The Problem of Brandon Teena: Ethics in the Story Documentary

Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir's documentary, The Brandon Teena Story (1998), released one year before the popular Hollywood film, Boys Don't Cry (Dir. Kimberly Peirce, 1999), is suggested by Jennifer Devere Brody (2002) to be a "more ethical and perhaps even more experimental [film]" (p. 92) than its fictional counterpart. Much has been written about the various media representations of the Brandon Teena tragedy. Most have focused on the inconsistencies revealed in the different texts, or the various ways in which transsexual identity is displayed. Valid as those approaches are, our paper is not going to compare texts, or discuss transsexual identity. Instead, we seek to investigate the notion of ethics in The Brandon Teena Story by assessing how its structure balances both message and metaphor. Throughout this paper, the message to which we refer is the arguments that the film advances, while the metaphors are representative of the narrative, the visual effects, the symbolic imagery, and the score. The intention is to provide an analysis on the ethics of representation in documentary, especially, as in this case, when the main subject of representation is absent. The documentary will be closely examined in order to interrogate the general assumption that it is more ethical in its presentation of facts. We hope to reveal much more about the film's views on the subject of Brandon Teena's murder than may initially be apparent. The purpose of such analysis is to unveil how the documentary addresses Brandon Teena's "story" in such a way that submerges the issues of gender identity beneath other social discourses. We intend to show how the documentary presents Brandon as a "problem" rather than a person.The events that ended Brandon Teena's life are a mix of fraud, sexual abuse and finally murder. While there have been various media recreations of the events that led to Brandon's death, it has been argued by Judith Halberstam (2005) that Kimberly Peirce's film Boy's Don't Cry "more than any other representation of the case has determined the legacy of the murders" (p. 24). The fictional film was greatly influenced by the earlier, lesser-known documentary. Though these films provide similar accounts of the crimes there are several key differences between the two that affect the messages they provide. It is understandable that Brody, as stated above, may find the documentary "more ethical" than the Hollywood film, since documentary through its association with "presenting" facts rather than "constructing" fiction, tends to encourage such opinions. However, in the case of the Brandon Teena topic, a crime story about a transsexual who is raped and murdered, what exactly does more ethical mean? Does it suggest that we have a clearer understanding of Brandon's identity, or a clearer understanding of the sequence of events (cause and effect) that led to his murder? In our opinion, the interesting, but frustrating aspect of nearly all the texts that attempt to recreate this tragic story is how little we learn about the main character.Before we discuss the film we must first cast an investigatory gaze on why documentary has generally been considered a more ethical construct than fiction. This has partly been generated by the fact that documentaries are considered to be more truthful representations of the real world. Jay Ruby (2005) argues that "most audiences believe documentary images to be accurate representations of reality, unless they are overtly altered" (p. 213). Although we do not feel confident in arguing what most audiences believe, it is fair to say that documentary suggests itself as a truthful text. Filmmaker and theorist Jill Godmilow (1997) qualifies this view:The essential claim that traditional documentary films make is that there's unmediated truth here because this was not scripted-because the materials are "found in nature"-thus, the text built out of them is truthful as well. That truth claim is still at the center of most documentary work [p. …