The Viscera of Love
In ‘Love Lies Bleeding,’ Bodies Movie In and Out of Control
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Rose Glass’ second feature film, Love Lies Bleeding, is preoccupied with bodies. What goes into them, what comes out of them, and that inexplicable alchemy that can exist between them. The film is part love story part violent crime thriller, building a world where blood and guts spill out alongside the sticky sweet vapors of desire.
The first orifice we see is a clogged toiled bowl, the domain of our resident weirdo, Lou (Kristen Stewart). The first instance of penetration is a steroid needle injected into the ass. These gut-churning moments give you a sense of the film’s fluid, often gross interpretations of pleasure and the collision of the flesh.
Lou, a horny little twerp, first meets Jackie (Katy O’Brian), an itinerant bodybuilder, at the gym where she works. The desire between them is immediate, which explains why Lou injects a needle into her backside the first night they meet. Though they’re both deeply grounded in their physical worlds, the characters don’t quite map onto familiar archetypes. Glass was keen to poke fun at the “strong woman” trope by making Jackie a literal strong woman, though her physical strength masks an inner vulnerability. Lou is weak by comparison, but she’s far from impotent.
Despite its grisly smoothie blend of genres, Love Lies Bleeding finds purchase among filmic touchstones. An 80s-set neo-noir, the movie plays with the genre’s classic themes of revenge, paranoia, and alienation, motifs that graft onto its queer love story. Lou and Jackie are alienated (or have alienated themselves) from the world around them for a multitude of reasons, some of which have to do with gender and sexuality. Taking the noir structure one step further, Lou occupies the role of the hardboiled cynic wracked with moral quandaries, while Jackie is the femme fatale. Neither has much agency because the world around them is corrupt. What choice do they have?
Lou and Jackie are lovers between a rock and a hard place, and their blood-soaked story recalls previous cinematic pairings. They’re on the run through the desert like Thelma & Louise, driving a car off the cliff in an act of desperation. They’re grimy outsiders fighting for a happy ending like Elvis and Alabama in True Romance. Their criminal sisters are Corky and Violet from Bound, also forced to contend with bloody carpets and no-good mobsters. The Wachowskis were similarly bewitched by bodies and how they fit together – Corky and Violet’s potent butch/femme dynamic is nothing short of a symbiotic Big Bang. Lou and Jackie’s bodies fit together too, but they lack one thing Corky and Violet possess: any semblance of control.
The most obvious parallel, of course, is the work of body horror master David Cronenberg. (Stewart also plays a horny freak in his most recent film, Crimes of the Future.) Cronenberg maintains that love, sex, and desire are inherently bizarre and disgusting, a position Glass seems to co-sign. Musing about Cronnerberg’s films in The New Yorker, Becca Rothfield writes that “all good sex is body horror.” She insists that love is a wholly transformative experience, evoking Kafta’s Metamorphosis or Ovid’s violent fairytales. Love Lies Bleeding most clearly resembles Crash and The Fly, fusing the former film’s perverse desires with the latter’s grotesque physical transformation.
Lou and Jackie’s desire for one another is not perverse because it’s lesbian, but because it causes their bodies to spiral out of their control. As Lou, Stewart embodies a visceral thirst that pours out of her from the moment she first sees Jackie. Every time Lou watches Jackie flex her muscles, she’s overcome by this hunger. Their desire for one another is insatiable and disruptive; it’s also what causes the film to move in a violent direction.
Both of their bodies begin tightly coiled, and they become dangerously unspooled once they crash into each other. Before she meets Jackie, Lou is as obstructed as the toilet bowl she was plunging at the beginning of the film. Her stagnation is unsettled by Jackie’s presence; her renewed virility gives her strength. Meanwhile, Lou introduces Jackie to steroids, which cause Jackie’s body to expand beyond its normal boundaries as she becomes a neon-coated She-Hulk. As Jackie’s body grows and transforms, so does the violence and the film’s sense of surreality.
The physical space occupied by Love Lies Bleeding expands beyond the screen. Both leads are out queer actors, a fact that is quite rare in the broader lesbian cinematic universe, especially as mainstream films are concerned. This matters not just in terms of authenticity but because O’Brian and Stewart take up queer space as they move through Hollywood. O’Brian’s wife thirsting after her on Instagram while she bulked up for the movie adds to the story of the film. Stewart’s suggestive Rolling Stone cover and red carpet appearances with fianceé Dylan Meyer contribute as well. O’Brian and Stewart’s sweaty photoshoot for Them situates the film’s queer aesthetics in the ‘real’ world.
And what of the bodies sitting in the theater? If you saw the movie the first few days it was out in theaters – or even at a later date – it’s likely the cinema was filled with queer folks, and in particular lesbians. In my theater, the audience was unabashed in their vocal reactions to the film. The events therein rippled through the crowd – comprised of friends and lovers huddled in anticipation – eliciting gasps and guffaws in equal measure. And yet, lesbian films of all kinds must always contend with the specter of fetishization, as illustrated by the Michigan man who treated the movie like his own personal porno. Still, one man doesn’t erase a nation of queer bodies in exaltation.
In Love Lies Bleeding, love is brutal in the most literal way imaginable. For the straight couple in the film (played brilliantly by Dave Franco and Jena Malone), love is a dead end. But for Lou and Jackie, love is a propulsive, though just as destructive, force. Is love redemptive for these queer women and their bodies-in-excess? Not exactly. But it is synergetic, and it gives them something to live for. As in Bound, we can imagine Lou and Jackie driving off into a perpetual sunset, leaving a trail of loveless deadbeats in their wake.