In the Field of Dreams: Transvestism in Twelfth Night and The Crying Game

Abstract

As A FILM soon known by the public to have a secret, Neil Jordan's The Crying Game became one of the major movie hits of 1993. Fans often responded with the enthusiasm of religious converts, while less enthusiastic viewers still played along with the film's publicists in advertising a sensational secret they refused to give away. From the beginning, however, questions were raised about the film's participation in the mass-cultural reconstruction and policing of (primarily male) homosexuality as an open secret. Certainly, the formation of the Clinton administration's ask, don't tell policy regarding gays in the military coincided eerily with the arrival of The Crying Game and its success in making the moviegoing public into sharers of its related secret. Whether the film was to be read as in mainstreaming gay male sexuality and crossdressing or as in its alignment with the Clinton policy thus became debatable. This informal debate largely concerned the film's transvestism and, by implication, the social compact(s) regarding male homoerotic desire and practice brokered by the film.' The terms progressive and reactionary are too crudely categorical to permit analysis of The Crying Game, while the either-or choice presented by the terms will seem forced as soon as any sustained reading of the film is attempted. Yet the debatability of The Crying Game's political representations remains an uncomfortable fact. It is partly in response to this discomfort, but also to a larger discomfort with the ready acceptance of The Crying Game in the United States, that I shall connect the film as a gender-bending text to Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. All historical and generic differences notwithstanding, I believe that Twelfth Night can supply a point of reference for further assessment of The Crying Game's transvestite politics.2 This conjunction does not necessarily entail mobilization of the play as a canonical blockbuster against the contemporary pop-cultural artifact.3 If Twelfth Night enables us to take a bearing on The Crying Game, the film simultaneously enables us to take a reverse bearing on Twelfth Night.4 More than just mapping and broad comparison are entailed, however, in this conjunction. Linking these texts virtually enforces consideration of transvestism in relation to