From: IN%"[log in to unmask]" "Benjamin Leontief Alpers" 22-MAR-1993 18:26: 31.87 To: IN%"[log in to unmask]" "Jeff Clark" CC: Subj: The Crying Game Return-path: <[log in to unmask]> Received: from PUCC.PRINCETON.EDU (VMMAIL@PUCC) by VAX1.ACS.JMU.EDU (PMDF #2317 ) id <[log in to unmask]>; Mon, 22 Mar 1993 18:26:12 EST Received: by PUCC (Mailer R2.10 ptf004) id 4336; Mon, 22 Mar 93 15:18:02 EST Date: 22 Mar 1993 15:08:36 -0500 (EST) From: Benjamin Leontief Alpers <[log in to unmask]> Subject: The Crying Game To: Jeff Clark <[log in to unmask]> Message-id: <[log in to unmask]> Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Jeff, Just mailing this to you because I'm responding to a fairly old message and I don't know how interested the rest of the list is at this point. Feel free to post this if you think it bears further circulation . . . I actually more or less agree with your analysis of Jordan's attempted use of the frog and scorpion story. However . . . it all seems a little obvious to me, and - with the possible phallic, symbolism of the scorpion's sting - the relation of the story to Fergus/Dil's situation seems a little strained. More importantly, the Great Secret of _The Crying Game_ is most definitely about sexual orientation and gender identity, while the whole frog/scorpion story is about identity at such a high level of generality that it neatly sidesteps these issues. Ask yourself the following: what if Dil had ended up being a black, English woman (i.e. still from a different world, still psychologically bound up to her former boyfriend for whose death Fergus feels responsible, etc.) Wouldn't the frog/scorpion story still apply just as well? However, _The Crying Game_ would be more obviously what I'm afraid it is,a film about the much more standard questions of soldiers (in this case broadly defined) on and off the front and how people reconcile their role as killers-for-a-cause with their human attachments. Perhaps the theme can be stated to be more broadly about identities (even within one person) clashing with eachother. However, this theme, at least in the way _The Crying Game_ deals with it, has nothing to do with Dil's equipment. -- Ben Alpers