Trans-gendering the Irish Na(rra)tion: Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto

Abstract

Occupying a relegated position as it does in Neil Jordan’s filmography, it is my contention that Breakfast on Pluto is one of his most transgressive films. Not only does it cross the most evident boundaries of heteronormative gender roles by giving a transvestite the central position in the story, but also blends film genres as a way of vindicating hybridisation at all levels, challenging other modern categorisations as those informing Irish national identity. Thirteen years after The Crying Game (1992) was released, Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan returns to the intersectional issues of gender and national identity in his adaptation of Patrick McCabe’s novel Breakfast on Pluto (1998). However, apart from the presence of a transvestite and the shadow of sectarian violence looming throughout the narrative, these films have little else in common: the dull, grey atmosphere of an obscure drama involving kidnap and murder by the IRA in The Crying Game contrasts sharply with the bright colours, ironic drive and parody in Breakfast on Pluto, a story about growing up in Ireland as an orphan transvestite who yearns for romantic true love. Moreover, while Jordan’s first feature film was defined as a romantic drama with thriller hues, Breakfast moves between comedy and drama, the bildungsroman and the melodrama. This generic ambivalence goes hand in hand with Jordan’s transgressing approach to the question of gender and national identity as a strategy to challenge fixed understandings of those labels as natural and given and, for that reason, the violence inflicted on the main character (and, by extension, on any Other body that does not fit those categories).