The Crying Game’s Legacy as Transgender Representation

Even so, there’s not a moment from the marketing, or from the public discourse around it, that can be isolated as the one that immortalized The Crying Game as the film epitomizing the reveal trope; it was a constellation of voices and events that did that. Critic Roger Ebert lavished praise on the film in his December 1992 review but compared it with 1960’s Psycho, a horror movie that makes the disclosure of its serial killer’s gender ambiguity a key component of its terrifying climax, writing that The Crying Game presented itself as one thing but really was “about something else altogether.” At the sixty-fifth Oscars the following March, The Crying Game was nominated for six awards, including Best Supporting Actor for Davidson, and the cultural hysteria surrounding the reveal supplied a centerpiece of host Billy Crystal’s opening monologue. The number he performed was a supposedly comedic twist on the trans-panic reaction. Called “(Surprise) It’s The Crying Game,” the song was written by gay comedian Bruce Vilanch and set to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “(Love Is) The Tender Trap.” In the audience, Davidson reacted with a stone-faced expression to Crystal’s trivialization of the film. In subsequent years, the reveal was spoofed in several other movies, but none more notorious than Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), when the antagonist, Lieutenant Lois Einhorn (Sean Young), is shown, with a crass close-up of her tucked groin area, to be disgraced Miami Dolphins placekicker Ray Finkle, against a needle drop from The Crying Game’s soundtrack and alongside a montage of police officers gagging.

It is hardly the fault of The Crying Game that the American public didn’t know how to respond to the difficult questions about the fluidity of sexuality and gender that the film was raising. American audiences at the time were prone to disorientation whenever the possibility of transness was introduced. They’d also struggled with the ambiguity of serial killer Jame Gumb’s nature in the Academy Award–winning The Silence of the Lambs (1991), whose infamous tucking scene—which was also endlessly spoofed—is likely the most notorious trans film image of the twentieth century. It would be difficult to blame any trans person who considers either of these films an impassable obstacle owing to the cultural residue of its contemporary reception and its reputation. However, when looking at The Crying Game with some distance from the monocultural freak-out, it is clear that we did not have the language to explain its virtues in the 1990s.