Thursday, April 17, 2025

Lilly Wachowski and Lana Wachowski (as Larry and Andy Wachowski) | Bound / 1996

 plumbing the depths of lesbian desire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lilly Wachowski and Lana Wachowski (as Larry and Andy Wachowski) (screenwriters and directors) Bound / 1996

 

The 1996 movie Bound begins with a scene we’ve all encountered a thousand times before in cinema, a woman enters an elevator with a man, her eyes glancing over at the other passenger, taking the person in with a knowing and lusty glance, which is returned, eyes meeting, bodies surveyed, a get-together assured, particularly when they both get off on the same floor, the stranger headed to the room next door to the apartment the man and woman enter. The fact that we soon discover that the woman’s boyfriend is mafia, is even familiar. As in so many movies of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, this promises to be to be a long, slow-paced film wherein obviously the lone passenger is going to be in for some difficult times until he gets the girl away from the danger which he has just assessed.



     Except—this seemingly familiar scenario has, in fact, seldom been played out before, because that passenger is not another male looking upon the foreign territory he would like to conquer, but another woman, a tough lesbian broad, who’s just been released from prison for robbery, now hired to completely redo the plumbing, walls, and floors of the condo next door. The seemingly ditzy mafia gal, Violet (Jennifer Tilly) is, in fact, only playing that part to keep her job as a long-time partner with benefits until a better opportunity and a tastier sexual tidbit comes along. And with Corky (Gina Gershon), opportunity and sexual allure have suddenly arrived in the very same instant.



     Violet loses no time, trotting over next door to see if Corky might help her get back her earring she has “accidentally” dropped down the drain. This plumber not only retrieves the earring, but like all plumbers shows her crack, the two getting it on so suddenly that there’s no turning back.

      If Corky, equally attracted, is a bit cautious at first, before you can even spell the name of the famous head of the Chicago crime syndicate for whom Caesar works, Gino Marzzone, Violet has not only bedded Corky but managed to hint at a way out of her 5-year relationship with her gangland money-laundering boyfriend, Caesar (Joe Pantoliano), a relationship she convinces Corky she has performed simply as if it were a job.



      Just to make sure you know what they’re up against, the directors, referred to in 1996 as the Wachowski brothers, arrange the torture of a gangland executive, Shelly (Barry Kivel) who’s managed to lay away 2 million dollars of syndicate funds. In brutal 1990s cinema style, the monstrously perverted son of Gino, Johnnie manages to torture the in-house thief by punching and beating him, jamming his head down the toilet several times, cutting off his fingers one by one with a garden shears, before, off screen, shooting him in the head at the very moment he reveals the hiding place of the cash. In short, this is what these men do for a living—when they’re not beating up their girlfriends or their wives. Any sympathy we might have for them later, has already been erased.

       Caesar has been assigned this time to quite literally launder the now bloody money, the man staying up late to wash and press every single $1000 dollar bill and hang them throughout the apartment to dry before Gino arrives the next afternoon to collect the restored loot.

     Gino, it so happens, drinks only Glenlivet scotch. So, according to Corky, it’s easy. Violet, in preparing a cleanup for their august guest will accidentally drop the bottle, forcing her to run out to get some more. And while she’s out, Corky will sneak in while Caesar is showering and getting gussied up, and steal the loot which Caesar has by this time counted, stacked, and packed away in a locked briefcase. It’s a cinch. Corky steals the money, fills the briefcase with heavyweight cardboard, and places the stash in a plastic bag buried deep within a paint container next door.



       As arranged, Violet returns with the scotch, tells Caesar she’s just seen Johnnie leaving, and waits for her suspicious boyfriend to wonder just enough to check on the cash. He does, and just as planned, suspects Johnnie of having entered and stolen it.

       The next step, so Violet and Corky presumed, would be for Caesar to flee, knowing that Gino would assume that Caesar, not his beloved Johnnie had robbed him. But Caesar, behaving somewhat irrationally, as women in such situations are often portrayed, knows that if he runs, he as much as admits he has stolen the loot. He decides to confront Johnnie in front of Gino. Realizing that suddenly everything has begun to unweave. Violet panics and threatens to leave. But Gino, now claiming he needs her more than ever, beats her and forces her to stay on for the arrival of Gino, Johnnie and the bodyguard, Roy.


        Caesar and Johnnie have long gotten on each other’s nerves, Caesar, in particular, detesting his hot headedness and his constant flirtations with Violet. When Johnnie, after arriving immediately begins to hit on Violet, Johnnie taunts him, finally pulling out a gun and announcing that Johnnie has stolen the cash. When Gino realizes that the money is gone and Johnnie appears trapped in Caesar’s accusations, both get ready to turn on Caesar, he having no choice but to kill them and the bodyguard. The gunshots, obviously, frighten the neighbors, as well as their special next-door neighbor listening in to their every move. The police arrive and before they can reach the apartment from their front door buzz-in, with Violet stalling them, the already exhausted Caesar drags the bodies into various other rooms, attempts to clean up and cover up the blood pooling on the living room floor, and together with Violet calmly meets up with the police explaining that he’s been listening to TV rather loudly since he's going deaf. Somehow, even with blood seeping through their shoes, one of the cops sharing the toilet without even noticing the body in the bathtub, Caesar convinces them that nothing suspicious has been going on.

     The next impossible step is for him and Violet to visit Johnnie’s apartment to find the missing money. Just as in so many previous gangster movies, he trashes the place in search of the loot, of course without finding anything. In order to waylay Gino’s other mob palls, he telephones Mickey, Gino’s best friend from Johnnie’s landline, faking Johnnie’s voice, that his father never arrived at the airport.

      By this time, however, Caesar has begun to suspect other possibilities, and when he catches Violet attempting to make an illicit call, hearing the phone ring through the wall, he figures out that, in fact, the robbery has been another “in-house: job. Threatening Violet with the same garden shears as Johnnie has used on Shelly’s fingers, her scream brings Corky running to their door. After a good fight, Caesar slugs them both out, ties up Corky and drags her into the closet—signifying the terrible life she has long ago thought she escaped. To gain more time he forces Violet to call Mickey and explain that Gino and Johnnie are in the hospital after a car accident.



      Having found out that the money is next door, he drags Corky to that apartment to find the money. Violet meanwhile escapes, calls Mickey to tell him Caesar took the money, and returns, gun in hand, to save Corky from the consequences.

      So far, however, although the women have certainly made it clear that they are extremely clever and have almost outfoxed their male counterparts, the story seems to be going in the direction of so many other films about gay figures throughout cinema history, those movies so brilliantly documented by Vito Russo that end with the LGBTQ figure dead.

       If nothing else, it surely appears it will fit the pattern of what B. Ruby Rich has described in her essay, “Lethal Lesbians: The Cinematic Inscription of Murderous Desire,” of the other “lesbian chic” murder movies and real-life situations such as the serial murderer Aileen Wuornos (arrested in 1991), Thelma and Louise (1991), Catherine in Basic Instinct (1992), the teenage girls Hillary and Bonnie in Fun (1994), the similarly young girls of Heavenly Creatures (1994), and the Papin sisters of Sister, My Sister (1994)—all in either lesbian or close sisterhood relationships—who were forced to suffer the penalties of taking on the male prerogative of violence through death or imprisonment.



      Even as Violet holds a gun to his head, Caesar is convinced that she really loves him enough to be unable to pull the trigger, that the female weakness for romance will always save the far more hard-headed and brutal male of the not-so-human species. She proves him wrong in an instant, blowing his head off and escaping almost as a mob hero with the money, Caesar suspected as having hidden or destroyed it. She and Corky head off into the sunset in a newly purchased truck to live a life of sexual fulfillment without an iota, evidently, of guilt for the men from which they have ridden themselves.

      As Rich summarizes the situation: “…They get to drive off into the sunset, not just the Grand Canyon, after committing the perfect crime: they get away with murder, and money, a gun, and most of all, each other. It took five years to get there, a half decade of eroticized vengeance.”

     Rich also observes that the truck they speed off in is blood red, a haunting reminder of the significance of the lesbian menstrual blood that permeated the earlier lesbian murder flicks as well as the numerous lesbian vampire films, Jean Rollins' 1979 Fascination serving as an early emblem, before AIDS made it necessary to remove that association.

      Almost as interesting is the fact that the two brothers’ directorial premier met with negative reaction by executives at some studios who insisted that they could do the film only if the character of Corky where to become a man. The siblings refused the suggestion, arguing “that movie’s been made a million times, so we’re not really interested…”

      Larry Wachowski began transitioning to a woman in the early 2000s, and formally announced that she was now a woman, Lana Wachowski in 2008, appearing as a fully transitioned female in 2012. Her former brother Andy came out as a transitioned woman, Lilly in 2016. Obviously, the Wachowski’s even back in 1996 had sympathized with the female point of view enough that they knew where they wanted to take their powerfully liberating movie.

 

Los Angeles, May 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).

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