Lesbian crime fiction, what an inexhaustible topic! The chemistry is perfect: stories about lesbians are usually about romance or desire, and the frisson of danger tends to set the erotic thriller somewhere along the crime genre’s gradient, which is where you get a lot of the pulp fiction that isn’t just softcore porn. Add to that the memory of lesbianism read as a pathology, plus, after a history of criminalization, the self-perception of queer people as slightly clandestine. Underneath all that, you have sub-genres: you can find in the lesbian detective thriller the cultural joy of self-mythologizing, see Sarah Schulman’s sexy detective novel After Delores (1988) or more recently Margot Douaihy’s delightful series about Sister Holiday, the lesbian detective nun (the newest installment, Blessed Water, mercifully out last month). You can find romance as a criminal act, see the obvious Carol/The Price of Salt (1953) by Patricia Highsmith. Or you can find lesbians committing crimes because lesbians are already often depicted as anomalous, odd, and escapist, see Heavenly Creatures (1994) and the various homoerotic movies, novels, and plays based on the Papin Sisters murder case[1]. Lesbians commit crimes they plan, like in the movie Bound (1996), or they commit crimes of passion, such as in Sarah Waters’ novel The Paying Guests, currently being ventured for a TV-series by Todd Haynes (I want to be excited about this but I haven’t been excited about Todd Haynes in a while). Then there’s the whole pan-cultural genre of women’s prison movies, which are all really just lesbian movies.
Crime in fiction is cool. It sometimes even feels like crime is the whole point of fiction: to depict some kind of transgression or upset. It is less actually violent than symbolically. It’s a catharsis that does us all good. Lesbians have rarely been culturally cool to anybody but other lesbians, but in crime movies they are. All to say, the lesbian crime genre is nothing new and I don’t think it’s a trend, but my beloved Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley is back on our television screens, and we just got three movies in a row that offer us delinquent or misbehaving women: the more prominent and hyped Love Lies Bleeding and Drive Away Dolls, as well as the fanciful French comedy The Crime is Mine, which barely made the discourse..
Ironically, each of these three movies is also a period piece, which last I looked had been rendered taboo by the lesbian culture police. Luckily we’ve all forgotten about that by now! (Or maybe some of us have finally understood that canceling queer movies will just lead to a lot fewer queer movies.) It’s like their mode and subversive quest for violence is tied to nostalgia, an indefinite, vague escapism that I perceive as a relief. None of these three movies wanted anything to do with our dissatisfying contemporary culture or the more drastic-sounding political issues gaining momentum. Instead, they exist simply to glamorize the lesbian situation of the past, a situation in which lesbians used to be unseen, sidelined, and existed as outlaws. It’s enough to make you wonder what this fantastical nostalgia says about the present, in which lesbians seem to be doing just fine, better than ever as a matter of fact, even though we can sense the pendulum gently starting to swing backwards.
Of the movies I discuss here in this newsletter, I feel the following ambivalence: I want to love lesbian culture and I want to define it on very broad terms—the more broadly one defines lesbian culture, the more varied and sprawling it gets. And yet I also interrogate the cultural products I see marketed to and about lesbians to understand what this (very niche) lesbian culture is, to classify and compare its products, all in the broad context of our culture at large. I am generally dissatisfied and pessimistic about our contemporary culture, and I guess I can speak to this dissatisfaction and pessimism through the lens of lesbian culture. Consequently, I must admit when I am dissatisfied with and disappointed by lesbian culture.
This is why I have to say that I truly wanted to like the crime “comedy” Drive Away Dolls, directed by Ethan Coen and written by his lesbian wife (how mid-century of them!), Tricia Cooke. Drive Away Dolls certainly over-promises: despite production troubles and late release, I expected I was in for violence, cars, the American South, and sex between attractive actresses, all packaged in a silly little movie. Basically, all I ever wanted. I also banked myself in for a specific type of nasty humor. This was my first disappointment—I was probably expecting something following in the vein of Bottoms (2023) which through masterful performance (by Ayo Edebiri) and writing (Emma Seligman) distinguishes itself from prior genre films using bold, brutal, and callous comedy. (Note Bottoms is an anomaly.) Drive Away Dolls opens in 1999, when there were no cell phones but plenty of dyke bars. Two lesbians, played by buttoned-up Geraldine Viswanathan and unconvincing out-of-control womanizer Margaret Qualley drive from Philadelphia to Florida pursued by a gang of thugs seeking a precious suitcase accidentally hidden in the girls’ car. With the surprising aura of a student production, entire scenes seem to have gone missing, jokes barely rise off the ground, and whenever either of the leads tries to do anything sexy, I suddenly felt myself becoming inconsolably sad, so sad I wanted desperately to leave the theater.
But somehow, I am still all for Drive-Away Dolls! I have nothing against nonsensical plots, plot holes, cardboard characters, anachronistic dildo design, and, as you can tell by my penchant for watercolor, I am profoundly attracted to whimsy. I will always prefer a movie like Drive-Away Dolls over anything that wants to tell me the story of an Important Topic or knows What the Problem is with Something. What I want to like about Drive-Away Dolls is that it gives me a world where you can roll in from out of town in a dilapidated car and holler, “Where’s the local Dyke bar?”
Gay marriage was aspirational then. Little did we know our problems had not even begun. With the appeal of a fizzed-out coke bottle that has been baking in a car’s backseat all afternoon, Drive-Away Dolls unintentionally encapsulates that sweet little moment in time in which we were all still going places.
A while back, I caught Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992) on Criterion Channel and wondered: what would this movie be like if it wasn’t boy-meets-boy, but girl-meets-girl? One of the awful thrills of Living End is the looming demise of its HIV-positive protagonists, a pair of gay lovers on a wild ride with nothing but death ahead. An epidemic as harrowing as AIDS is not exactly something you can translate as far as narrative stakes are concerned, but, simplistically thinking, what about the threat women face at the hands of men and domestic violence? Just as AIDS and violence become an aphrodisiac for Living End, so does the cramped threat of family ties and male aggression become a conveniently brutal constraint for Love Lies Bleeding. Neither Living End nor Love Lies Bleeding tries to preach at us, and thankfully this makes Love Lies Bleeding goofy and warm and extremely entertaining, if excessively, almost obscenely violent, sometimes recalling Showgirls (1995), other times Jim Thompson or Charles Bukowski, but with crusty, lovably dense anti-heroines. A delicious surrealist streak combines with the self-deprecating humor of lesbian relationship tropes, from instantly u-hauling to the perpetually returning ex. Our vengeful lesbian antagonists are themselves only barely victimized. Instead, blithely unaware of their own lethal prowess, they doll grotesque injury upon injury unto men and women alike. For director Rose Glass, this seems a huge leap from Saint Maud (2019), which contains several sensitive and surreal inventions but winds up dramaturgically digging its own grave. There were over-promises with Love Lies Bleeding, too. “I want to do the gayest fucking thing you’ve ever seen in your life!” Kristen Stewart (our birthday girl) told Rolling Stone in March with her hand thrust into a jockstrap. Stewart was talking about the Lidia Yuknavitch memoir she is hoping to produce, but in the context of Love Lies Bleeding’s release I was stuck waiting for this gayest fucking thing. Consequently any actual depictions of sex struck me as cozy and sweet and, well, kind of cute. No superlatives.
Meanwhile I found interesting that Love Lies Bleeding seemed to embrace and emulate—and not separate itself from—the styles of Verhoeven and Cronenberg, the former of which’s most recent lesbian movie (Benedetta, 2021) was sidelined by lesbian critics for being written and directed by a male auteur. It’s been a long time coming, but perhaps we are seeing the male gaze discourse slowly come to a rest at last. Some of lesbian culture’s best films (Mulholland Dr, 2001, The Handmaiden, 2016, and yes, Benedetta) were made by straight male filmmakers. There are nuances here, but I still find ironic that in an era appealing to trans acceptance, the gender and sexuality of a director could even still be an issue (and that trans lesbians periodically partake in canonic exclusions of filmmakers like David Lynch and Olivier Assayas on the basis that they are straight men). I hope Love Lies Bleeding is not the last lesbian film that uses Verhoeven’s influence so freely. I’d honestly love to see an era in which the quality of a film isn’t judged by who made it, but how sexy, fun, and violent it is.
My favorite movie in this lineup was Mon Crime/The Crime is Mine (2023) by François Ozon, which is less a crime movie than a pastry puff adorned with candied pistol funfetti. The ultimate antidote to the tedious and didactic Anatomy of a Fall (2023), The Crime is Mine, decked out in over-the-top theatricality, involves two ambitious girlfriends, a lawyer and an actress, and their scheme to use a high-profile murder to gain career advantage. At one point Isabelle Huppert appears as a veteran vedette called Odette Chaumette. Characters spend more time exclaiming where they got their jambon au beurre sandwiches than analyzing their psychologies, and in typical Ozon style we get reference upon reference into the depths of French cinema, from cameos by the late Danielle Darrieux (who also starred in 8 femmes, 2002, my favorite Ozon) to the murderess Violette Nozière, whose 1978 biopic Violette starred, yes, Isabelle Huppert. There were references to Le dernier metro (1981), and Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires (1915-1916), right down to endless re-takes of Ozon’s own movies. The two female protagonists are never explicitly lesbian, but there is plenty of same-sex yearning and flirting, and nobody in this campy frolic is really outed as not lesbian either. On top of its self-involvedness, the Crime is Mine’s pleasure is the sheer grandeur and fun of its production quality: a gorgeous, silly period piece with beautiful costumes and fantastic actors. It’s the kind of movie that critics ignore but audiences love and I truly had not expected this kind of joy to return after 2023.
Ozon’s skin-deep dive into the mid-century Paris theatre scene reminded me of one of my favorite Lesbian crime movies linking criminality and theatricality: Henri-George Clouzot’s Quai des Orfèvres (1947) which anticipates Patricia Highsmith novels like The Blunderer (1954) and A Suspension of Mercy (1965) in how it twists up a fantasy of murder with the actual accusation thereof. Poignantly significant, this Clouzot, whose films usually contain a nasty misogynist undercurrent, contains the central and overt lesbian character of Dora (Simone Renant). Even more poignant and rare, Quai des Orfèvres showcases solidarity between a gay woman and straight men. Dora is the confidante of a straight couple accused of murder, and her allegiances seesaw—sometimes towards the husband, Dora’s childhood best friend, at other times towards the wife, with whom Dora is smitten. It’s a sentimental depiction of lesbianism, one of playing with visibility and masochism, but it’s a powerful one. Ultimately, to quote Kristen Stewart, it’s Dora who is that gayest fucking thing: a portrait photographer by profession, Dora is all gaze and spectatorship. Another woman—Dora’s object of affection no less—even accuses Dora of using her camera as a pretense to get closer to her, to rearrange and touch her, and with this bluntness we see Dora at once as humiliated and triumphant (Dora’s work renders her a visible lesbian; even if she’d prefer it were otherwise, she is still seen).
Some of the greatest Lesbian movies might contain just one really good lesbian character who is central to unraveling a murder mystery. Seven years after Quai des Orfèvres, Clouzot would make his currently more famous Les Diaboliques (1955) and expunge all traces of lesbianism provided by its source text, the fun little crime novel Celle qui n’était plus by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Les Diaboliques has since been remade, but I’m still waiting for a proper adaptation of that original novel…
[1] Les Blessures assassins, 2000; Genet’s Les Bonnes and its 1975 British movie adaptation The Maids; Sister My Sister, 1994; or Chabrol’s perfect La Cérémonie, 1995, which in turn is based on a Ruth Rendell novel; etc