 Good morning, everyone. I'm Brian McElroy. I'm the chair of the Arts One program and today I'm going to be talking about Neil Jordan's The Crying Game. But first of all, I'd like to dedicate this lecture to two individuals. First to Dr. Mark Harris, who unfortunately passed away a few months ago, and who used to teach an online cinema, Irish cinema and culture course, and the Crying Game was one of the films that was on this course. The second person, Mark Cochran, died in Northern Ireland in 1980 and during what is called The Troubles in Northern Ireland. And so I'll be talking about The Troubles and I thought it appropriate that I dedicate this lecture to him as well. This picture I'm showing right now is of Neil Jordan. He is probably Ireland's most famous filmmaker and along with Jim Sheridan and Terry George, he has been involved in promoting Irish films throughout the world, both in Hollywood and in Britain and Ireland and also continental Europe. I'll be talking about his career in this lecture and also of course his very famous Oscar-winning film, The Crying Game. This poster of The Crying Game is the one which is now currently on the DVD that is distributed. It shows Miranda Richardson playing Jude and she has the cut of what appears to be a kind of femme fatale figure, a gangster figure. In fact, she is an Irish Republican Army volunteer. What's interesting about this image is that we have here a woman with a gun, a smoking gun. And if you blur your eyes just briefly, you will see that her face and neckline are in the shape of a dagger. And this particular image is one which people have associated with the dangerous woman, which is an issue that comes up in the film. This other poster that I'm showing was used to sell the film in France and in this poster we have Dill and also Fergus looking at the mirror in the hairdressers. And in a way, this is what The Crying Game is about. It's about are we looking at each other and do we really understand what we see in the mirror, both about ourselves and about the others that we are with. Here's another poster that I'm showing now which was put out during the British launch of the film. And the film had a rather tortured distribution in the United Kingdom for a number of reasons. First of all, the production company, Palace Pictures, went bankrupt just after the film was made. And the film had to be sold to another distributor, one that they did not particularly choose but needed for its distribution. What we find is in this particular poster with the Miranda Richardson dude character in the foreground, Fergus, the IRA volunteer in the mid-ground with a gun, and Dill in the background singing, is perhaps a rather confused message that is not being made very clear. And you can tell this from the wording that went along with the actual poster. On one side we've got desire is a danger zone and on the other we have a statement that this is the more surprises than any film since Psycho and that The Crying Game is Neil Jordan's best work to date. So what's interesting about this poster while only distributed in Britain, when the film itself when it was released did not do very well, was that perhaps the mixed messaging of the poster did not help its launch. There's also a practical reason why the film did not succeed in Britain in 1992 and that is that the IRA campaign of violence was now targeting England and here was a film talking about the IRA and so the reception from the British media was a rather cool one since this was a very current issue at the time. Here's another poster actually this time from Spain which again uses the image of Dill and Jude looking into the hairdresser's mirror but this time it's not clear what they are seeing and what we are to make from it. Is this a film with this poster about two women and is this a film that we should view through the women? As we move on and this poster here is actually from Japan and it's even more confusing perhaps. We have an image of Dill rushing to one side and the face of Fergus being implanted in the center on the other side. So it's not quite clear what the Japanese thought of the film. Now all these posters are what we call paratechs. That is that they are elements that are outside the film such as trailers, posters and we use these paratechs to understand how a film is understood. Even though we have not yet seen the film we make an assumption about the film on the basis of the poster and what I'm suggesting to you here is that the crying games receive many different posters with different images and that has led to some of the confusion around the film when it was first released. But I'd like to turn to some biographical facts about Neil Jordan now. He was born in Ross's Point County Sligo in Ireland in 1950. Now Sligo is a very rural area of Ireland but he didn't live there long because when he was two years old his parents moved to Dublin which is the capital city of the Republic of Ireland. He was noted in his own memoirs that he had no television at home and he would visit the cinema once every two weeks. He then went on to attend University College Dublin and he studied English and history and received a BA in 1971. What's interesting given the texts that we have looked at this year is that at university Neil Jordan played the character of Tiresias in the production of Oedipus Rex and I think this is important given that the crying game is a film about sight, vision and perception. So it's something which Jordan has already embedded in his consciousness, his literary background, his historical background and you might say a metaphorical background as well. In 1971 he married and he and his wife moved to London for two years to find work. And it was there that he began to write short stories with his first collection entitled Night in Tunisia published in 1976. And you might note the connection here between the film The Crying Game and the remove of Fergus from Ireland to London. Somewhat mirrors Neil Jordan's own life story. Neil Jordan was quite fortunate in that the filmmaker, very famous filmmaker John Borman read the collection of short stories and invited him to collaborate on a film script that Borman was working on. At the time in 1979 Borman was making the film Excalibur and which is a film about Arthurian legend and even stars Liam Neeson in a small role. Borman invited Jordan to be a creative associate and actually gave him some money to make a documentary on the making of the film. And this is where Jordan began to learn about filmmaking and to be in that particular atmosphere of the whole filmmaking process. But he went back to writing fiction and he published his first novel called The Past in 1980 and then went on to write screenplays for television drama and film. He was perhaps at this point just another screenwriter looking for a venue for his work. But John Borman had not forgotten him and he was instrumental in giving Jordan a good bunch of money that was available at the Irish Film Board to fund Jordan's first feature film. This caused a little bit of controversy at the time because Borman ultimately decided to give a huge chunk of the money that was available just to this one project. And this project was a film called Angel and this poster that I'm showing now shows interesting enough Stephen Ray who of course acts in the crime game holding a gun and so it's not quite clear from the poster what the film is about. But it should tell you that there is this interest in Jordan's work of violence attached to high stated emotions. Jordan's Angel was Stephen Ray's first film role for Neil Jordan and it plays on the idea of an avenging angel. It's set in Northern Ireland during the 1970s which was by all accounts the worst period of what are known as the Troubles, extreme violence happening every day. Stephen Ray plays a character called Danny. He's a saxophonist. He witnesses murders and then goes on to seek revenge for these murders. So in a sense he's a man brutalized by violence and then he murders the murderers. It's very poetic. It's very mannered. It's very literary and as most critics have said it's rather uneven in tone. It's not quite clear how we are meant to take the film, whether it's a literary exploration, whether it's a revenge narrative, whether Jordan is striving to say something about the Northern Ireland Troubles. I think I'd like to talk a little bit about some of Jordan's other feature films, the lead up to The Crying Game and then also what happened to his career afterwards. After Angel, which was also known as Danny Boy in the United States, he worked with the writer Angela Carter on a film called The Company of Wolves which rewrote the Little Red Riding Hood narrative. And this was fairly successful. It also starred Stephen Ray as well. But he then went on in the UK to make a film which actually got him a lot of critical success. It was called Mona Lisa and it starred a tall female lesbian having a relationship with a short male heterosexual. So in a sense if you've watched The Crying Game you'll understand that Jordan is interested in unusual relationships that cross barriers of race as well as sexuality. After this success he decided to try his hand at comedy and he went to work in the United States and received funding from there for two films. One, High Spirits, which starred Peter O'Toole and involved interestingly enough a situation where living people have relationships with dead people who momentarily come alive for that relationship to happen. It wasn't very successful. There's something about Jordan and humor, street art humor that doesn't quite work. And indeed his next film, Where No Angels which starred Sean Penn and Robert De Niro and which was shot here in British Columbia was also not very successful. It starred a couple of criminals trying to escape and they were able to achieve safety within a religious atmosphere but still again the film did not actually succeed in getting an audience. So very disappointed with this Hollywood experience and the usual problems of perhaps him feeling as a writer that the Hollywood studio system and the various executives had curtailed his work. He returned to Ireland in the early 90s and he made this very short film called The Miracle which looked simply at a young Irish boy who's lost his mother and who's looking through his other relationships for a mother figure. It was a very quiet film and it didn't provide much critical attention but it was at this time that he started working more seriously on the crying game and I'll talk more about that later. Now after the crying game, because of its huge success Jordan was commissioned to work with Anne Rice and he worked on Interview with a Vampire which was the adaptation of her novel and this starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise was very successful at the box office. And it is said that Jordan agreed to do this film and used the leverage on this film so that he could return to Ireland to make what perhaps is his most important film which is a biopic of Michael Collins the IRA leader from the 1910s and early 1920-21 period. This film starred Liam Neeson in the major role of Michael Collins and is often seen as a film that tries to look at the birth of the Irish Free State now known as the Republic of Ireland and to find some way to reconcile the very violent past in Ireland with the current situation today. After this film which indeed the Irish film censor saw as a landmark of Irish cinema he moved on to adapt another writer's work Pat McCabe's The Butcher Boy which criticized the life in Ireland in the late 50s and early 60s in small town Ireland. He then returned to the United States and he worked with Nicole Kidman on a film called In Dreams which is really a psychological thriller and then went on to England where he adapted the Graham Greene novel The End of the Affair in a film starring Julianne Moore and Ray Fein. This too was very successful critically. Now moving on into the 2000s he's actually worked on a film which is technically Canadian called The Good Thief which stars Nick Nolte it's really a casino heist in Monaco and then went on to work on a film which is very similar in some ways to The Crying Game Request on Pluto because it looks at what you might call a trans woman or at the time in the 1970s where it is set someone who is a transvestite played by Cillian Murphy who moves through the various troubles in England and in Ireland at this time and again it seems to be that Jordan is looking at unconventional relationships and people who have decided to live essentially differently. Then went on to make a more conventional film I would argue in The Brave One which stars Joni Foster as a person who is attacked and who decides to take revenge very much like a kind of female version of the Death Wish movies and most recently he's worked on a number of projects in 2009 he made a film called Undine which starred Colin Farrell about an Irish fisherman who brings up in his net a woman whom he thinks is like a mermaid but is in fact a refugee from Eastern Europe and perhaps most remarkably he's made this television series The Borsas which Jeremy Irons plays the Pope and a number of characters we see a great interest on Jordan's part with both the Catholic religion and also violence related to that. Most recently he's made a vampire flick called Byzantium and so he's returning to some extent to the ground that he worked on with Interview with the Vampire. What I'm showing now is an image of Ireland I often have a sense that people don't have a sense of the physical geography of Ireland and what I'm talking about in relation to the crying game is essentially Northern Ireland which takes up perhaps the first third of the film Belfast is its capital and further to the south is Dublin which is the capital of the Republic of Ireland and you'll see that from this image that it's very close to Scotland, England and Wales and indeed there is much communication and trade and commerce and travel between the various countries here but Ireland is a small country in terms of population only in the whole of Ireland there would be about 6 million people so we're talking about a small place but with a lot of history and it is with history I'd like to continue here where are some key dates in Irish history to understand the background to the crying game One of the odd facts of history is that Northern Ireland was before 1600 the most Gaelic or the most native Irish of all the provinces of Ireland and it was the one that was the most rebellious and so when James I came to the throne in 1603 he decided that enough was enough that he had to keep down this Irish rebellion from constantly breaking out and he decided on a policy of what was called plantation this is where he encouraged English and Scottish Protestant settlers to go to what is now Northern Ireland at this point in time it was quite common that native Catholic Irish were forced off their land but there was also occasions where accommodation and agreement were arrived at indeed James did not get enough people to settle in Northern Ireland as much as he wanted so in the end it became very much like a series of garrisons and indeed to this day some people refer to the Protestant community as suffering in some way from a siege mentality a small group of people surrounded by a larger group who to some extent resent their presence certainly historically a most important date in Irish history which affects England is in 1690 with the Battle of the Boeing and this is when William of Orange who was Protestant was invited over by English nobles to England to get rid of James II who happened to be Catholic and from that battle which was fought in one in Ireland by William the royalty the British royalty and Protestantism have been inextricably linked so Ireland has had a huge impact on English history and how England is constructed today now throughout the 19th century what we find as a significant aspect of Irish development is the gradual movement of various laws against Catholics being slowly removed when the Protestants came to Ireland they decided and so did the British government that there had to be some rights and privileges which the Protestants had which the Catholics did not and so many of these laws which were called penal laws were enacted against Roman Catholics so for example one of them which doesn't seem on the surface to make much sense was that no Catholic could own a horse that was worth over five pounds and that's a monetary value not the ways of the horse but the issue here is that they wanted the Protestant community the British and Scottish settlers and the British government to be always because of their small number to be in a superior position in addition to that to try to assimilate the Irish into the British culture although Ireland had its own Dublin parliament up till around 1800 there was an act of union in 1801 which dissolved it and therefore Irish members of parliament had to travel to Westminster in London to argue their case during the 19th century various Irish nationalist leaders were elected to the Westminster parliament and they agitated for what was called home rule so that the Irish could conduct their own affairs this movement went through the House of Commons and into the House of Lords but was interrupted by the First World War and those agreed that matters will be returned to after the First World War was over interestingly enough during the First World War we had both Protestant and Catholics joining up to fight for Britain against the Germans both groups felt that this was an act of loyalty but for different reasons however during the First World War perhaps the most critical event in Irish history happened and this was the 1916 Easter uprising in Dublin when various Irish nationalists and Republicans joined together and took over various institutions and buildings around the city and this led to a violent conflict for a short period of time but what happened was that the leaders of this rising and this is detailed in the film Michael Collins were arrested by the British and subsequently executed now up to this period of time Irish people generally thought that these individuals who had revolted during the First World War were not worthy of their support because I think there was a sympathy that here were our people who were over during the war in Flanders or in Belgium and were being killed and here were these people back on the home front causing trouble but this mood changed once the British executed the Irish leaders and so this led eventually to more support for the early Irish Republican army and then Irish War of Independence broke out between 1919 and 1921 it was quite violent 400 policemen were killed, 160 soldiers and many many civilians and many atrocities were committed by 1921 however the British decided that we need an agreement there was no use for this war civil war to go on but it was quite a dramatic agreement in the sense that instead of giving Ireland over in total to the Irish people it was decided that Ireland needed to be partitioned divided because the Protestant community in the north was very dominant and very little very few Protestants existed in the south of Ireland so the six counties of Northern Ireland remained in the United Kingdom and the remaining 26 counties formed the new dominion of the Irish Free State and later the Republic of Ireland this agreement however divided the Irish Republican army and it split between moderates and hardliners people who didn't want the partition to go through were the hardliners those who thought this was the best deal we could get could be seen as the moderates Michael Collins was identified therefore as a moderate who signed the agreement and decided that this was the best that he could get from the British at the time so there was a civil war between the Irish between 1922 and 23 and the moderates won that war and then began to move into government the other major aspect of Irish history I suppose is the current more current is the Troubles in Northern Ireland which began in 1960 at 1969 and I should talk a little bit about what Northern Ireland comprised of in order for you to understand the Troubles in the background to the film the first third of the film of the Crying Game initially Northern Ireland was 66% Protestant and Unionist the word Unionist meaning that wanting to remain within the United Kingdom and 33% were Catholic and nationalist that is that they felt a sympathy towards joining the Republic of Ireland and having a separate country from Britain but this involved only one and a half million people in total so though it was a small community of one and a half million people the Protestants in the north felt that they could govern since they had two thirds of the population and they had their own government called Stormant which was set up to govern the province today interestingly enough that divide between Protestant and Catholic is much much closer perhaps 53% to 47% in terms of a religious split although there are nine more people who identify as atheist or no religion and it's no longer as clear whether the Catholics prefer United Ireland or whether indeed that some Protestants prefer the Union with Great Britain so it is a complicated picture today but what is true is that between 1968 and 1998 at least 3,500 people were murdered or killed during what is called the Troubles in Northern Ireland if I extrapolated from this per capita that would mean 70,000 Canadians killed in those 30 years or 10 times the death toll of Americans in the Vietnam War so you have a sense of how brutal and pervasive this violence over that 30 years actually was you might ask who was actually fighting well on the one side we did have the Irish Republican Army the IRA and that's a reference in the film The Crying Game to the IRA Fergus, McGuire and Jude are IRA volunteers or IRA members and they believe that Northern Ireland should be under all Irish control and that Britain should relinquish its control and leave you'll remember in the film when Fergus and Jody talk about this Fergus just simply says well we believe you just shouldn't be here also of interest at one point during the Troubles the British Army had 20,000 soldiers in the country and in addition to that there were at least 10,000 police and there were also on the Protestant side loyalist paramilitaries and these were illegal forces they emerged to fight the IRA because it was illegal to own weapons in Northern Ireland so these were similar to militias and so you could say that Northern Ireland was a highly militarized state and it was a difficult place to live in but what was it like between 1990 and 1992 when Neil Jordan made this film well the guerrilla war that the IRA had started had continued for more than 20 years and it was generally agreed that a stalemate had actually set in that neither side felt that they could succeed in fighting the other and winning indeed British ministers often talked about acceptable levels of violence in private conversation it's as if they thought well if we can only manage the problem we can't solve it but we can manage it even so political progress in the early 90s was beginning to happen and yet the guerrilla campaign had ratcheted up because the IRA had started to target England as well as Northern Ireland so I think we do need to have some sense of this phrase that troubles because you will find that if you do any research on Northern Ireland this phrase will come up and people are sometimes confused as to what it means for some British ministers it was simply a little local difficulty it was a local affair and we in Britain we can solve it we can manage it, we can navigate it and we don't want the United Nations or the Americans interfering for others it was essentially a low-grade civil war that is to say it was not like perhaps events that have gone on recently in Libya or Syria it was not all out war but a kind of war of attrition it certainly was a guerrilla campaign of bombs and bullets what were termed legitimate targets legitimate targets for the IRA would have been the police the army prison guards judges who they believed represented the British state indeed in 1984 the IRA attempted to assassinate the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher so she was seen as a legitimate target during this whole period Northern Ireland was ruled directly from London, UK that is to say there was no real local governance everything had to come from London that exacerbated the situation that people felt that par was being exercised from afar and lastly Northern Ireland was a very odd place so for example the court system had what were called dip lock courts these were courts where there was a judge but there was never any jury and the reason for this was that if individuals were brought up on firearms charges murder or attempted murder it was almost impossible to get a jury given the prejudice and the sectarian attacks in the community at the time to serve on these juries and to be impartial and so all the emphasis lay with judges and this seemed very undemocratic particularly to the Catholic community who felt they were being disadvantaged so with regard to the troubles in Northern Ireland I think I need to give an example of what it was like to live there so that you have a sense of perhaps what the character Fergus is meant to feel as he's addressing the problems that he sees in the film so I'd like to do a thought experiment here and unfortunately it's true and that I'd like you to imagine you are a 17 year old Northern Irish Protestant who is coming home from school and he arrives at a place at the station in a city called Lisburn and he gets on the train he's going home to a place called Finneke which is three stops down the line he walks, gets on the train he walks to the last carriage and he sits down there are three empty spaces around him the train moves off at the next station a Nigerian gets on the train he's 35 years old he's the father of three young children he also is going to Finneke where he lives he gets on the train he walks to the last carriage and he sits down beside you the train moves off at the next station a place called Dunmury two Northern Irish Catholics get on the train they are both in their early twenties each carries a bag they are like Fergus in the crying game IRA volunteers they walk along the carriage they reach your compartment they sit down opposite you and the Nigerian the train moves off you are three minutes from home 90 seconds later one of the IRA men stands up perhaps something about that movement makes the incendiary bomb inside one of their bags explode a ball of fire engulfs the carriage and three lives are extinguished 30 minutes later and this is on the documentary record if you put Dunmury train explosion into Wikipedia you will find clearly a rescuer reaching that last compartment and he reports that all he could see was three piles of ashes where once human beings had sat now you might say though that day in January 1980 what is called Dunmury train explosion incident but three people died that day two innocent one guilty even though the bomb went off prematurely something drove those individuals to bring incendiary bombs onto the train you might look at it differently you might say that the Northern Irish Catholic the Nigerian and the Northern Irish Protestant who died that day that they were all victims of colonization and we have read Phenons wretched off the earth and we have discussed how violence is a result of colonization and indeed Phenon goes further and says that violence is colonization now it seems to me that Neil Jordan is going in a different direction he's saying more clearly that we have to get beyond the violence we have to understand it we have to accept it perhaps at some level we have to work our way through it but we have to get beyond it and it seems that he's also suggesting that we have to transform ourselves and this is why his film is about self-transformation as well as a film about the IRA and British soldiers now there are various sources to Neil Jordan's work literary and filming sources one of the strong sources is a short story by Frank O'Connor called guests of the nation which was published in 1931 in this story the Irish republicans take two English soldiers hostage and the story shows how they get on very well with their captors but ultimately the captors have to shoot the English soldiers another literary work which touches on this theme is Brendan Beans play the hostage and again where a British soldier is taken captive and eventually he is killed in a field rescue operation on the film Excite of Things Neil Jordan is also drawing on a film called Odd Man Out a film directed by the British director Carol Reed made in 1947 and it looks at an IRA man on the run after he has killed a person in Belfast during a botched robbery indeed some of the lines which I'll quote in a minute actually also are present in Odd Man Out as well as in The Crying Game also the fable which comes up very strongly in the film The Scorpion and the Frog is also used in other films such as Orson Melz's film Mr. Arcaden what I think Jordan is trying to do here is to draw on all these sources and introduce them into his film but he's trying to go a little further he's trying to add an erotic thread to these very traditional narratives I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute but first of all this fable of The Scorpion and the Frog which is repeated a couple of times in the film and Jody explains first of all to Fergus this fable he says the frog takes a scorpion on his back braves the waters halfway over feels a burning spear in his side and realizes the scorpion has stung him after all and as they both sink beneath the waves the frog cries out why did you sting me Mr. Scorpion for now we both will drown Scorpion replies I can't help it it's in my nature and I think that this fable which Fergus doesn't really understand is absolutely essential to understanding the film at some level Fergus understands his nature his role as an Irish public and army volunteer but it's deficient it's simply not good enough for him to be the person who has lost faith you might say and yet what the fable actually asks is what is our nature is it our nature to do certain things are we really scorpions that we must hurt other people or are we frogs that are fooled and then must suffer or can we change our nature the fable brings us to that question but that also you might say well Jody has a story a fable to tell does Fergus have a story and indeed Jody once he's been told he's going to be shot in the morning asks Fergus tell me a story tell me something and all Fergus can come up with is the following I was a child I thought as a child but when I became a man I put away childish things and Jody asks what does that mean and Fergus after a very long pause says nothing and after an even longer pause Jody says you're not a lot of use are you Fergus and Fergus agrees he says me no I'm not good for much so this doesn't seem to be very much I suggest to you that this story that he's trying to get out what Fergus remembers is some childhood religious biblical text so in the first Corinthians 13 we have verses 11 to 13 we have the following when I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child but when I became a man I put away childish things for now we see in a mirror dimly but then face to face now I know in part but then I shall know just as I also am known and now abide faith hope love these three but the greatest of these is love now I think that what's happening here is that Fergus is recalling his Catholic education remembering his priest perhaps telling him these lines and he remembers learning them but for the first time he's beginning to understand what they actually mean and he's unable to finish this memory to Jody because he realizes that if he truly loves someone he would not be an Irish Republican Army volunteer he would not be taking Jody out for the next day to shoot him so he's unable to finish his story he doesn't have a story but he's conflicted he's confused he's not sure what his nature really is Jody tells him he is kind because that's his nature but Fergus is not yet clear what his nature is so there are various ways you can read the film and I suggest here at least four or 15 ways of reading the film but I think that this should help you along as you view the film you can read the film from an historical political level and focus on violence as something which has no usable political end and indeed one feels that with the film that we start with a lot of history and politics and violence in a way and we end the film with a greater emphasis on personal relationships so it certainly works for the first third of the film to view the historical political angle another way the critics have viewed the film is an artistic one that Jordan, someone who is a writer he's very interested in the literary and filmic Gothic and indeed that you might see this as a kind of Irish some blind that there are these heightened emotions that are explored and that there is something quite awesome about the effect of it and I'll talk a little bit more about that later unquestionably the film is a narrative platform to question racial, gender and sexual identities obviously the identity of Dill is one that's open to question issues of race appear viscerally in the film and perhaps the questions of gender identity are the most difficult to confront and lastly for some viewers and critics is this film just simply really a meditation on the nature of love and desire essentially concluding that there is no reasoning behind love and desire but it just seems to happen to us and is a difficult and conflicted activity what I often find in discussions of this film is that people don't quite understand the relationship between Jody and Fergus and one of the discussions that goes on very heatedly between the two of them in fact as Jody and Fergus move outside the glass house that Jody is incarcerated in in order for Fergus to shoot Jody they discuss and argue over two games Fergus says that hurling is a better game than cricket which Jody has played and some people may not be aware that hurling apart from a few countries is essentially only played in Ireland and is associated here I'm showing an image of it right now of people playing hurling that is something that's associated with Ireland with Gaelic games which doesn't really travel to other countries it doesn't have the same popularity but crickets and here's an image of Jody throwing up a cricket ball is something which has been brought to the colonies of Australia New Zealand Antigua where Jody is from the West Indies and it's a game that's been incorporated into those cultures and indeed in the 1970s and 1980s the West Indies cricket team was better than England and most other teams so what you have here in the film is something that's set up between two types of games one the so-called game of the British colonizer and two the monochrome nationalist Irish first game of hurling and it seems to me that Jordan is preferring the game of cricket even though it's the game of the purported colonizer and indeed we see cricket being played a couple of times in the film particularly at the construction site where Fergus is working and Dill comes to visit him as she comes up to see him we have a shot of him working over a cricket match going on so it's interesting that Fergus after having had that argument with Jody about cricket and hurling he moves to London and is surrounded by images of what Jody was talking about what he played and then in this image that I'm showing now we move into the apartment of Dill and we have a triangular relationship between Fergus on the right side of the frame Dill in the center of the frame and on the left side of the frame we have Jody's cricket whites as they're called his uniform and here it's clearly that Jody is now dead, he's this absent lover but here his cricket clothes are presented as the missing person so cricket and what that represents seems to be very important here to indicate that Jody although a colonized other someone who came from Antigua and who came to England lived in London he was able to continue playing cricket to see his joy and love of cricket not as something from a colonizer but as a game in itself and this is something that Fergus cannot do, everything seems to be political even sports and in this image here what is interesting in the film technically in order to save Dill Fergus asks that she put on Jody's cricket clothes and therefore she will be hidden from view so it's a rather interesting image on the left side of the frame here we have Dill in Jody's cricket clothes but there are also pictures of Jody in his cricket clothes as well so again this idea of the colonizing game of cricket emanating from England is seen here not as a negative force but actually a positive force it saves people and it also is seen as a way in which the colonized other the Antiguan who is Jody can come to London and be part of the British Mosaic but going back to this notion of the romantic sublime or the Gothic which is present in the film you can see certainly that there's a lot of death energy or a certain burden of the past which dominates the film Fergus is constantly brooding there's something about Stephen Ray's very sad eyes I think that many people comment on that he's an intellectual who's thinking but who is sad and part of the sadness that comes across in the film is this burden of the past which is a very romantic notion things that have happened that you cannot change but that you brood over and this is certainly true for Fergus thinking about Jody's death there's also the other romantic idea of the monstrous feminine and here clearly Jude would fit into this category she is the ruthless IRA volunteer she is willing to prostitute herself to in order to capture Jody she's willing to travel to London to threaten Fergus she's willing to kill judges she's a nasty piece of work there's no doubt about it there is also this idea of the adventurer explorer and Fergus is a bit of an adventurer an explorer but it is a sort of internal exploration that he's involved in emotions in the film are treated as seriously as reasoning I mean the crying game as a song is sung three times in the movie by different singers Dave Berry, Kate Robbins and Boy George these songs and the crying game theme definitely bring us to think emotionally they're intended to move us to move our emotions there's also a kind of indulgence of the unnatural throughout the film that clearly the relationships between Jody and Dill and Fergus are complicated and unclear there's also a very melodramatic consideration of suicide Dill threatens to commit suicide near the end of the film and overall there's a kind of feverish excitability there are various negative pleasures that we get from a film like this with its danger, its shootings violent arguments and unclear developments that run throughout the film perhaps more clearly on what has come up in most literary and film criticism are the issues of race, gender and sexuality in the film one cannot get away from the fact that a white man has caused the death of a black man or you might phrase it as a white Irish soldier has caused the death of a black Irish soldier, both working class both colonized and that white man replaces a black man in his love for a black woman and so what are we to make of this that race is also tied to sexual difference in the film even though most people think the fact that Jody and Dill are either black and the mixed race does not seem to be of any particular issues certainly to Fergus questions of gender and sexuality however occur much more strongly in the film to many critics arguably Jody and Fergus are bisexual one knows it Jody and acts upon it the other it's unclear perhaps he explores his homoerotic desires rather subconsciously we also ask what is Dill, who is Dill is she a cross dresser a trans woman queer transgender homosexual a person who perhaps just escapes labels and I think Jordan very intentionally places her character under a question mark unsettling the viewer certainly unsettling Fergus but there are consequences to these choices of Jordan and a number of critics have rightly said well is Jordan saying that men who get in touch with their feminine side such as Dill who is declared herself as female even though she has male genitalia while heterosexual women who get in touch with their male side in the role of Miranda Richardson's Jude are they viewed as monstrous and indeed in interviews Jordan in Ireland with an Irish feminist critic was very defensive towards this position because he felt that the sexual politics were being reduced to this identification of demonization of the female what's interesting is that in this period in the early 90s various theorists were also interested in what you might call these gender issues and indeed Judith Butler's book Gender Trouble first published in 1990 seem to raise many of the issues that Jordan was struggling with in the film here's a quotation from Judith Butler's work how do non-normative sexual practices call into question the stability of gender as a category of analysis how do certain sexual practices compel the question what is a woman what is a man and what she's getting at there is that why is there this conflation between gender and sexuality is there are there not situations where someone who is born male can choose to define himself or herself as female and this of course is led more recently to the category of transgender of individuals who decide that the current practices of ticking off a male or a female box are simply insufficient and also Butler considers another idea that perhaps what we understand by lesbian is possibly a third gender and this is something which is actually missing in the film there is no lesbian character more generally however what we do see in the film is a movement from the periphery to the center and this is why I imagine one can call it as in Fanon as well his interest in the the metropole or the governing power now the word metropolis is Greek for mother country or city state in French metropole indicates the controlling imperial center and we can contrast a metropolis here in this film the crying game London stands in for the British empire and the peripheries are Ireland, Scotland, Wales, India Australia and here what we have is Fergus who goes across the water from Ireland to England in order to lose himself but you could argue that he finds himself as well in the relationship with Dill and he finds this true nature that he is not just kind as Judy the soldier says but that he is someone who discovers that the ways in which he has been brought up his IRA connections his belief systems are all questioned by his when he moves to London what is interesting is that when he moves to London he takes on a new identity he goes from Fergus to Jimmy his non-diplume and then he works on the construction site and the owner gives him all their names like Pat or Mick who doesn't really care who he is and this is a very typical immigrant story of someone who has a name and identity in the home country comes to the center of imperialism in this case London and loses himself he wants to be lost but that also provokes him he has a problem with his identity and Dill in a sense helps him to find what his true identity is he doesn't quite understand his attraction to Dill he hasn't got the vocabulary to describe it but it seems to me that Jordan is saying that moving to the metropolis does on occasion empower the marginal and indeed the metro bar is a place a safe place it seems for people who are marginal in this London society well I think I'll come to the end of this lecture and if you're interested in other films that look on Northern Ireland there I've written a book on this called Shooting to Kill Filmmaking and the Troubles in Northern Ireland and I hope you've enjoyed the lecture