The Crying Game (1992): What Desire Actually Is

The Story

Fergus (Stephen Rea) is an IRA soldier in Northern Ireland who is assigned to guard a British hostage, a soldier named Jody (Forest Whitaker). Jody asks Fergus to find his girlfriend in London and tell her he thought of her. He gives Fergus a photograph. Jody dies. Fergus goes to London.

He finds Dil (Jaye Davidson) in a Brixton bar. She is extraordinary: beautiful, funny, sharp, performing a kind of femininity that is simultaneously natural and constructed. Fergus falls in love with her. And then he discovers what the film has been withholding, and the question becomes: what does he do with that discovery?

The Reveal and Its Meaning

The reveal — that Dil is trans — is not the film's subject. It is the occasion for the film's subject, which is the question of what desire is and what it owes to category.

Fergus is not gay. The film does not reframe him as gay. What it does is ask whether the desire he has developed for Dil — specific, earned over time, rooted in his knowledge of her particular person — is annulled by information about her body. His initial reaction suggests it is. The rest of the film suggests it isn't. Not because categories don't matter, but because the specific person has come to matter more.

This is a more sophisticated argument about desire than most films attempt. It does not flatten the complexity — Fergus's discomfort is real, Dil's vulnerability is real, the situation is genuinely difficult — but it insists that desire is relational, particular, not simply the operation of category preferences on available bodies.

Jaye Davidson

Davidson was not a professional actor. He was a friend of a costume designer, spotted at a party, brought in to read. The performance he gives — in a debut, in an extraordinarily exposed role — is among the most remarkable in queer cinema.

He plays Dil with a quality of self-possession that makes her simultaneously the most vulnerable and most certain person in the film. She knows what she is. She knows what she wants. She is clear-eyed about the world's likely response to her, and she has decided to be herself anyway. That decision — the courage behind it — is what Fergus is falling in love with, before he knows it and after.

Davidson received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and did not make another film for four years. When he eventually left acting, it was by his own choice.

The Political Frame

Jordan sets the love story inside a political thriller — the IRA, Britain, the Troubles — and the political frame is not incidental. The film is about the categories we inherit and the specific people who make those categories feel insufficient. Fergus's politics, his nationalism, his understanding of who is enemy and who is ally, all get undone by the same force that undoes his certainties about desire: the reality of the individual person in front of him.

The political frame also gives the film its visual texture — the movement from Northern Ireland to London, the specific world of an immigrant community in Brixton in the early 1990s, the bar where Dil performs as the film's one consistently warm space.

The Song

Dave Berry's version of the original Gerry and the Pacemakers song plays over several pivotal moments, and its quality — slightly melancholy, slightly swinging, a song about desire and loss and the resilience that follows — perfectly captures the film's emotional register. Dil performs it in the bar. It becomes her theme, and the film's.

BoysDo is a platform that refuses to flatten desire into category. The male body it celebrates is not a type — it is a subject, specific, particular, worthy of genuine attention. *The Crying Game* makes the same argument about desire itself: that what matters is not the category but the person, not the label but the specific quality of this connection, now, between these two people.

That argument was radical in 1992. It remains useful. The film made it better than almost anything before or since.