Drawing the Border, Queering the Nation: Nation Trouble in Breakfast on Pluto and The Crying Game

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article:

Part I | Drawing the Border

This article examines films set in Ireland by writer and director Neil Jordan. Thus far, Jordan has made eight Irish films. Here, I focus on two of those: the whimsical picaresque piece adapted from Patrick McCabe’s novel Breakfast on Pluto (2005), and the controversial blockbuster that put him and (actor and Field Day co-founder) Stephen Rea on the map, The Crying Game (1992). The title of the latter film is a pun referring to both the heartbreak involved in romantic relationships and the state of occupied Northern Ireland. This split film offers juxtaposed crying games—a historico-political conflict as against an invented romance-gender conflict—so that viewers recognize the issues as linked. Perhaps needing no introduction, it gives us main character Fergus (Stephen Rea), a Volunteer in the Provisional IRA. He befriends Jody (Forest Whitaker), a Black-British policeman of West Indian descent on patrol during Operation Banner. Fergus participates in abducting Jody, is charged with overseeing him, and later ordered to assassinate Jody. But he does not follow this direction, and Jody is hit and killed by a British lorry instead of by the bullet Fergus was ordered to hit him with. Now, Jordan’s protagonist “cross[es] the water, lose[s] [him]self for awhile,” traveling to London in a symbolic cattle boat. Fergus is thus reborn, alighting in the colonial mainland as a second self, a Scottish immigrant named Jimmy. On the lam and now newly employed in construction, he is not just hiding from the paramilitaries; Fergus is there to fulfill the romantic mission which comes to trump his political involvements. It is the errand requested by his new, now dead friend to deliver a message to Dil (Jaye Davidson), a second order he fails to complete.