Reports and Debates: Boyz Do Cry: Screening History's White Lies

The inextricability of ethics and aesthetics is demonstrated in the way in which the production of a pure white queer subjectivity in Kimberly Peirce's "Boys Don't Cry" is achieved thorugh the excision of black humanity, in the form of an unseen black character. In this reading of the movie, the interest is in thinking about the "negative" space of the motion picture; indeed, about material so absent it never even appeared on the cutting-room floor. Evidence for this argument comes form reading the documents of Brandon Teena/Teena Brandon's life-story, studying the rhetoric used in interviews with the director, and finally, looking broadly at the white lies screened in film history.