Girls, Guns, and Gore: Sapphic Subversions in Rose Glass’ Love Lies Bleeding
By Millie O’Brien for issue 1 of The Grey: Fashion & Gender
Some film makers set out to please the masses. Love Lies Bleeding feels like it aims for the exact opposite. Fittingly produced by A24, Rose Glass’s neo-noir horror is characterised by its violent binary resistance and appetite for gruesome excess. Comic gore is combined with a messy plot of uncaged lust and the result is nothing short of masterful. Set in 1980s New Mexico, bodybuilding fanatic turned steroid addict Jackie (the astoundingly androgynous Katy O’Brian) falls hard for pining butch Lou (achingly trendy Kristen Stewart) who hides a haunting traumatic past closely intertwined with her murderous father. Beginning as a steamy whirlwind romance, the story spirals quickly into chaos, substance abuse, and violence.
Worlds away from the soft Italian sun and twinkling piano music that foregrounds other queer productions like Call Me By Your Name or the rolling grassy hills of Brokeback Mountain, L.L.B resists romanticisation. Her bold thriller feels otherworldly and deeply ominous from the outset and its setting is reflective of that. Drone shots linger menacingly on a crater-like gorge which promises secrecy, the expanse of barren desert feels rotten, and the eerily silent New Mexico sky that stretches on past the sunset feels somehow uncanny. The sense that darkness is brewing in the background is forever lurking in our peripherals.
Glass’ aesthetic subversion extends too most prominently and glaringly to her casting and character subjects. By actively not conforming to the appeal of the heteronormative masses and giving two masculine queer women centre stage, the film’s media reception was unsurprisingly hostile. The comment section of its trailer release on A24’s Instagram flooded with disgusted viewers shaming the film as unsexy, ugly, downright weird. In the queer community however, the masterpiece gained enormous amounts of positive traction, heralded for its unapologetic representation that until now has yet to have been seen in mainstream cinema.
The word ugly, whilst used as an insult, is indeed a fitting word to describe the film. However, its ugliness is quite delicious to watch. The camera adopts a tendency of lingering in places we wish it wouldn’t. For example, viewers endure an intensely graphic scene of Lou plunging a gym toilet on her hands and knees as well as a shot of her avidly gobbling up the discarded remnants of her microwave dinner from the previous night. The lens bombards us with shots of slimy egg yolks and veins popping beneath Jackie’s skin with gruesome sinewy sound effects. Simultaneously, Glass offers us shots of absurd, almost comic murder scenes and a scene towards the end in which Jackie undergoes a monstrous transformation and manhandles Lou’s father. There is an interesting interplay at work between the natural sways of everyday normal life and the cartoonish supernatural. In the words of Olivia Rutigliano, the film is “ultimately more interested in finding its paranormal activity in normal matter: human bodies, mostly, and their cavities and fluids and even capabilities.” Whilst it’s gruesome, it's inherently human with an obsession with the flesh. Therefore, the representation of queer characters feels closer, more intimate, and unapologetic. Glass wields the horror genre as a thrilling tool to showcase a romance foregrounded in being othered.
Crucially they feel like real people. The characters, whilst being at the forefront of absurdity and violence, both excuse an aura of normality. They feel accessible and knowable on screen. Lou works a dead-end job where she plunges toilets, Jackie gets hit on by burly men and suffers from homelessness. In terms of representation, it feels extraordinarily real despite being ultimately surreal in many other ways. It’s the film’s very layers that make it so electric.
Notably, horror is one of the earliest genres to represent queer identities if only to isolate or vilify them. The demonisation of the Queer meant that queer stereotypes within horror cinema became the language of monsters representing Other. The horror genre itself comes from the idea of the Outside which plays on the human fear of something unknown posing a threat to the domesticity, safety, and familiarity of normal life. Queerness can be read as an embodiment of this fear. It becomes a disrupter that will challenge this natural balance of heteronormativity. In the case of L.L.B, it certainly does.
In most horror films, the queer character exists in the background, a vessel that functions for comedy, and is usually killed off early. Note Barbara’s vicious death in Stranger Things, Joanna who is raped and brutally murdered in The Suckers. In other productions, queerness can be embodied as an uncanny feeling that intensifies throughout a film. Instead, Glass places queer characters at the forefront of her story. Not only this, but they live. The final shot of L.L.B. is an achingly cliché shot of the two leading women driving off into the sunset after quite literally tearing down the patriarchy with their bare hands. As aptly put by DR. Thomas J. West, L.L.B showcases “the lesbian body in all of its excess” which “brings the patriarchy to its knees”. We are granted the indulgence of the “delicious pleasures of queer rebel without the tragic ending.”
Even costume in the film is subversive. Lou wears muscle tees inspired by the book Macho Sluts, the act itself becoming one of protest against the normative culture of her small-town life. Olga Mill, the film’s costume designer, revealed in an interview that despite the film being set in the 80s, they actively steered away from the conventions of women’s clothing of the time. Instead of neon leg warmers, she explains that “everything is a little sun-drenched, sun-warmed, and dusty…the film takes so many leaps that we wanted the characters to feel really grounded.” Evidently, the attention to making the characters feel accessible once again shows itself to have been of paramount importance to Glass. There are gender subversions in costume everywhere, a masculine body in feminine shorts and a crop top with muscles bulging from pink lace, a feminine body donning workman trousers. Gender subversion through fashion has always been a vessel to rebel against normative systems and Mill does just that.
Without diving too deeply into Judith Butler’s queer theory, gender in L.L.B. is highlighted to be a cultural fiction, a construct, and a performance-based practice rather than a truth. The dedication to Performativity as a concept itself in the film is hypnotic. It is everywhere and allows the film to have an electric feel of newness and modernity. Jackie performs as a Las Vegas bodybuilder, posing to the heteronormative masses whilst amid a sapphic romance away from the stage. Simultaneously, she performs for men, exercising her feminine allure to secure housing and jobs in the beginning of the film. Lou is categorised as butch in every way the medium of cinema allows. Both characters are defiantly designed to be non-normative. Undoubtedly, “the deconstruction of normative models of gender legitimises lesbian and gay subject-positions.” (Butler, 83) On-screen, they feel like real people thus Glass’s strategy of queer representation feels monumental.
Glass exercises a rebellious embrace of all that is anti-feminine and all that is traditional in cinema in her work. Subversion underpins the scaffolding of the film and emulsifies itself within every element of its characters, plot, and aesthetic. The love story between Jackie and Lou is tainted with gore and pain but despite it all, it feels normal in their kisses, support, whispered intimacy in the dark. Cooking each other breakfast after a night spent together. Glass queers the horror genre by strategically shocking her viewers and thus illuminating the possibilities of representation on screen. Ultimately, the film is a radical and it is transgressive and I absolutely loved it.
References and Bibliography
---. “‘Love Lies Bleeding’ and the Perils of Genre.” The New Yorker, 8 Mar. 2024, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/18/love-lies-bleeding-movie-review.
How Love Lies Bleeding Queers the Crime Thriller. www.curzon.com/journal/love-lies-bleeding-queer-crime-thriller.
“Love Lies Bleeding Is an Eerie, Electric Body-Horror Thriller.” Literary Hub, 12 Mar. 2024, lithub.com/love-lies-bleeding-is-an-eerie-electric-body-horror-thriller.
Ide, Wendy. “Love Lies Bleeding Review – Kristen Stewart Keeps It Real in Deliciously Lurid Outlaw Romance.” The Guardian, 5 May 2024, www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/may/05/love-lies-bleeding-review-rose-glass-kristen-stewart-katy-obrian-deliciously-lurid-outlaw-romance.
“Female Masculinity and Phallic Women— Unruly Concepts on JSTOR.” www.jstor.org. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23720196?read-now=1&seq=12#page_scan_tab_contents.
West, Thomas J., III. “Film Review: ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ Is a Pulpy Feast of Female Gazes and Unruly Bodies.” Omnivorous, 18 Mar. 2024, omnivorous.substack.com/p/film-review-love-lies-bleeding-is.
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