Gabrielle #14 – Love Lies Bleeding
Vests, am I right?
Mainstream cinema is attempting to be sexy again. It’s mostly failing, sadly, but it is trying – whether it’s pushing desire through broader themes of control and liberation (Poor Things), class warfare I guess (Saltburn), or the majestic sport of tennis (Challengers). The best of them, in terms of how well it renders the choking, maddening, subjugating force of the erotic on screen, is Love Lies Bleeding.
I think it helped that I watched it in the same room of Curzon Soho that I was thrown in a few weeks ago by myself, at 10 o’clock in the morning, for a press screening. Spending hours alone in a cinema that still has those thick red drapes that open and close in front of the screen gives you a dirty in plain sight type of feeling, like doing an STI test in a public toilet or eating a burrito while walking, that everyone should experience at least once. It’s the intimacy of your own living room mixed with the reality that anyone could wander in off the street, if they felt like it. (Curzon if you're reading this please don't put me on some sort of list, I’m just thinking out loud.) Anyway! I enjoyed the film, and I have some thoughts on it, but I also have a looming chapter deadline for my book so I’m going to give them to you in bullet points. (Spoilers, obviously.)
I’ve always found Kristen Stewart to be a brilliant actor. I was not a “Twilight head” – I was 16 when the first book came out, which is both too old and too young to be getting into the repressed fantasies of a Mormon housewife (the correct ages for that are approximately 11 and 35+), but I find the films soothing in that ‘always on ITV2 at Christmas’ sort of way. They are not good films, let’s just say that. Too ludicrous and too earnest, graded like a DeviantArt project. But Kristen Stewart is incredibly compelling in them. She has an unusual physical presence; timid and over-expressionistic at the same time. She’s overly alert, almost. Always twitching and tightly wound, like every room she’s in is too cold. People make fun of her acting style a lot but I find her fascinating to watch, and I think Love Lies Bleeding has finally redeemed her as one of the greatest conveyors of limerence. The way her body carries the discomfort of having a feeling, the way she never inhales or exhales fully, which gives a sharp, breathless quality to her delivery… that’s desire embodied! When I think of Twilight I always think of the bit in New Moon after Edward fucks off and she’s either staring out of a window like she’s just been trepanned, or convulsing in bed, full-throat screaming with an animalism that gives Sheryl Lee a run for her money. She does a lot of staring and screaming in Love Lies Bleeding, too, in which she plays a chain-smoking, beer-swigging lesbian gym attendant called Lou. She stares at Jackie, an aspiring bodybuilder passing through on her way to a competition in Las Vegas, as she does bicep curls in the gym’s mirrored walls. She stares at Jackie from across her apartment. She stares at Jackie from below, face hovering between her knees. She screams when Jackie shoots a girl in the back of the head point blank; recoils and gags upon discovering the remains of a guy (Dave Franco, very satisfying) Jackie beat to death in his own home. It’s all sensory; taste, touch, smell, sound, sight. And in each case the line between sex and violence is entirely circumstantial.
For reasons we learn midway through the film, Lou’s life is boring by design and suppressed by nature. The film opens with her elbow-deep in a clogged toilet and trying to shake off a cloying ex-girlfriend. She has a Richard O’Brien-as-Riff-Raff ass dad who she doesn’t speak to on account of how he embroiled her, as a child, in his passion for disappearing people in a ravine near the Mexican border. When Jackie appears out of nowhere, the way these people often do, it upends everything. Where there was nothing, there is everything. Where there was boredom, there is too much. The physicality of Lou’s desire for Jackie obliterates the mundanity of her day-to-day, unscrews the top on the hard-shaken bottle of her existence. This is what happens with lust anyway. It busts you open like a pomegranate, scrapes all the substance out of you, and stuffs it back in a new order. You are changed, but only to the trained eye. It’s almost uncanny. What good erotic thrillers do is give that sensation some sort of shape, mapping the intensity of desire onto stakes that are as momentous as it feels. In this case, triple homicide ought to do it.
From the moment she meets Lou, Jackie begins to transform. Mainly because she starts hammering steroids, but also because of desire. Her body swells and squeaks against her clothes, the sound of it like rubber, like balloons being twisted together. She starts flying off the handle. She kills to protect, she has rage blackouts, she loses her grip on reality. Meanwhile Lou, physically much smaller, is pragmatic and subtle. She hides the bodies, cleans up the evidence, lies to the feds. She loses her grip on reality too, but in a more measured way. Partly, I think, because she is more accepting of the prospect of being in love – something Jackie quite physically cannot handle and responds to, at first, as an attack on her sense of self. In a heterosexual dynamic the assumption, usually, is that male energy is grounding while female energy is hysteric. Rational thinking meets emotional thinking. There’s some truth to that (when taken as a statement of fact not of value), but as soon as you start messing with gender it becomes flimsy. Here, the physically stronger person is also the most incoherent and chaotic. The bigger Jackie becomes – the more “masculine,” if you want to view it like that – the more unhinged she gets. The weaker, more “feminine” person, sort of thin and depressed, is consistently stoic and logic-driven. How do you define the direction of power in a dynamic like that? There isn’t one. Throughout the film, Lou and Jackie take turns rescuing (and hurting) each other. It’s a disruptive take on things; the question mark of gender allowing us to see the ways in which power can manifest in a relationship without the patronising contemporary framework of “bad men and female victims” muddying the waters. I don't think it’s an accident, for instance, that when Jackie has her first full rage blackout Lou suddenly refers to her as “Jack.” The sex, too, is physical in a literal sense. As Stewart said herself in an interview with Empire: “In these sex scenes, it's about power – subverting it, toying with it. There's always a power dynamic that charges a sexual dynamic, and it's just so interesting between two women, especially when one is extremely ‘strong’, and the other is quite frail.”
I rate that it’s set in the 1980s and, while the hospital they frequent is plastered with posters about the AIDS crisis and both queer sex and intravenous drug use are fundamental parts of the story (their meet cute starts with Lou shooting steroids into Jackie’s arse and ends with them fucking), it isn’t a story of gay death. A bunch of abusive male archetypes get what’s coming to them, Lou’s poor battered sister sides with them and is abandoned as a lost cause (there's no moralising about that, either, Lou simply calls her a “moron” and moves on), the ex-girlfriend Daisy (played pitch perfectly by Anna Baryshnikov) weaponises pity to get her way – more cloying and calculated than an injured party. This is a story with no true victims, which is refreshing.
I’m not enamoured with magical realism and there’s a bit at the end of the film that I’m in two minds about. Basically: Jackie gets big. Not John Cena big. Not ludicrously capacious, gargantuan, slide it across the floor after a bank job big. Like, really big. The size of a small mountain perhaps. She does it to save Lou’s life, and it’s a cool way of turning the threat of her size on its head, but aesthetically it pissed me off. My husband talked me round slightly by pointing out that it’s a payoff the whole film spends its time building towards – the way Jackie is shot like Richard Gere in American Gigalo, the creaking sound of her growth, the zoomed-in shots of her veins bulging cartoonishly – and it made an otherwise boring rescue scene interesting. I’m not entirely sold but the whole running through the cosmos thing did feel a bit Angels In America, what with all the 80s and the AIDS backdrop of it all. So: fine. Why not. We all love a bit of implied vore here.
Not to talk about sobriety again – get a new drum to bang, god! – but one thing I realised last year is that I need to be overwhelmed. If I’m not doing something purely sensational for several hours a day, I start lingering on Tower Bridge and wondering if I would notice the smell of the Thames before drowning in it or if the impact would kill me first. I need to have my head emptied out like a slop bucket on a regular basis, and the most effective way of doing that is to flood it with something else. That’s why I like slashers and Skrillex and the ocean and sex that’s so physically taxing my mind temporarily abandons my body. I am genuinely thankful, now, for the confluence of circumstances that meant I never really encountered heroin.
It reminds me of this interview with Charlotte Gainsbourg, whose cool eyes and deadpan voice have carried some of this century’s most extreme depictions of sex and violence, around the release of Antichrist. She says: “I love violence in films. I like being physical, probably because I’m not very physical. I’m not very big. It really lets you blow off steam. It’s as liberating as screaming, as a shouting match in a scene. These are moments when we forget ourselves [...] These are the most powerful moments, because the action is so extreme that we lose our heads.”
She’s speaking as an actor here, obviously, but it’s a relatable sentiment. Gainsbourg likes doing violent scenes because she acts to lose herself in the first place. I like watching them, and inviting violence upon myself in some circumstances, for the same reason. Love Lies Bleeding is absorbing in that sense, but also pulpy enough to call enjoyable. It didn’t blow my head off the way a harrowing psychological experiment like Antichrist would, but it’s a weird film made on a low budget by people who understand what it means to commit multiple felonies because of the way someone looks in a vest, and that’s good enough for me.
