Bound and Drive-Away Dolls center sexual politics.
Sexual orientation is one of the two easiest means of contemporary political persuasion (race being the other) — conveniently for Criterion’s new 4K/Blu-ray release of Bound, the 1996 lesbian crime movie. The feature-film debut of the Wachowski siblings, Bound proves that gender manipulation is an old demagogic strategy.
The Wachowskis followed Bound with the sci-fi blockbuster The Matrix, which explicitly used racial identity (specific allusions to black-liberation theology) to express the disaffection that the directors felt toward modern society. Sex and race are also how the Wachowskis disguise the banality of their adolescent imaginations: Mafia-moll Violet (Jennifer Tilly) and ex-con Corky (Gina Gershon) hook up, then team up to cheat brutish thug Caesar (Joe Pantoliano) out of $2 million. Bound is just another post-Tarantino hipster crime flick, but the sleekly designed sapphic exploitation — it’s not film noir but Vogue-magazine noir — makes it seem a harbinger of Millennial acceptance.
Criterion’s effort to give Bound classic status for the “non-binary” craze might have worked except that it comes after Ethan Coen’s recently released Drive-Away Dolls, a satirical lesbian road movie and accidental-crime flick that exposes the hilarious sexual politics inherent in today’s pious gender victimization. In Drive-Away Dolls, lusty Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and bookish Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) become more than best friends when escaping Jamie’s needy ex Sukie (a cop played by Beanie Feldstein) on a drive-away rental-car road trip to Tallahassee. They don’t know that they’re being pursued by a violent political ring seeking to recover a briefcase, stashed in the car’s trunk, that contains the sexual secrets of a senator (Matt Damon).
This is Ethan Coen’s first solo project (co-written with his wife, Tricia Cooke) without his brother Joel, but there’s familiar Coen wit in political references to Bella Abzug, Ralph Nader, Al Gore, the “National Organization for Women’s dismantling of the patriarchy,” plus literary asides. (The film’s original title, “Henry James’s Drive-Away Dykes,” was based on snarky references to The Golden Bowl and The Europeans, novels favored by two characters. “James is why I don’t read — except for road signs,” quips ribald, streetwise Jamie.) Through the girls’ picaresque adventures and growing affection, Coen surveys the subculture of lesbian bars, sorority soccer teams, and feminine license that have surfaced in the nearly three decades since the release of Bound. (“Since when do women curse like that?” a henchman reacts to Sukie.)
In Criterion’s bonus pamphlet, by McKenzie Wark, women use academic terms such as “lesbian essentialist lens” to elevate Bound’s origin in now-dated sexual ideology. Wark, who identifies as a transgender woman, writes, “We feel a truth via the body that appearances belie.” But Wark ignores the film’s superficial aesthetics. Instead, Wark falls into double-talk. “Paradox of cinematic misogyny: if femininity is defined by its powers of deception, . . . the fantasy factory that is cinema is coded feminine too.”
The Wachowskis (critic Gregory Solman dubbed them “the Watch-Outskis” as early as the ’90s) belong to that group of coddled siblings — the Coens, the Farrellys, the Duplasses, the Russos, the Safdies — who encourage one another’s adolescent mind-set. All male, all action-movie oriented, they inspire Wark’s defensive claim that crime genres “work hard to subdue gender panic about cinema’s own femininity though fascination with masculine violence or through the exposure of the femme fatale.” But Wark overlooks the feminine potential for violence in crime movies by arguing that “Bound flips the script. It puts us on the side of the feminine for once . . . via the experience of our own flesh, as pointing toward possibilities for life.”
Such criticism is confused about gender and morality, positing crime optimistically, equating money with power and freedom. Bound is conceived hermetically (and might be the basis for a psychoanalysis of the Wachowski siblings, who both underwent gender transition — from Andy and Larry to Lilly and Lana). But even so, we know its decadent storytelling is immoral, unlike Coen’s larky open road that, livelier than Gregg Araki’s The Living End, holds dangers as well as surprises.
In Drive-Away Dolls the conflict between love and choice is alternately dumbfounding and satirical. It deepens as Jamie and Marian’s relationship deepens. Their intercourse isn’t soft-core like Bound but features Marian’s shy, sly, self-consciousness. (Flashbacks to Marian’s adolescent awakening give blushing, believable details — from nail polish to wooden-fence scopophilia.) Matching Jamie’s experience with her own new curiosity, Marian reveals more than when Bound’s Corky says, “You know the difference between you and me, Violet? Me, neither.”
To praise Bound for providing lesbian or transgender escapism is to disregard what sometimes is profoundly tragic in crime movies — Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett’s explicating the masculine distrust of self, a spiritual critique that the Wachowskis forsake for adolescent thrills. Coen’s farcical climax peaks with the senator’s complaint about “trafficking in other people’s attainments!” It summarizes gender rivalry — Jacques Lacan’s “lack,” the precursor of desire — more than all the Wachowskis’ color-coordinated bloodshed does.
When Gershon’s snarling, curled-lip Corky describes her larcenous past as “redistribution of wealth,” the Communist term amuses Wark, who also approves of Violet’s inability to distinguish copulation from love. This basic mistake comes from the politicization of sexual identity. “The Wachowskis’ cinema never asks us to believe in the restoration of order to the world,” Wark enthuses. “It’s the world itself that’s wrong, that’s false, in its totality.”
That’s just transgender pique. And Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls liberates us from this nonsense. Wark endorses the Wachowskis’ deluded politics, saying, “Their cinema always takes place in a world that is false and wrong.” Wark mangles Marxism, unknowingly it seems, even when claiming that the homosexual, transsexual, and transracial Wachowski fictions offer “variations [on] the possibility of solidarity.” The latter is not a humane hope, it’s a Marxist byword whether in crime, politics, or the movies.