Lesbian Liberation
Butch and Femme Freedom in the Wachowskis' Lesbian Neo-Noir
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The first 30 minutes of the 1996 film Bound – the Wachowski sisters’ debut – just may be the sexiest 30 minutes in all of cinema. Corky (a swaggering Gina Gershon) is a contractor who just got out of prison and is hired to work in an apartment building in Chicago. On her first day of work, she meets Violet (the titillating Jennifer Tilly), the girlfriend of a mobster named Caesar (Joe Pantoliano). Before they even speak to one another there is immediate chemistry between the two women, and obviously, their chemistry bears fruit.
But it’s not just about sex, though sex certainly plays an important part in their relationship. Bound is about liberation, freedom, and being released from the shackles that once kept you constrained. Corky and Violet find liberation in each other, and, through their partnership, are able to free themselves from the habitual roles they once occupied.
It’s immediately clear upon seeing Violet and Corky that the two women represent the archetypical lesbian roles of the butch and the femme. Corky, the hardened ex-con, has tattoos and speaks in a low, confident drawl. She’s good with her hands (more on that later) and has an unaffected manner about her. Violet, her visual opposite, speaks in a breathy, almost cartoonish voice and always appears put-together. She is a master of seduction, and is able to read Corky like a book. When they hatch a plan to steal from Caesar and his mob bosses, Corky acts as the strategist, while Violet uses her feminine charm to hoodwink all of the men. But, despite how the film illustrates seemingly rigid gender norms, not everything is as it seems.
There are three symbolic motifs that feature prominently in the film. These symbols – which act as both physical manifestations of the film’s underlying themes and plot points in and of themselves – are key to understanding how the film explores the notion of lesbian liberation.
Bound begins with Corky tied up and gagged in Violet’s closet, both a hint of what’s to come and a foreboding warning to the viewer. (Will Violet betray her? Will they both get caught?) It also represents the film’s most obvious symbolic element: bondage. Later on, Corky and Violet are both tied up, though Corky manages to free herself with a pair of pliers that already chopped several fingers off earlier in the film. The metaphor here is right on the surface. The notion of freedom and constraint applies to both Corky and Violet’s lives, and plays out literally when Caesar captures them.
Corky is constrained by her identity as an ex-con (in addition to her literal confinement in prison), while Violet is trapped in the life of a mobster’s girlfriend. The similar nature of their confinement becomes clear. When Caesar asks Corky how long she was locked up, she replies that it was five years. Later, when Corky asks Violet how long she’s been with Caesar, her answer is the same. They’ve both been tied up for the last five years, though Corky might argue (at least initially) that their situations have little in common. When Corky helps free Violet from Caesar’s control, they are both able to live the lives they have always wanted.
The apartment Corky is working in is directly next to Violet and Caesar’s place, and the thinness of the walls is a recurring plot point. The idea of walls – or divisions, if you will – is another prominent theme in the film. The first time we hear about the walls, it’s after Corky hears Violet having sex (or at least that’s what she assumes she is doing) in the neighboring apartment. Violet can also hear Corky working, so she brings over two cups of coffee. The transitional sequence here is very intentional. According to Lily Wachowski, the visceral, physical work Corky is doing cleaning out the drain in the bathtub is meant to be analogous to the sex work Violet is engaged in next door. “It’s like the same work, in a way,” Wachowski said in the director’s commentary for the film.
Having heard Corky working (she had been using a snake to clean out the drain), Violet decides to stop by for a visit. (“It’s not your fault, the walls are terribly thin,” Violet says when Corky apologizes for the noise.) She brings one cup of black coffee and one cup with cream, correctly guessing that Corky drinks her coffee black. Violet immediately understands what kind of person Corky is. She knows her coffee preference, that she drives a vintage car, and that she prides herself on being able to fix things with her hands.
Despite Violet’s implicit understanding of Corky, Corky mistakenly believes that they are too different to ever be true equals. She doesn’t understand Violet’s relationship to sex work and initially diminishes Violet’s femme presentation and her lesbian identity. “We’re different,” Corky says. But Violet is having none of it. She maintains that she’s just as much of a dyke as Corky, and what Corky heard on the other side of that wall wasn’t sex – it was work. “We make our own choices. We pay our own prices. I think we’re more alike than you care to admit,” Violet insists. By the end of the film, Corky finally understands what Violet knew from the start – there is no difference between them at all. The things that have been dividing them – the walls, if you will – finally fall away.
The apartment’s walls have significance for the plot, too. When the heist begins to go wrong, Violet calls Corky from an adjoining room, fearing she’s been abandoned. Corky answers, and they each press their hands against the wall, as if to feel the other’s presence. Moments later, this act of intimacy gets them in trouble, as Caesar catches Violet on the phone and hits redial, hearing it ring in the neighboring apartment. But the implication is clear: these two women are reaching out to each other, longing to come together without anything separating them.
Sex plays an important role in Bound. So important that the Wachowski’s hired a sex consultant to work on the film. (Though it was actually Susie Bright, the feminist author who was hired for the job, who asked to work in this position because she thought the sex scenes weren't descriptive enough.) In the DVD commentary for the movie, Bright notes that “the hands are the sex organs” for lesbians, which is why they play such an important part in the film.
Corky’s hands are highlighted numerous times throughout the movie. The first is during her and Violet’s first meeting, when Violet notes that Corky’s hands are just like her father's. “His hands were magic,” Violet muses, as the camera zooms in on Corky’s grease-stained hands. Later, in an almost laughably obvious pretense for sex, Violet has Corky come over to help retrieve an earring she dropped down the kitchen sink. What follows is a distinctly erotic shot of Corky’s wet hands twisting the pipe under the sink. Shortly thereafter, Violet takes Corky’s hand and puts it between her legs in an effort to show her that while the earring trick may have been a lie, her attraction is very real.
Violet and Corky are interrupted by Caesar, of course, who shakes the hand that was just inside of his girlfriend mere seconds ago. “Bianchinni hired you, you must be pretty good with your hands,” Caesar quips, no longer threatened by Corky once he realizes she’s a woman. (Oh how wrong he is.) When Corky leaves to go clean her paintbrushes, she pauses for a moment, rubbing her fingers together in a pleased remembrance.
Though Corky may be the one with the powerful hands, Violet is not merely a passive recipient in their relationship. Later that evening Violet gets in Corky’s car, ready to apologize. When Corky responds that she hates it when women apologize for wanting sex, Violet upends the script. “I’m not apologizing for what I did, I’m apologizing for what I didn’t do.” They go to bed together in the empty apartment (never has a dirty mattress been so erotic), and Violet returns the favor, determined to be the one on top this time. “I can see again,” Corky says afterward. Once again, their relationship subverts expectations. Violet is a dominant femme, while Corky, in all her cocky butchness, is content to let her take charge.
Corky’s hands might just be the most important object in the film. There is a physical element to their presence, of course, and there are several material ways in which they are useful. But they also speak when words are not enough. While Bright’s suggestion that hands are a “sex organ” for lesbians is accurate, in no way do they represent a phallic object or act as a proxy for heterosexual sex acts. This is a lesbian film, after all, and it works to subvert normativity, not uphold it. Corky’s hands represent many things – skill, desire, freedom – all of which are distinctly lesbian in their orientation.
These themes – constraint and division, along with the physical and symbolic nature of lesbian desire – work in concert with one another to create a rather profound account of lesbian liberation. This freedom could certainly be understood as a kind of liberation from gender norms, but Bound is also a celebration of lesbian identity and desire. One could read the film as a story about the rigidity of butch and femme roles, the frivolity of these identities, or the idea that butchness and femmeness are some of the many norms that need to be undone. But that’s not quite right. Though Corky and Violet eventually come to realize that they are, in some fundamental way, exactly the same, this doesn’t mean their gender and sexual identities must be stripped away. There is fun, pleasure, and joy in them, if their erotic dynamic is any indication.
So what does the film have to say about gender? During the scene where Violet and Corky get into a fight about Violet’s sex work, Violet insists that she knows who she is, and that she doesn’t need to flaunt her sexual identity like Corky does with her tattoos. It’s a dig, sure, but it also illustrates what Violet already knows, that the two women share something special that shouldn’t be denied – a meeting of souls, if you will. (When Corky asks Violet if there’s a “little dyke just like me” inside of her, Violet responds “No, she’s nothing like you, she’s a whole lot smarter than you are.” Their entire conversation proves Violet’s point, as she clearly has a much more refined understanding of how the world works than Corky does.)
In many ways, the film is about the performance of gender. Caesar is the most comical character in the film, and his performance of masculinity (which is clearly just as much of a performance as femininity is) is frequently satirized throughout. Violet – perhaps the smartest of them all, if you’ll recall – then performs her femininity in a way that soothes Caesar’s fragile manhood. Violet clearly uses her femininity to survive in the world. As she tells Corky, she does sex work because she’s good at it, just like Corky is a thief because it plays to her skill set.
The joy of their relationship – and indeed, the joy of lesbian culture as a whole, if you want to extrapolate – is their ability to have fun with this performativity, to play with the implications of their supposed roles in a way that is both invigorating and sexy. Corky is very clearly a dyke, but Violet is a dyke too, though Corky dismisses this implicit truth at first. They eventually find freedom together through their mutual desire, yes, but also through this sense of recognition and reflection that is so fundamental to the lesbian and queer experience.
In the end, what’s been discovered here is not the idea that butch and femme identities are fundamentally narrow, but rather that our definitions of these categories needn’t be so rigid. Indeed, Violet’s insistence that she is both a femme and a dyke doesn’t soften the power of either of these terms. Instead, it expands the space lesbianism can take up in the world. What truly liberates Corky and Violet is not leaving behind their entire identities, but instead recognizing something familiar in each other. It’s this lesbian recognition – the reflection of one's self in the other – that finally allows Corky and Violet to drive off into the sunset together, hand in hand.
