ABSTRACT
Over the opening credit sequence of Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992), we hear Percy Sledge singing “When a Man Loves a Woman.” The song we later learn is used ironically since the film deals centrally with Fergus, a man who discovers that Dil, the woman he loves, is really a man. The song points to how carefully Jordan uses music in the film. Over the film’s closing credit sequence, for example, he returns to ironic use of music with Lyle Lovett’s cover version of the Tammy Wynette classic, “Stand by Your Man.” Clever as this selection of songs is, however, it is the title song, “The Crying Game,” that points to a significant central feature of the film: melodrama and the male body.
