Your Body is A Construction Site
A (Spoiler-Free) Review of Love Lies Bleeding (2024), dir. Rose Glass
“A sacrifice is a novel, a story illustrated in bloody fashion.” —Georges Bataille, Eroticism
Do we need our bodies anymore? Our lives are cybernetic, our relationships algorithmically curated and digitally maintained, so many of our jobs are nothing more than pinging email inboxes and shrill Slack notifications. Perhaps bodies themselves are obsolete, heavy objects which do nothing for us beyond requiring rent payments and food intake.
I don’t believe this at all, though many libertarian biotech investors and effective altruists seem to. And it seems that, just as our ever-digitizing lives necessitate a reconsideration of our mass and flesh, cinema as a medium is likewise returning to “the body,” not as an object but as a place, a space, a site, and an archive. Last year, no film did this better than The Iron Claw. This year, Love Lies Bleeding may be the definitive treatise on The Body.
To be frank, I did not expect Love Lies Bleeding to be good. I expected it to be fun, kitschy, sexy, the kind of movie you watch over many (many) beers and too-loud commentary with your friends crowded onto an IKEA couch. Instead, I saw a melodrama handled with the tact of Douglas Sirk, a presentation of artifice under the same electric glow as Showgirls, and a work of body horror that could have been conceived by Cronenberg. It is deeply, deeply Batailleist. Yet Love Lies Bleeding is far more than the sum of its influences; it is a wet, neon, fever dream of sex and violence, an encapsulation of the American Pathology, and a beacon for what this latest wave of Queer Cinema can be.
Love Lies Bleeding is set in 1989 Albuquerque, among strip malls and dingbats and sandy shooting ranges. We see almost no natural light, our characters and their surroundings illuminated only by buzzing overhead fluorescents and drowning in the neon glow of advertisements. The sets are strange, insular, I got the feeling that I were to wander just off-frame, I’d reach not only the end of the film set, but the end of the world itself; each shot bounded by some deep, imagined darkness. The score is entirely electronic, built, fabricated. There is nothing beyond what we see. Everything—everyone—is constructed and manufactured by their environment and their will.
In this way, Love Lies Bleeding is not a Trans Film, but A Trans— Film. Upon the first meeting of our leads, Louise (Kristen Stewart) and Jackie (Katy O’Brian)—who go by Lou and Jack, in obvious reference to their gender nonconformity—inject each other with illicit steroids. The act of changing their body, de-feminizing it, is their initial act of intimacy. What immediately follows is sex, and what follows sex is a series of close-up shots of raw eggs, milk, sweat, bodies depicted with the topography of mountains and deserts. It is a wet film, concerned with the fluids of life, its opening scene beginning with a shot of a toilet filled with diarrhea. There is blood. There is amniotic fluid.
The mutability of the body at the will of the individual is the film’s key theme, one that necessitates constant depictions of bodily fluids. To Georges Bataille, and to Love Lies Bleeding, there is a necessary connection between eroticism and wetness, the liquid viscera of life in stark contrast to the dryness of death, the finite state of bleached bones, the New Mexico desert that surrounds Albuquerque. “There exists an unmistakable link between excreta, decay, and sexuality,” writes Bataille in Eroticism, “Horror at death is linked not only with the annihilation of the individual but also with the decay that sends the dead flesh back into the general ferment of life.” Lou and Jack transform their own bodies, and the bodies of others, between natural and artificial, alive and dead, needing and satiated, wet and dry. The film’s antagonist (Ed Harris) is always surrounded by the barren, arid nature of death; he, like the beatles he keeps in his home and office, live dryly amongst the sand. Lou and Jack must be fluid to be alive. The violence enacted by Lou and Jack is bloodied and glistening, encased in the same wetness as their erotic desire for each other.
Love Lies Bleeding is a collection of beginnings and endings, so it is fitting that it would be set at the end of the 1980s. AIDS awareness posters line the halls of a hospital, homes in the once-booming Sun Belt are dilapidated, Reaganite tax cuts have failed to trickle down. Lou and Jack have limited interaction with the politics of their day, but a newscast can be overhead narrating the fall of the Berlin Wall, described as a “celebration of the individual.” Politics have emphasized accumulation and individualism, anyone can become anything. As the film progresses and Jack’s steroid use increases, she becomes physically larger, closer to her desired form, far less stable. The erotic drive is illogical, taboo by the very nature of its triumph over the “logic” of Western societies. Following desire at the expense of social norms is an affirmation of life, of the transgressive power of the individual as a spirit and a body, and thus it is necessarily tied to violence. Harris’s character oversees a system of violence in Albuquerque supported by institutions of power, his desire for capital and material acquisition non-threatening to the social order and thus (to a degree) permissible. In this way, Harris simultaneously plays the role of the state, dictating the boundaries of sexuality, desire, transformation, death, and taboo: he is a necropolitician of deregulation, a Ronald Reagan.
Bataille writes of the dangerous desire for transformation, “At bottom we actually want the impossible situation it all leads to: the isolation, the threat of pain, the horror of annihilation; but for the sensation of nausea bound up with it, so horrible that often in silent panic we regard the whole thing as impossible, we should not be satisfied.” Love Lies Bleeding is the story of two individuals who will do anything to become what they desire. Perhaps its success as a biopolitical film suggests that we must do the same: we must dictate the shapes and boundaries of our own bodies, we must insist our desires do not simply uphold the powers that confine us, and we must want things that are living, changing, corporeal, alive, wet.
this is so genius