ABSTRACT
In Neil Jordan's 1992 film The Crying Game, a British soldier named Jody is taken hostage by a group of Irish terrorists. The Crying Game was the film industry's sleeper hit in 1992, making about $62 million at the box office. The Crying Game can also be understood as providing the audience with the opportunity to revisit and master a universal developmental crisis involving curiosity about the genitalia of the opposite sex. In The Crying Game this artifice is modified so that neither the members of the audience nor the protagonist in the film are aware of Dil's maleness. The success of the movie was largely related to the way it was marketed—namely, a film with a secret that nobody, not even the critics, was revealing. Jordan's film reminds us that we are all on shaky ground when it comes to our sexual identities and preferences.
