The Crying Game: Identity Crises

Jordan’s intent was not to valorize the IRA or destigmatize its attacks. That may not have been clear to 1992 audiences reading about the movie’s portrayal of Fergus. (“An Irish Terrorist in Human Terms,” proclaimed the headline on Vincent Canby’s New York Times review.) But it’s clear enough to anyone who watches the film and sees how brutish, impulsive, indifferent, or cruel Fergus’s compatriots are, and how he fully finds himself only after he leaves them behind and takes up with Dil. Fergus and Dil’s relationship is messy—mutually confusing and mutually painful. But it’s part of a necessary reconstruction and reclamation process for both of them, a way to redefine themselves in more positive terms.

Any analysis of Jordan’s work is likely to eventually become an analysis of identity. At some point, his stories almost invariably consider who his characters are versus who (or what) they’re pretending to be. Supernatural predators disguise themselves as ordinary humans in The Company of Wolves (1984), Interview with the Vampire (1994), and Byzantium (2012). Con artists masquerade as ghosts in High Spirits (1988), convicts masquerade as priests in We’re No Angels (1989), and a drug mule identifies as a selkie in Ondine (2009). Michael Collins finds his political identity in Michael Collins (1996), and Kitty grows into her trans identity in Breakfast on Pluto (2005), while Francie Brady loses his identity to fantasy, trauma, and madness in The Butcher Boy (1997). The characters in 1986’s Mona Lisa adopt false names, wear disguises, and steal one another’s identities. The eponymous villain of 2018’s Greta is a matryoshka of assumed personae, stacked one inside another.

In The Crying Game, Dil projects confidence and control. In the Metro, the run-down but cozy corner pub where Jody told Fergus he would find Dil, she holds herself like temporarily embarrassed royalty, graciously accepting fealty from her court, particularly the ever-watchful, gently supportive bartender Col (Jim Broadbent). But her loneliness and hunger for acceptance, love, and kindness leave her vulnerable, first to an abusive hanger-on, Dave (Ralph Brown), who manhandles and hits her whenever she refuses his advances, then to Fergus himself. She sees Fergus as a chance to reshape her life, to see herself anew through the eyes of a shy, admiring, gallant stranger. When Fergus assaults Dave, Dil clearly relishes the power to finally chase off her abuser and have it stick. But she also enjoys being protected by someone who cares enough about her to feel possessive and jealous.

Fergus’s own identity games are more complicated. Jordan has said that, for him, the hook in The Crying Game was the chance to dissect his protagonist, to separate him from his self-image and see what happened next. Fergus starts out as an IRA loyalist, but his sympathy for the charismatic, sly, subversively funny Jody shakes his ability to demonize British soldiers. Jody, a Black British man of Caribbean descent, confronts Fergus with accounts of the shocking racism he has experienced in Ireland, making Fergus uncomfortable with his own ethnic identity. For her part, Dil rattles Fergus’s sense of his sexuality, while Jude shatters his sense of agency and independence.

“By the end of the movie, he’s called every facet of what he thought he was into question,” Jordan told the British Film Institute in 2017. “I don’t think people fully understand themselves, and I like to make movies about characters who realize they don’t fully understand themselves.”

Fergus responds to his initial losses of identity by remaking himself in London: he cuts off his shaggy hair, takes the name Jimmy, allows Dil to believe he’s Scottish, and conceals his history with Jody from her for most of the film. He has the nerve to accuse Dil of adopting a false identity (“You’re not a girl,” he tells her, with a patronizing air), even as he’s lying to her about who he is, where he’s from, and why he sought her out. But there’s an open question hanging over The Crying Game: Who was Fergus, really, before he met Jody? We learn nothing about his family, his history, or what brought him to the IRA. His entire defense of the organization’s terrorist acts amounts to one limp sentence delivered to Jody: “You guys shouldn’t be here.”

The only hints we have about his life come from the bits and bobs Jody elicits over three days of dialogue: Fergus is a fan of hurling, he enjoys “having a pint at the Rock,” and he knows a little about the Bible. The real keys to him are that he’s instinctively kind to Jody, and that when Jody shames him for having no words of comfort about Jody’s impending execution, Fergus meekly responds, “No, I’m not good for much.”

When Jordan was developing the movie, one seminal text he drew on was 1931’s “Guests of the Nation,” the most traveled short story by celebrated Irish author and cultural writer Frank O’Connor. The first-person narrative concerns an IRA soldier, nicknamed Bonaparte, whose cadre has been holding two English soldiers hostage for so long, and so informally, that captives and captors alike have lost their innate sense of enmity. They aren’t friends, exactly, but they’re as familiar with each other as small-town neighbors, and their arguments about society, capitalism, and God are contentious but not vituperative.

Then Bonaparte’s group is ordered to execute their captives, in retaliation for IRA members killed by the British Army. None of the men entirely know how to proceed, and the murders that follow are marked more by social awkwardness than nationalistic fervor. After helping to bury the two English soldiers, Bonaparte describes the terrible distance he feels from everyone and everything around him. “I was somehow very small and very lost and lonely like a child astray in the snow,” he says. “And anything that happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.” That’s where the first act of The Crying Game leaves Fergus—guilt-stricken, vulnerable, bereft, and primed for reconstruction. But he lacks the will or impetus to reshape himself past the most basic surface elements (a haircut, a name, a day-laborer job) until he meets Dil.

For all Dil’s aching need for love and validation, she’s more certain in her identity than Fergus is in his. She has carved out a precise life for herself in places where she’s welcomed and accepted—a salon where she’s just one of the girls, a quiet neighborhood queer bar where she sits shoulder to shoulder with people playing with masculinity or femininity in rule-breaking, constructed ways. “Dil” as a persona is something of a public performance—she periodically speaks about herself in the third person, just as Jody did about himself in the movie’s opening. (The commonality raises the question of whether one of them picked this habit up from the other, or whether perhaps it was a shared game.) She uses that affectation to distance herself from some of the flirty or furious emotions she communicates to Fergus, pointedly passing her messages through Col at the Metro, even when she and Fergus are sitting together.