Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 1999
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 19, No. 2, Spring 1999, pp. 127-32.
Abstract
CRIME AND RESPONSIBILITY
The Brandon Teena Story, Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir's recently released documentary, addresses the circumstances of a triple murder that occurred on the last day of December 1993 in a rural farmhouse in southeastern Nebraska. The crime received national media coverage because one of its victims, the principal target of the attack, was a young woman who had, for some time, been living as a man. The two other victims, a young man and woman, were killed because they were witnesses. The murderers were quickly apprehended and tried, one sentenced to life in prison, the other to death in the electric chair.
The documentary's title indicates the filmmakers' approach and method. Born as Teena Brandon, the twenty-one year old had, for a while, been cross-dressing and calling himself Brandon Teena. Muska and Olafsdottir's use of his chosen name is a decision to accept a principle of self-identification. The designation "Story" emphasizes the decision to present a chronological narrative of the events leading up to and following Brandon Teena's death rather than their own explanations and analyses of the material. This is a film without voice-over narration or other forms of authorial commentary. Of course, the filmmakers do not, cannot, eschew the formal means inherent in their medium for shaping, selecting, and sequencing their material.
As do most documentaries narrating a series of actual events, The Brandon Teena Story relies heavily on the filmmakers' interviews with people who have something germane to contribute to the story: former girlfriends of Brandon Teena, his family and friends, an array of law enforcement and criminal justice figures, the two perpetrators-Thomas N issen and John Lotter-and their connections, and the family of another of the victims, Lisa Lambert. Because Muska and Olafsdottir arrived in Nebraska after the murders, they had to rely on other people for much of their material: photographs, writings, and, most tellingly, an audiotape of Brandon Teena's interview with Richardson County Sheriff Charles Laux.
The film also depicts the story's setting through montages of Lincoln, Falls City, and, most eloquently, the winter roads and stub bled fields of this corner of the state. Country-Western music often accompanies the imagery; labeling, in the form of time and identification titles, newspaper headlines, television footage, provides informational links.
The opening section devotes considerable time to Brandon Teena's teenage girlfriends in Lincoln, where he was born and grew up. Sexual issues are raised from the start, the young women maintaining that they believed Brandon Teena was a man, even though some of them were sleeping with him. In the face of their friends' skepticism-"People said, do you feel a strap-on?"-they wanted to agree with him that "this isn't a gay relationship." There are two ways of accounting for this denial. All of these young women enjoyed being with him: "He knew how to please you"; he bought roses, pizzas, engagement rings. And none of them seems to have wanted to face the social consequences in their milieu of the possibility of being in a lesbian relationship. When Brandon Teena's gender, in the physiological sense of the term, .became too well-known to be ignored, the women recount his explanations: he said he was a "hermaphrodite," or he came up with stories about a just begun sex change-steroids, implants. Perhaps it was public embarrassment that caused them to turn on him: "How could you lie to me?" "You are a female"; "He lied and lied." A middleaged friend of his says that whenever he tried to tell the truth, he was called a fag, a dyke, a lesbo, a freak.
Comments
Copyright 1999 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln