The Brandon Teena Story (1998)

Just a note of clarification. Brandon, did not lie about his gender. Brandon lived his short troubled life trying to express his gender the way he saw it and wanted others to see it. What he did however cover up was the truth of his biological sex. I tend to agree that full disclosure of these facts to his sexual partners would have been just. However, people are often not understanding of issues of gender nonconformity. Nor, have many people been equipped with the language, self-understanding, support, safe-space, and confidence to speak about these things without fear of being met with fear, ignorance and hatred. Our society has a strictly enforced binary gender system that is extraordinarily hard on those who do not conform. This is so entrenched in the sub-conscious of most everyone from such an early age that sometimes it seems that only those of us who do not fit in that system know that it is there and has been constructed by a society built on easy answers and small thinking that limits so many of us in numerous ways. It is so ingrained in people to believe that woman = feminine / man = masculine and all the stereotypes and behaviors that go with these two choices that they think these unwritten (and sometimes written) rules are natural. Therefore those who do not, nay, cannot play by these rules are unnatural, sick, sinful .. etc. So while I was disgusted by the behavior of the local authorities (including the civil court judge) I was not shocked. Serious deep changes need to be made to the way we as the human race see sex and gender or this type of appalling hatred will continue.

I just wanted to acknowledge the fact that if we are going to talk about how people are closed- minded and how society's views must be altered to include transgendered individuals as people of value and importance in our culture, then we must first begin with the little things: If Brandon felt that he identified as a male then we should give him the respect he deserves as someone who served as a lesson for us all. This means referring to him as male. If Brandon saw himself as male then we should refer to him accordingly. I suggest that whoever designed this IMDb movie profile should re-evaluate the way this profile is set up and change the cast description to Brandon Teena...himself (not herself). This is the first step to achieving what I'm sure Brandon would have wanted: to have transgendered people be accepted as how they see themselves- not how someone else sees them.

The documentary about Brandon Teena retells a horrific story about a murder of a peculiar young girl who believed she was born the wrong sex. Adopting the name Brandon, we learn that he went through life at his small town befriending many people and even finding partners in relationships successfully and happily. Recounting the details after the death of Brandon, there is some interesting on screen titles to give information about certain dates, court hearings and accounts from Brandon however this can only hold the audience for so long and doesn't really make up for the cheap, distractingly poor cinematography. In one scene there is a camera device where there is a dutch tilt from a travelling car looking at houses and the sky above that has no relevance to the narrative whatsoever. The talking heads also, become boring in their blandness and the content of each interview slowly gets tiresome in it's repetitiveness concerning how people perceived Brandon from friends and family. Saying this, the first act of the film is highly polluted with people's accounts of who Brandon was, how he treated those around him and an eventually pieced puzzle about how he befriended the two who eventually killed him after all the same old content and narrative that the audience are subject to for a lengthy period of time. However, the interviews do give Brandon substance and makes him a very likable person giving him much sympathy to his tragic end. We learn that he had stole just to buy gifts for his loved ones and how he brought happiness to people in a town full of not too appealing people in a prejudice America. Once we find out exactly what happened in the tragic last Christmas/New Year period in Brandon's life, there are disturbing accounts of what happened and what Brandon was subject to by his so called 'Friends'. The most disturbing piece of film shows still information and audio over the image from the actually interview Brandon was in with a Police Officer concerning his bullying. It is almost laughable how moronic and insensitive the Officer is in his investigation forcefully questioning his sexual abuse to detail and unbelievably asking for a repeat of the statement in very unprofessional terms. I was disappointed that the film was so long, it became hard to concentrate on in the final act. New people were introduced in what seemed random talking heads and the Directors/Writers Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir seemed to lose their way in the narrative by concentrating on the two men who murdered Brandon and their court case. It seemed like a whole different film and purpose in studying their prosecution and the pace suggested that possibly they could have (and in my opinion, should have) in fact made another documentary into their story and the possibility of looking at their motives and Southern Americas discriminatory motives today.

The story of Brandon Teena is fascinating, true, but was terrible filmmaking. I saw this at the Seattle Internation Film Festival, and the filmmakers were there to introduce it themselves. The audience loved it, but purely just for the subject matter. The truth is that this film was put together poorly. The quality of the whole production was lousy, and nothing new or interesting was revealed. It was a second rate true crime documentary that even the subject matter couldn't overcome. It is too bad that the only interesting character in the film appears only in photographs.