BRANDON TEENA STORY, THE

One thing is definitely proved by the deeply unsettling documentary The Brandon Teena Story: It's scary out there in the heartland. Despite all the highway signs welcoming one to small-town Nebraska and 'The Good Life,' a young misfit named Brandon Teena found anything but that there. On December 30, 1993, Teena and two friends, Lisa Lambert and Philip Devine, were brutally murdered in a farmhouse outside the town of Humboldt. Teena was, in actuality, a girl named Teena Brandon who had chosen to disguise herself and live as a man. Drifting throughout Nebraska, she wooed and won the hearts of a number of unsuspecting young women who were thrilled by the hitherto unknown attention and tenderness showered upon them. ('I'm thinking, 'What's a strap-on?'' one of them says in an interview.) Teena, who admitted she suffered from a 'sexual-identity crisis,' was herself something of a ne'er-do-well, in chronic trouble with the law for theft and check forgery. She was also strictly from the 'love and leave 'em' school of romance, forever moving on to new feminine conquests. This tendency would prove to be her undoing for, when she took up with a local belle named Lana Tisdel, she incurred the wrath of a pair of violent ex-cons, John Lotter and Thomas Nissen. Lotter had once dated Tisdel, still carried a torch for her and, when Teena's real sexual identity began to arouse suspicion, he and Nissen determined to do something about it. On Christmas Eve 1993, they took Teena into a bathroom and stripped her to find out the truth. They then carried her to the edge of town where they savagely raped and then beat her up. Despite being warned by them to keep her mouth shut, she filed a rape complaint against them the following day, but Richardson County Sheriff Charles Laux made no attempt to arrest the accused.

After the murders, five days later, Laux and County attorney Douglas Merz were hard-pressed to come up with reasons for their laxity. They claimed that Teena's gender masquerade robbed her of any credibility and, even given Lotter's and Nissen's lengthy criminal records, there supposedly still wasn't enough corroborating evidence to throw them in jail. Their 1995 murder trial in Falls City became a media carnival, attended by the likes of Maury Povich, Montel Williams and a raft of gay and transgendered activists who turned Teena into something of a martyr in the spotlight, unmindful of the deaths of Lambert (whose infant son was present during the murders) and Devine, an African-American amputee. In March, Nissen was convicted of murder. After making a plea bargain in which he agreed to testify against Lotter, he was senntenced to a life term without parole. Almost a year later, Lotter received the death penalty, which he presently awaits in the Nebraska State Penitentiary.

Filmmakers Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir tell this grim tale with deep compassion. Their film is well-stocked with interviews with everyone from the two murderers and various police involved, to Teena's ex-lovers, friends and family. A picture emerges of a deeply conflicted girl who, despite her gender and sexual predilections, refused to see herself as anything but a male, and certainly not a lesbian. Other women, ranging from Willa Cather to jazz musician Billy Tipton, have also been known to affect male personas with decidedly happier results. Teena's story, with its picaresque life of petty crime and sexual confusion, was like a modern version of Katharine Hepburn's infamous cross-dressing turn in Sylvia Scarlett, as seen through a cracked and bloodied white-trash mirror. A big question is why, exactly, didn't she leave Nebraska for the assuredly more welcoming environs of, say, nonconformist enclaves like San Francisco or New York? As one interviewee puts it, the murderers merely saw their crime as just 'getting rid of some goddamned dykes and some nigger,' a view unfortunately shared by many heartland folk who 'don't view homosexuals (or blacks) as equal, or even human.' Teena, indeed like her murderers, seems to have been inevitably drawn back to these familiar surroundings, however much being there may have imperiled her. When one learns about Teena's willful deceptions of others (as well as herself) and strutting cock o' the walk womanizing, not to mention stealing from trusting friends, it's frankly difficult to work up much initial sympathy for her.

However, when the tape of her interrogation after the rape is played, the quavery, achingly young voice answering Laux's disgustingly salacious questions ('Where did they try to pop it in at first? When he got a spread of you, then did you work it up for him?') breaks your heart. Horrifying as well are the accounts of the actual murders (all at close range, execution-style), and Lotter and Nissen's chilling original plan, which was to take an axe and sever Teena's hands and head. It's absorbing, often stomach-turning stuff, but, in the interests of filling feature length, the filmmakers stretch things out too much. The narrative is diluted with all manner of extraneous padding, like the use of that most awful recent media invention, the cheesy re-enactment, and 'telling' musical interludes with endless footage of Nebraska landscapes (desolate towns, waving wheat fields, snow for days). At times, the directors seem to forget their documentarian parameters in the interests of making another Fargo. This all reaches a dunderheaded apogee with an amateurish, extended rendition of 'Jingle Bells' on a xylophone to underline the fact that it was Christmas when Teena's fate was sealed. Many of the interviews could have been shortened or even excised for their redundancy; nearly everyone in town seems to have had their own two cents recorded.

All told, the film has nothing of the incisive brilliance of John Gregory Dunne's superb New Yorker article about these events, 'The Humboldt Murders.' In one sentence he absolutely nails what Muska and Olafsdottir take an eternity to establish: '[Teena's] was the marginalized world of mobile homes, grungy rentals, public housing, unemployment, welfare, service jobs, minimum wage, social workers, domestic abuse, sexual molestation, absent fathers, paternity tests, teen-age pregnancies, foster homes, court-ordered psychological counseling, learning centers rather than high schools, Job Corps, petty crime, felony convictions, and penitentiary hard time.'

--David Noh