Neil Jordan doesn’t make things easy for besotted straight men. For one thing, he sets them up with impossible attractions to people who render the relationship null: At any given moment, their dream girl could be revealed to be a lesbian (Mona Lisa), a man (The Crying Game), or even their mother ( The Miracle). Furthermore, he withholds crucial information that would keep them from getting smitten in the first place: a deception is involved in each of these relationships, encouraging a one-way emotional bond that will ultimately have nowhere to go. And in the end, it is the female or female-coded who understand things best—they are the ones who have read the rules of the game while the men act like oblivious schmucks as they follow their hearts.

But it’s important to remember that this masochistic scenario is the work of one such straight male romantic named Jordan. And the fact that he’s equated homosexuality, transsexuality and motherhood would seem to suggest that he’s not particularly picky about the taboo with which he decides to block himself. Though much ink has been spilled on The Crying Game’s ultimate political meaning (partly due to its accidental intersection with the Queering of America in the Nineties), the triangulation of the three films suggests that Jordan is less interested in queer polemics exactly than in gender performance—specifically that which might be coded as female.

The chumps who draw themselves into erotic no-win situations never really find themselves changed from who they were initially: they are still tediously straight, and they still want to chase the ideal that they’ve created, the only difference being that they’ve realized that the present reality didn’t line up with the need in their hearts and bodies. The women are another matter. Though the trio are intimately wrapped up with image and performance as a prostitute, an actor, and a hairdresser/drag performer (though The Crying Game’s Dil is technically a man, her self-created image more than qualifies her as female), they understand what lies beneath the performance and how to use that performance to their advantage. The men can do nothing but yearn for the lie that obscures the truth—for the performance and pose rather than the arbitrarily unsatisfactory real thing.

The Jordan sucker-man archetype is given the simplest presentation in Mona Lisa. That film features George (Bob Hoskins), a criminal who’s done a long stint in prison and subsequently finds himself alienated from his wife. Diminished in the demimonde and with no other means of support, he calls in his last favor and gets a job driving for call girl Simone (Cathy Tyson). George proves to be the most guileless thug in the history of crime: Despite having been in deep enough to go to jail, he’s pathetically naïve about the nature of the underworld and has to be given lessons by the more practical Simone. It is she who not only shows the tasteless George how to dress to impress, but who also, through the mission she gives him, the cruelty and brutality of the world and certain people (like crime lord Mortwell [Michael Caine]) whom he thought he could respect.

Simone, of course, is only giving him half of the story. The mission she bestows on George is to look for an underage prostitute named Cathy (Kate Hardie), with whom she had a relationship—though she leaves that last bit of information out of her request. As with her clients, she evokes everything he wants her to be—which in this case is a dazzling no-nonsense woman to which he can live in thrall. George rises to the bait immediately; he misunderstands the rules of the game and falls head over heels in the manner of a foul-mouthed schoolboy. Clinging desperately to the man’s right of action, he doggedly pursues Cathy through London’s underworld, making the odd gaffe (failing to convince a brutal john that a prospective Cathy was a terrific lay; confronting Simone with pornography in which she performed), but ultimately serving his purpose- until, at the film’s climax, he’s confronted with the truth.

But where a less capable auteur would have painted Simone with misogynist broad strokes, Jordan simply acknowledges a no-win situation. The female lead has spent so much time in the realm of the spectacular acting out of male fantasies that she’s ultimately entitled to use it to her limited advantage—and even though we’ve been rooting for George all along, any other ending would be wish-fulfillment instead of adherence to logic. Finding himself on a split between exploiters like Mortwell (who is revealed as an associate of a brutal pimp) and victims like Simone and Cathy, he chooses to turn on his gender even though it means canceling out his desire. And though a furious, selfish exchange with the unmasked Simone lends him no luster, he is forced to accept his usefulness in the grand scheme of things and concentrate on a more plausible relationship with his now-teenaged daughter.

The antinomy of gazing oblivious male/spectacular knowing female continues in The Miracle. The film features two couples: the sexually-charged friendship between Jimmy (Niall Byrne) and Rose (Lorraine Pilkington), and the failed romance of Jimmy’s musician father Sam (Donal McCann) and mother Renee Baker (Beverly D’Angelo). The dichotomy is pretty obvious in the case of the latter pair: Sam is an obvious twit whose response to everything is to drink or to shout, while Renee goes about her business competently and with a certain amount of control. But wounded Sam has claimed to his son that his mother was dead—and so when she returns to town in a production of Destry Rides Again n (in the Dietrich role, of course), the complication that arises is her son falls in love with her.

Renee’s not trying to plot anything, but she does have the knowledge that Jimmy doesn’t possess. And though she’s torn between telling him the truth and blowing him off with his illusions, it is she who holds the balance of power in the situation, the one who can change the rules of the game or abandon it completely. Not that Jimmy doesn’t assert himself: He becomes ridiculously possessive (and pathetically obnoxious) in his attempt to make his misunderstood love work out, the victim of his father’s lie and now the perpetuator of that patriarch’s belligerent pride. But he’s operating on bad information and not asking questions, where his mother insists on asking why, in fact, he has to act that particular way. Renee, at least, is torn trying to calculate the best way out of the situation: Jimmy winds up making things worse by fixating on an image instead of finding out the truth.

Her practicality is mirrored in that of Rose, who meanwhile proves to be the smart one in her pairing with Jimmy. While the young man simply submits to the external mystery of his misunderstood paramour, Rose methodically concocts a mission to free the abused animals in a visiting circus. And she uses the ruse of her femininity in a manner similar to Mona Lisa’s Simone. Seducing a not-terribly-bright member of the circus’ entourage (another sap to add to the list), she manages to steal the keys to the cages during a bout of bad sex—and in the film’s denouement releases them to magic-realist effect. Her decision to execute this mission of mercy is placed in stark contrast to Jimmy’s consuming, oblivious passion—her punchline after the deed is done is “See? I had a plan.” Jimmy is seen as not having a plan- of following his heart (and relying on his eyes) instead of using his head. And so his final gesture—similar to George’s final resignation- is to absolve all participants and declare God the guilty party.

In The Crying Game, the wall of taboo is far more complex—and the ruse far less deliberate. IRA waffler Fergus (Stephen Rea) is the man who looks without seeing this time, who befriends the English soldier Jody (Forrest Whitaker) whom his terrorist cell has kidnapped. After a botched execution- Jody escapes only to be crushed by a rescuing army van—Fergus takes up his request to seek out his girl, Dil (Jaye Davidson). The “girl,” as anyone alive in 1993 knows, is a biological man who is convincing enough in drag to render the flabbergasted Fergus smitten. Dil is seen as every bit a woman as Simone or Renee, and yet every bit as incompatible: The relationship naturally hits a brick wall when Dil reveals his male genitalia and Fergus is thrown into confusion. Once again, a man loves a woman who is for some reason off-limits to him, the result of his looking without asking (as when he fails to apprehend that the watering hole in which he flirts is in fact a gay bar).

So another man fails to ask the right questions and finds himself in a no-win situation. But the mop-up, admittedly, is a tad messier this time. Where Mona Lisa and The Miracle were more or less situations where a man could not be loved back, Dil continues to love long after Fergus has dropped his illusions—and finds she has to do battle with Fergus’s IRA girlfriend Jude (Miranda Richardson) when she comes to suck him back into terrorism. That girlfriend, however, is a shapeshifter of a different sort: She’s shown in drag of her own when she comes back to lay claim to our hero—a disguise markedly unlike her early scenes in Ireland and pronounced in its emphasis on spectacular femininity. She knows where to find him, and through her costume, how to slip by authorities. And so the stage is set for Fergus to miss an assassination attempt (due to Dil’s having tied him up), for the schleppy cell leader to die in a hail of bullets, and for Richardson to come calling for payback.

It’s here that the film makes its rendezvous with familiar patterns. The film’s climatic battle between the two women occurs with Fergus tied to a bed and unable to participate—with the women who know the score deciding the fate of the hapless man who’s literally and figuratively unable to decide his own. The movie sort of acknowledges the disaster of his blundering by having him take the rap for Dil’s victorious kill shot: He’s not technically guilty of anything (in this case) but still has to shoulder the burden for creating the whole morass of futile desire. The impossible romance between Fergus and Dil can only end, like the others, with nothing gained. Though the lady shows up like a dutiful wife to visit her man (and offers ironic promises of romance), Fergus must repeat her first boyfriend’s Mr. Arkadin quote to the effect that he can’t reciprocate—after all, “it’s in my nature.”

The question remains: Is the archetypal man the scorpion or the frog in that particular anecdote? Jordan’s distinction lies in trapping you into identification with a man while undercutting all of his assumptions—of admitting to both the stupidity and attractiveness of the image he’s chasing but will never capture. He can’t reorganize the male gaze or compromise with something realistic; he can’t imagine a love object beyond the thrilling spectacle of a woman on display. But he can imagine the woman inside the image and show how his desire can cause disastrous consequences for someone who might exist outside of it. He’s the feminist fetishist, the reluctant sexist, a quandary and conundrum that, for all of his sentimentalizing of the picture of a woman refuses to give himself the last word on the frame.