Sinful Sunday: Being Gay and Doing Crime with the Lesbians of "Bound"
The two main characters of the Wachowskis' exuberant thriller are a reminder of the power of queer desire.
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Welcome to “Sinful Sundays,” where I explore and analyze some of the most notorious queer villains of film and TV (and sometimes literature, depending on my mood). These are the characters that entrance and entertain and revolt us, sometimes all three at the same time. As these queer villains show, very often it’s sweetly good to be bitterly bad.
I’ve always thought there was something exquisitely pleasurable about those films which allow gays to just do crime, particularly those rare gems in which the queer criminals get away with their deeds and ride off into the sunset. Given the extent to which Hollywood has often gone out of its way to punish its queer characters–whether they do crimes or not–these kinds of movies are like islands in an ocean of homophobia. They demonstrate the extent to which queer desire can be a surprising source of strength, existing outside the bounds of patriarchy and the law.
Perhaps no film exhibits this subversive power more than Bound, the 1996 neo-noir erotic thriller from the Wachowskis. At the center of the story are Corky (Gina Gershon), an ex-con who gets hired to do some repair work at an apartment building, and Violet (Jennifer Tilly), the moll of gangster Caesar (Joe Pantoliano). After the two hook up, they devise a plan wherein they’ll steal money from Caesar and start a life together, but it’s not long before things go sideways. Though the two ultimately manage to kill Caesar, get the money, and drive off to their happy ending, it’s really quite touch-and-go there for a while, and the film keeps us on the edge of our seats until the very end.
From the moment they meet in the elevator, it’s clear that there is a potent–almost palpable–erotic attraction between Corky and Violet. It’s there in the way that their gazes seem to caress one another’s bodies, and it’s there in just the sheer chemistry that you can feel pulsing on the screen. It’s the kind of chemistry that you only rarely see at this magnitude, particularly in Hollywood film, in which all too many lesbian romances are written and filmed for the lascivious male gaze. What we see here, I would argue, are quite simply two queer souls who, at long last, have found one another, each of them providing the other something they have so far lacked. Corky gives Violet the kind of sexual satisfaction and the thrill of the unknown without the threat of violence represented by Caesar, while for Corky Violet is someone that she can protect and care about.
As the film unwinds, they repeatedly find themselves confronted with the specter of patriarchal violence. This is hardly surprising, of course, given that they are both satellites of the criminal underworld, but things go particularly sideways once Caesar discovers that the money is missing and becomes totally unhinged. Pantoliano plays this role to the hilt, to be sure, but his Caesar always comes across as a man who is just barely hanging onto the last frail shreds of his patriarchal authority, and he unsurprisingly sees the romance between Violet and Corky as a threat to his fragile male ego. In the film’s imagination, queer desire is a disturbance both at an individual and a social level, and by the end of it our two leads are almost the last two left standing. Caesar and most of his associates are dead, and one of the last remaining gangsters, who has clearly always carried a flame for Violet, proves quite willing to believe her lies about Caesar’s culpability for the theft.
The question, of course, is whether we are led to see Corky and Violet as the heroes of this pulpy lesbian noir or whether we’re meant to see them as villainous as the criminal goons with whom their lives and fates intertwine. Certainly many critics of the time took the latter approach. Todd McCarthy of Variety was particularly pearl-clutchy, writing: “All characters in the story, including the two women, are willing criminals who exist on the same bankrupt moral level. All are scum, and just because Violet and Corky fall for each other doesn’t mean they somehow fall into a privileged state of grace in which vile behavior can be forgiven. So fundamentally unbelievable and unsympathetic is their romantic and criminal collaboration that one’s sympathy eventually swings back toward the temperamental Caesar simply because he proves the smartest person onscreen.” This is quite a statement to make about two of the sexiest and most compelling lesbian characters to have ever graced the screen and, let’s be real, it’s both laughable and ridiculous to claim that the unhinged and blustering Caesar is in any way smarter than our heroines, let alone that he gathers even a shred of sympathy.
Nor was McCarthy the only one to express self-righteous dismay at these queer women and their violent tendencies. Rita Kempley of The Washington Post snootily remarked that the film “depicts well-nigh unwatchable cruelty for its own sake. There's no moral to justify the grisly goings-on. Its only discernible theme: Love conquers all, even the Gambino family.” Once again, though, the critic seems to miss the point in the very act of articulating it. Yes, in fact, queer love does conquer all, even the brutal patriarchism represented by organized crime (which, it’s worth noting, has its own complicated history with queerness, particularly in the United States).
It’s easy to see why such critics would argue this way: they’re not queer, and they’re certainly not queer women. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this film isn’t for or about them, and they reveal their cluelessness with every word of their reviews. Bound is unapologetically queer in terms of its narrative, its aesthetic, and its morality (or lack thereof). Corky and Violet are two women who have long existed on the outskirts of society, and if they have at last decided to take the chance to forge their own destiny and their own happiness, then who are we to judge them? They may not attain some sort of state of grace as McCarthy says, but that seems to me to be precisely the point. I daresay that they would spurn any such offer if it were to be made. They have proven time and again that they don’t need the approval of either the men in their lives or the society at large, and I’m sure I’m not the only queer audience member who savors and cheers at their final triumph.
The brilliance of a film like Bound is that it so effortlessly binds together the heroic and the villainous, in the process queering the very notion of such categories in the first place. They are the best kinds of queer criminals: alluring and dangerous and sexy, teasing us with their siren song but eluding our desire to understand them. And, when we get right down to it, they’re just hot. As someone who had a thing for butch and androgynous lesbians in my youth, Gershon was hitting all sorts of buttons in my queer brain, and Tilly is similarly sublime with her husky voice. that somehow manages to combine a certain innocence with a sultry allure. Seeing them get to ride off into the sunset together to start a new life filled with hot sex is a powerful and titillating reminder of the enduring power of queer desire.