Peirce could never pin her down on when she knew that Brandon was a girl: whether it was when she first met him or at any point up to the moment when John Lotter and Tom Nissen, who would later kill Brandon, stripped and raped him. But Peirce learned to embrace the ambiguities. "It was a pure love. Lana didn't think of Brandon as a boy or a girl. She just loved Brandon."

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

Brandon loved himself, too. "Brandon loves being Brandon, and you love him because of that," Peirce says. For long stretches the film is oddly delightful because of this. When I told Peirce that I thought the center of Swank's performance was a mercurial mix of mischief and rue -- Swank's Brandon, like a goodhearted, hell-raising child, is quick to act on impulse and as quick to apologize -- Peirce said, "I love that you see that! That's where the complicated fun and craziness comes from. I saw Brandon as one of those classic male heroes who makes mistakes, from Clyde Barrow and Cool Hand Luke to Pinocchio. Brandon is like Pinocchio when he's getting in with the bad boys and he's smoking cigars and the donkey ears are sprouting up. We're all like that, I think; I connect to Pinocchio in ways I don't even understand."

Peirce aimed to keep us inside Brandon's point of view by juggling two styles: "One out of John Cassevetes and early [Martin] Scorsese and neo-realism -- [Roberto] Rossellini's 'Rome: Open City' and [Pier Paolo] Pasolini's 'Accottone.'" Peirce uses this style to explore the world of arrested-adolescent arousal and carousing that Brandon joins when he enters the weirdly liquid friend and kinship group of John, Tom, Lana and her mom. When that world becomes too restrictive for Brandon and Lana, Peirce conjures up a second style with escapist flourishes out of "the magical films of Michael Powell and [Kenji] Mizoguchi's 'Ugetsu Monogatari' and 'The Wizard of Oz' and all the Disney fantasies -- and 'Romeo and Juliet,' which I guess brings things together."

Peirce hopes that the roughhouse camaraderie of John and Tom takes in audiences as totally as Brandon. She wants us to see the sadistic fun in risky activities like "bumper skiing," in which a "skier" balances on the back of a moving pickup truck while holding onto a line connected to the cab. Peirce trusts that if her method works, when the sadism begins to dominate, "Everyone watching is in as much denial as Brandon."

She didn't want the film to play as an essay on "the culture of violence," but as a tragedy of men who are so crippled in their resources, external and internal, that they, like Brandon, must struggle to confirm their manhood. Says Peirce: "When you contrast these guys with Brandon, his existence becomes a critique of what it means to limit the imagination. Brandon turns out to be better than them at being a guy; it's a double blow when they discover he's a girl."

The film's portrayal of tough slackers brings to mind Tom Wolfe's observation that the accouterments of the counterculture never disappeared: They drifted down to the working class and lost their hippie-era meanings. "These people didn't appropriate the emotions; that's so interesting," says Peirce. "It's true: You see that [murderer] John Lotter has long hair and you think that maybe he's OK with his femininity, when he is completely not OK with it. In a way, it's what I find so fascinating about Lynyrd Skynyrd. The music can be so lyrical and orchestral, but the guys listening to it get off on the rage."

Not even a troglodyte could get off on the rage-filled murders at the climax of "Boys Don't Cry" -- Peirce has filled them with harrowing sorrow. But the moment that shrivels the heart comes earlier: Brandon, raped by his former buddies, reports the crime to a sheriff who pulls a classic blame-the-victim number and asks Brandon why he's been going around as a boy. When Brandon says he's having a sexual identity crisis, we experience it as a defeat.

"Brandon is finally telling the truth and who is he coming clean to? The sheriff. And he's using language he appropriates from someone else: 'A sexual identity crisis' is a phrase someone must have told him. But that phrase may be a clue to deeper stuff. I guess he's like all of us -- he's looking for truth anywhere."
salon.com | March 9, 2000

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