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The Story of Brandon Teena vs. The Brandon Teena Story

It's hard not to get sucked into the story of Brandon Teena. After all, this was a 21-year-old man living in a woman's body in the rural corn-belt of Nebraska -- a daunting task, by any stretch of the imagination -- who performed manhood so well that he managed to fool even the "real" thing. The men he hung out with and the women he dated all believed him to be male, and until he got busted for check forgery and his "real" gender came out, he was just one of the guys. Perhaps this is why the rest of the story is so shocking: two men with whom Brandon had been friends kidnap and rape him, and then, a week later, shoot and stab him to death, all in the name of protecting their fragile Midwestern masculinity. Like I said, it's hard not to get sucked in.

Unfortunately, getting sucked into the story of Brandon Teena is considerably easier than getting sucked into The Brandon Teena Story, the 1998 documentary that preceded Kimberly Peirce's 1999 Academy Award-winning feature film Boys Don't Cry and attempts to tell Brandon's story through the voices of those who knew him, and those who eventually killed him. The attempt is certainly noble, especially considering the lack of ready funding for documentaries, not to mention the resistance to "controversial" subject matter like genderfuck. But good intentions can only take you so far, and this film ends up being a bit of a mess.

Directors Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir choose to let their subjects tell their own stories, in their own voices, without additional overdubs or narration. This means that we have no idea if the film's subjects are really answering the directors' questions, a suspicious move that makes watching The Brandon Teena Story not unlike watching a presidential debate, and one that asks us to take the subjects at face value. This is not an unproblematic request. Muska and Olafsdottir explain their decision by stating, "We didn't want to be pedantic and preachy, because that is boring." Point well taken. But this is definitely a case in which moderation is the key. The film seems choppy and disconnected without some kind of over-arching narrative to pull together the seemingly random landscape shots and interview snippets. In some ways, perhaps, it makes sense that the film is choppy -- it relies on the memories of people who didn't really know Brandon, much less all the complications he embodied: his mother and sister refer to him with female pronouns, clearly disrespecting his own identity as he recognized it; his so-called girlfriends are more concerned with protecting their own heterosexuality than with sharing even their limited understandings of Brandon's experience; and the men who were convicted of killing him are invested purely in reinforcing and stressing Brandon's female-ness as a means of normalizing their rape of him. None of this really helps get to Brandon -- the film is, by default, more about the people who were acquainted with Brandon than it is about Brandon himself.

Furthermore, despite Muska and Olafsdottir's best intentions, the film does have its pedantic moment, when they interview Kate Bornstein, the well-known and often-quoted male-to-female transsexual gender activist, playwright, novelist, and performance artist. They speak to her in Nebraska, while she's there, along with members of Transgender Menace, to hold a protest/vigil at the trial of one of Brandon Teena's killers. Bornstein shares her shock and disgust with the crimes perpetuated again Brandon, but her testimonial gets a bit heavy-handed with Bornstein's seemingly on-cue tears that border on kitsch. Furthermore, even Bornstein can't let the story be Brandon Teena's; her apparent attempt to create community by referencing her own brushes with violence as a result of gender performance fall on largely deaf ears as it's clear that Brandon himself is being brushed to the side, used only as a reference point. While this might be good strategy for the larger political goals of gender activists, it's a curious decision within a film that is ostensibly about Brandon Teena specifically.

This isn't to say that The Brandon Teena Story isn't valuable for what it does do: it reminds us that gender is a sticky and often oppressive business (especially since there are only two from which to choose); and it highlights the pathological sexism and compulsory homophobia in a small-town community that has far too much to lose if it accepts the instability a transgender resident brings to it. Reactionary conservatism is alive and well, the film shows us, as Nebraska residents seem more shocked at Brandon's gender performance than at the incompetence of the police department, the rape of Brandon, and his assailants' attempts to cover up the evidence of that rape, attempts that culminated in the murder of Brandon and two other people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. While this is a useful insight, it's not surprising. Nor does it dig below the photogenic surface of the life and death of the film's subject.