Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Documentary filmmakers Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir talk about the story behind "The Brandon Teena Story."
Feb 26, 1999 | On New Year's Eve, 1993, two young men drove to a farmhouse in rural Nebraska and killed the three people inside. Their victims were the farmhouse's residents, a 24-year-old single mother and a 22-year-old man, and a 21-year-old drifter who was taking refuge at the house following recent trouble in nearby Falls City.
The drifter was a slight, muscular, short-haired woman named Teena Brandon. The two men who shot her, Tom Nissen and John Lotter, had known her as a slight, muscular, affable young man named Brandon Teena until a week earlier, when, upon discovering her true gender, they drove her out to the Nebraska countryside and raped her in the back of their car on Christmas Eve. When Brandon pressed charges, the two men, both ex-convicts, decided to kill her.
Documentary filmmakers Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir learned about the case through a wire story from the Omaha Gazette headlined "Dressed to Kill." Both the nature of the crime and the local press's treatment of the story intrigued the New York filmmakers. So when Muska was offered the chance to go to Falls City with a writer from the Village Voice who was covering the story, she brought her camera along. (The story also attracted the attention of filmmaker Christine Vachon, who is currently producing a fictionalized account, "Take It Like a Man.")
Olafsdottir and Muska's film, "The Brandon Teena Story," which won awards at both the Berlin and Vancouver film festivals last year, documents a society as deeply conflicted about its identity as Teena Brandon was about her gender. The girls of Falls City express concepts of sexuality both naive (one of Brandon's former girlfriends talks about looking up the definition of "hermaphrodite") and, in some ways, very evolved. For the women who dated Brandon, sleeping with a girl didn't make them lesbians -- so long as the rest of the town believed she was a man.
Lotter and Nissen accepted Brandon as a peer, until the rumors about his identity became too loud to ignore. The sense that emerges from the film is not so much outrage over Brandon's true identity as anger at the depth of his betrayal. According to Olafsdottir and Muska, the town is still grappling, five years later, with the extent to which they were deceived.
What was your initial impression of Falls City and the people involved in the case?
Muska: It's a really quiet and small town. The people involved didn't treat the murders as anything remarkable -- it was all rationalized into something they could understand. In their eyes the murderers were nice guys. It was over with, and now they didn't want anything more to do with it.
Did your idea of what the story was about change during the process of filmmaking?
Olafsdottir: I don't think we went in with an idea of what it was about.
Muska: There were things we wanted to explore. We wanted to know more than what was coming out in the press.
Olafsdottir: Like where does such hatred come from?
Muska: People would say, "She lied and no one should do that." The lying was a big thing and it was very difficult to decipher what this whole lying business meant, because to us, everyone was lying. It was difficult to sort through how people expressed their feelings about gender and male-female relationships and homosexuality.
When you say everybody lied, by "everybody" do you mean the women Brandon dated?
Muska: It depends what you mean about lying. I don't want to sound like Bill Clinton. These girls said, "To me he was a man, and he was the nicest man I ever dated." And to an extent that's fine, and you can go along with that, but the line is crossed when other peers started saying, "This isn't really a man, he's a woman, he doesn't have a penis, you're lying." And the girls would have to cave in to that, because there was incontrovertible proof. But they didn't believe they were lying before, and I don't believe they were lying before.
And wasn't Brandon lying as well, telling these girls that she was a hermaphrodite or that she was in the process of getting a sex change?
Muska: He would tell people so many different things ... That's the beauty of the story. The people who were involved with Brandon needed their definition of Brandon to fit in with how they needed to live their life. You go after what you think you need, but you can't name it what it technically is, because that's going to ostracize you.
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