Opengender

At the same time as the tomboy was coming of age in the wilderness, there was a spate of both indie and mainstream films in which a lesbian-erotic undertone to representations of female intimacy was heavily pathologised. This tendency seems only partly explicable as a product of an American obsession with serial killing which developed in the late 1980s. This was seen as symbolic of national paranoia, social breakdown and a deeper crisis in masculinity. A fascination with urban breakdown emerged in TV cop shows, which also developed a paranoiac (homo)eroticism. For King (1990), Miami Vice epitomised a "lack of narrative [standing] for the 'threat' of postmodern culture [...] the possibility of a future without connected human emotions; [...] where the obsession with surfaces leads to a total disconnection from feeling, a separation from reality that is so far-reaching that even the word real must be placed in quotes" (King, 1990: 281-2). By the late 1980s, the figure of the solitary tracker/outlaw on the lonesome frontier/road had moved the detective genre and gone 'psycho'. Next stop, The X-Files. 'Civilisation' could no longer be depended upon to reiterate a normalising closure of the perversity opened out in cinematic fantasies of phallic excess — because now the aliens rule, OK?!

Eroticised representations of this sexual uncertainty inevitably diffused into classical paranoia producing (amongst other tropes and themes) the figure of the homicidal lesbian in the lesbian noirs. These re-assimilated lesbianism to a spectacularised eroticism for male spectators and reproduced the stereotypical pathologisation of lesbianism as paranoid and aggressive. But this did not, of course, prevent numerous lesbians from enjoying their edgy homoeroticism. Paradoxically, such representations seemed to Galvin (1994) to have appealed more to lesbians and heterosexual women than to gay or heterosexual men.

The potential for women and men to read the film in different ways is illustrated by the fact that, whereas men have been more reserved in their judgement, both heterosexual and lesbian women have taken some limited pleasure from Basic Instinct. In this sense, the obvious intention to appeal to the male audience through Catherine Trammel's various states of undress have been subverted by the female audience's complex system of identification, empathy and selectivity. Women can derive pleasure from not only Catherine's conventional beauty but also her unconventional behaviour — from smoking to wearing no knickers to driving aggressively to sleeping with women to killing men — depending on one's scale of values. (Galvin, 1994: 222)

Galvin (1994) placed such films as Basic Instinct (1992) in the context of 'backlash'. The film also provoked considerable queer protest, particularly in the US (Galvin, 1994: 219).

By the time Basic Instinct went into production the lesbian and gay subculture was particularly threatened by a backlash against the small but significant steps towards equality which had been achieved during the previous two decades. (Galvin, 1994: 219)

The 1990s nevertheless also produced films with a more positively deconstructive attitude to a similarly highly eroticised representation of autonomy in heterosexual femme fatales such as A Rage in Harlem (1991) and The Last Seduction (1993). A Rage in Harlem ends in an implicitly egalitarian heterosexual relationship (effected by "feminising" its black male hero), whilst the closure of The Last Seduction is suggestive of an autoeroticism — which seems to cite the persistent difficulty of representing an autonomous feminine heterosexuality. Mainstream indie cinema came up with a partial solution to both these problems by catching up with a new sophistication in the visual coding of lesbianism. Bound might be seen as invoking a deconstructive attitude to urban sex-gender alienation associated with cosmopolitan adroitness rather than suburban paranoia — a titillated rather than anxious response to sexual 'undecidability'. Bound pushes at the formal boundaries of mainstream representation at the arty/cult end of 'cultured-lads' mainstream. A young, cosmopolitan sector of the mainstream audience is now ready to find lesbianism stimulating rather than threatening.

Bound, however, carefully encodes a lesbian 'verisimilitude'. It does not really succeed in a 'realistic' representation of lesbian subcultural space, codings or lifestyle but this may, in itself, be a further source of lesbian pleasure. Relating Clark's (1991) comments on 'window' advertising to this cinematic context, lesbians may take pleasure in precisely this failure adequately to 'colonise' lesbian space.

[T]here are certain aspects of lesbian subculture that remain (as yet) inaccessible or unappropriated. By claiming this unarticulated space as something distinct and separable from heterosexual (or heterosexist) culture, lesbian readers are no longer outsiders, but insiders privy to the inside jokes that create an experience of pleasure and solidarity with other lesbians 'in the know.' (Clark, 1991: 194)

Thus, the very move towards assimilation simultaneously reinforces lesbians' feelings of difference and separateness which is effectively cancelled out by the more collaborative mode of lesbian consumption of the contemporaneous 'lesbian lite' genre.

Most recent films which show a female 'alternative civitas' are set in 'outlaw' territory — on the margin or frontier. Whether this margin is figured as natural wilderness, or as urban ghetto; lesbianism signifies a 'walk on the wild side' rather than an introduction to the girl next door. Politicised lesbian feminisms' critiques of heterosexuality and of capitalism made it impossible for its representation to circulate through those systems. Lesbian 'lifestyle' identity, which can now be opposed to a more threatening, feminist insubordination, can thus appear as a relatively attractively packaged sexy, youthful, and commodity. Nevertheless, for heterosexual male filmmakers, lesbians still seem to require an 'outlaw' setting in urban criminality. In both the 1980s and the 1990s, films which treated female insurrection in situations more familiar to the white, suburban, middle-classes tended to be comedies (9 to 5 (1980), The Witches of Eastwick (1987), She Devil (1989), The First Wives Club (1996).) 'The lesbian' continues to be coded as criminally aggressive, albeit now in a context of free-market capitalism which actually valorises 'enterprise' over (cultural) legitimacy and takes an economically appropriative rather than disciplinary attitude towards 'difference'.

Bound (1996) obviously hit the spot with lesbians and set off the same kind of adulatory overload prompted by Thelma and Louise.

Yes, it's directed by men, but for the most part you'd never know it (Olson, 1997: online).

They smoulder with every look, steam with every kiss. (Elliott, 1997: 19)

Susie Bright's (aka Susie Sexpert) offer of script advice on lesbian sex was accepted. Bound "has a pair of convincing lesbian characters, a palpable desire between them, and a happy lesbian ending" (Olson, 1997: online). "Bound tells the story of a couple of dykes out to steal millions from the mob. In the US, its stars [...] have rightfully become lesbian icons" (18). The film was also nominated for the 1997 GLAAD Media Awards. Not all lesbians were as ecstatic, however. Bound "seemed to get an equal number of 'loved it' or 'hated it' reviews" in the US lesbian press, since many "couldn't stand the graphic violence" (Olson, 1997: online).

The film also seemed to have an appeal for heterosexual women. Jennifer Tilly, the heterosexual actress who played the femme fatale Violet, herself talked about her character in terms of the 'feminine masquerade' (see Doane's [1982] expansion of Montrelay and Riviere), seeing the character's femininity as "a disguise she puts on so she can move freely through the man's world, but that's not who she really is" (quoted by Elliott, 1997: 19). Tilly also related the character to her own experience as an actress in the male-dominated world of Hollywood. Gina Gershon, the heterosexual actress who played the 'butch' character, Corky, felt a greater need to research the part, visiting bars and imitating their dyke patrons; and it is interesting to note that these heterosexual actresses both seemed to treat the 'femme' character as more natural. Gershon clearly had done her homework, basing the butch character, Corky, on the lesbian icon "James Dean" (Elliott, 1997: 20). Elliott, however, remained somewhat cynical about the motivation of the heterosexuals involved:

Since Sharon Stone rocketed from starlet to sex symbol overnight in 1992 for crossing and uncrossing her legs, actresses have been lining up to try to recreate the effect. (Elliott, 1997: 18)

Editorially, the Diva review article runs various 'revealing' quotes by participants in the film's production in a separate text box without critical comment, inviting — as does the film itself — the active critical participation of lesbian readers.

The film's directors, the Wachowski brothers, were adamant that Bound would be a lesbian movie. They turned down several offers of funding which required them to change Corky to a male character (Bergeron, 1997: online). They shot two versions of the sex scene, each in a single take, to manipulate the censors — the scene could not be edited without removing it altogether (Bergeron, 1997: online). Bound's 'female-centred' take on the noir genre recalls The Last Seduction's heterosexual but self-motivated, femme-fatale protagonist who (having been knowingly recoded in terms of the feminist critique of the genre and its 'feminine masquerade') survives. Nevertheless, (hetero)sexual expression by and for this femme fatale is effectively written out by the female-autonomous functionality of her 'performance' of hyper-femininity. The difficulty of 'matching' this ultimately auto-erotic feminine masquerade to a satisfactory heterosexual outcome is not, here, resolved by death — in fact, it no longer seems to need to be resolved at all. The Last Seduction's postmodern heroine begins and ends the film in emotional solipsism, and perpetual restless motion. The heterosexual feminine masquerade works here to contain the inconsistencies which open out between "femininity," as ideally pliant and receptive, and the routine enactment of independence by (heterosexually) female-identified persons in a 'post-feminist' age.

By a self-reflexive manipulation of the (usually subtextual) lesbian implications of female protagonism, the dislocations of the feminine masquerade and the resultant ambiguities in the distribution of the eroticising gaze, Bound is able to maintain a tense undecidability about the reliability of Violet's performance of femininity until the narrative resolution. It is on the reliability of Violet's sexuality that her reliability as Corky's accomplice rests. As such, Bound fits perfectly into a lesbian reading agenda. It seems to remain the crucial component of (white) lesbian pleasure that the heterosexual visual-spatial cinematic organisation of desire is deconstructed or at least somewhat defamiliarised. Individual lesbian spectators may not be able to articulate this process in the language of film theory but a more or less disruptive attitude towards the relay of the gaze can be observed in more or less any film which has ever appealed to lesbians. Obviously, such disruption is more usually the accidental effect of some other agenda of (male) filmmakers, and is not usually effected for the benefit of lesbians — or even necessarily with any idea that lesbian implications might arise. However, more recently, lesbian visibility has made a discourse of the lesbian-eroticising gaze available to mainstream filmmakers.

In Bound, a butch drifter, Corky, just released from gaol, fetches up in an apartment next door to a mafia gangster and his pouting, purring, ultra-femme girlfriend, Violet. Bound begins with a textbook reproduction of the characteristic visual coding of sex-gender in the noir genre; with Violet coded as femme fatale and Corky gender-substituted as typically morally ambiguous anti-hero and dupe of the femme fatale. The initial encounter in a lift is constructed in the butch's cinematic point of view, complete with a lingering, narrative-freezing, pan up the femme's legs, which is eyeline matched to Corky's desiring gaze (and that of the spectator is thus coded as inverted-butch/het-male). This visually establishes Corky as the protagonist and relays a (butch/het-male) point of view through her onto the femme. It also establishes a stereotypical alignment of the butch with male heterosexuality — with inversion. This scene is followed by a scene set in lesbian bar where Corky's butch character is narratively coded as she is 'seen off' by the policewoman-girlfriend of a femme she is attempting to chat up. The information that she has just been in gaol not only strengthens her coding as the typical noir dupe but also (stereotypically) her butchness. The gay bar-scene does not quite ring true for lesbians but it is near enough to mobilise lesbian recognition whilst still allowing lesbian spectators to feel somewhat better informed — pleasurably more 'in the know'. After the seductive encounter in the lift, Violet calls Corky over to do some minor repairs in order to seduce her — again in classic noir style. After overhearing Violet 'entertaining' her male mafia friends in her adjoining apartment, Corky tells her that they are too different to make a relationship work. Corky implies that this is because Corky is a real lesbian and Violet is not. This again ambiguously cites both the classic coding of the noir femme fatale and a lesbian discourse of femmes as 'unreliable', or less 'real' as lesbians.

Bound thus uses the conventional construction of characterisation through the ordering of visual space and genre-coding to set up an expectation (in both lesbians and more urbane heterosexuals) that we are in for more of the same old load of 'backlash' tripe. The lesbian femme has been generically coded as unreliable manipulator of a butch dupe, and the cinematic gaze has been aligned with the heterosexual-male point of view. Lesbians might inevitably feel annoyed at such inversionary stereotyping but nevertheless sufficiently implicated in the coded citations of lesbian conventions to find a lesbian verissimilitude in a vicarious anxiety for the unfortunate 'real' lesbian falling for an unreliable het-femme who apparently cannot tell the difference between a lesbian butch and a heterosexual man. For example, in the lesbian-directed She Must Be Seeing Things, the butch character, Agatha's, jealous anxiety is predicated on her knowledge of her girlfriend's previous heterosexual life. This anxiety is verbalised in the scene where Agatha chats with hetero-sceptical friends in a lesbian bar who advise her to stay away from 'unreliable' ex-het-femmes.

The expectation is thus set up that this deceitful femme fatale will turn out to be the kind of masquerading (heterosexual) loner typical of 1990s reworkings of noir such as The Last Seduction — without even having the excuse that she is doing the dirty on a het-man who might, categorically speaking, be felt to deserve it. Coded as a heterosexual woman, Violet's femininity is nevertheless ironised not only by its hyperbolisation but by the generic coding of her deployment of the masquerade as the necessary manipulative concealment of a female-independent agenda. The 'butch' has been coded as phallic protagonist whose manhood (as narrative control) is also ironised by the duplicity of the femme fatale's performance. The male protagonist of the noir is classically 'inverted' as passive dupe by the final unmasking of the femme's covertly controlling activity. He is thus forced to kill her in order to regain (narrative) control by overcoming the covert driving of the narrative by the phallic-femme to restore the consistency of his own acts with an authentically male motivation. Thus, in terms of its generic coding, Bound's narrative suggests alignment between the 'butch' lesbian and the compromised (inverted) masculine position of the phallic-femme's dupe.

It would be impossible for a butch lesbian to (re)ascribe her acts to a credibly phallic origin in order to evade inversion and effect a (heterosexualising) narrative closure. Thus, the spectator can only expect the narrative to be resolved by the Corky's own death as well as that of Violet. This expectation is also deliberately foreshadowed early on by a narrative flash-forward which is repeated at crucial points in the narrative. In this flash-forward scene, which actually occurs sequentially (that is, in terms of the fabula) towards the end of the narrative, Corky is shown tied up and locked in a wardrobe (rendered as 'closet' in Americanese — some double-entendre perhaps) an item of furniture identified as belonging to Violet by a row of spike-heeled shoes. Corky voices-over this scene that she should have "seen it coming." Again, this mimics classic noir's reversed-narrative structure typically opening with the protagonist's voiceover reflecting on how desire for the femme fatale compromised his moral judgement and got him into trouble. The impression that Corky will be (has been) double-crossed by a duplicitous (not-really-lesbian) femme fatale is thus apparently confirmed.

As the narrative develops, this classic narrative form is gradually deconstructed through a series of reversals. Contrary both to generic convention and to lesbian received wisdom, having conned $2m from the mafia, and after considerable twists and turns relating to whether it is Corky or Violet who is actually going to take the money and run, the two women succeed in escaping with the money together. In classic noir, the femme fatale originates the scam and the plan whilst the dupe lags behind her manoeuvres doing her bidding until the very end when he finally sees through her masquerade and kills her (usually just in time to stop her from killing him). In Bound, a gendered division of labour is re-harnessed to a (feminine) collective aim. Although it is initially Violet who suggests the scam (femme = deception), it is Corky who figures out the actual plan (butch = action). Violet sets up an opportunity for Corky to burgle the apartment Violet shares with her mafia boyfriend and steal the money (action). Violet will have to "act innocent" to conceal her involvement from the boyfriend (deception). But she does this on behalf both of herself and Corky (collectivism). This is in a contrast with classic noir where the femme maintains an act of brutalised and tarnished innocence in order to manipulate the sympathies of both her intended primary victim (husband) and her dupe boyfriend.

In some noirs, such as The Lady From Shanghai, the equally evil husband is already aware of the femme fatale's unreliability. As events in Bound unfold, it is actually Violet who lags dangerously behind events which are propelled by the deceptive cunning of her suspicious het-male boyfriend. She is constantly obliged to think rapidly on her feet as the plan repeatedly goes wrong. It is actually the butch who is most often in a position to abscond with the money leaving the femme to face the music. In the end, both women are caught, bound, and threatened with torture by the boyfriend. By this point, the narrative has already made it clear that both Corky and Violet can, and do, trust each other since neither has taken opportunities repeatedly offered to take the money and run. This recurrent visual motif of Corky tied up in the wardrobe now carries and emphasises the reversal of the generic gender-codings in the now evident female-collective motivation the women's actions. In a reversal of the heterosexualising resolution of narratives more generally, it is the femme's wit, loyalty, and courage here which ultimately saves the protagonist.

Lesbians sub-cultures have a long-developed expertise in resignifying popular cinema by effecting a non-heterosexual distribution of the eroticising cinematic gaze among women (diegetically and extra-textually). Thus, the foregrounding of the intra-female gaze might actually constitute a form of lesbian verisimilitude in itself. This is just what lesbians do to produce lesbian eroticism as difference from the distribution of desire in the heterosexual representational order. That is, it has articulated a form of specifically lesbian involvement with any visual and discursive space. This practice has clearly now become sufficiently materialised for mainstream filmmakers to be able to appropriate and encode it into the popular cinematic text as lesbian 'window' appeal. In the past, the lesbian visual order remained subtextual, allowing lesbians a degree of distance and pleasurable activity in re-coding the text. In Bound, the iconic coding of lesbian recognition is self-reflexively deployed to the working of a complex set of reversals on the narrative conventions and iconography of the classic noir genre. Although Bound is at the low-budget end of indie, however, it remains unlikely that a $4m film is aimed primarily at lesbians. Clearly, it is addressed principally to the same kind of educated heterosexual white-male/female audience as was The Last Seduction. Whilst it presents more or less credible lesbian characterisations, Bound only minimally refers to any 'realistic' coding of women's oppression or lesbian sub-cultural space. Nor is its reading actually fundamentally dependent on the information that Corky and Violet are lesbians. The central characters could easily be replaced with a heterosexual couple with minimal alterations to the script — as was proposed by prospective funders. As with other 1990s noirs such as Basic Instinct, Bound is able to encode more than one point of entry to a reading of this text.

Like other narratives, Basic Instinct obviously holds different values and different meanings for different spectators [...] (Galvin, 1994: 221)

For heterosexual men, the representation is available as an exotic form of soft-core titillation with a cosmopolitan twist — the accessibility of which pleasurably affirms their sophistication as readers. There is no evidence that heterosexual males found this film as threatening as Galvin (1994) suggested they found Basic Instinct. Tilly made a comment which is perhaps indicative of the film's appeal for heterosexual women: "So it was fun because I could kind of experiment and go, 'Well, I was just acting' and go back to my normal life." (Elliott, 1997: 18) This attitude would seen consistent with an argument that heterosexual female spectators may participate in the illicit fantasy of a lesbian-eroticised rebellion because they are able to close down the fantasy scenario when the lights go up — and evidently they are able to do so whether the narrative effects such a closure on their behalf or not. Lesbians liked the film because it combined sub-cultural citations with a deconstructive attitude to sex-gender. The sex scene was praised for departing from the dreaded 'touchy-feely' representation of lesbian sex without taking on heterosexualising visual codes (Olson, 1997: online). Doing the whole take in a single tracking shot disrupted the cinematic visual construction of heterosexual activity by giving a 'flowing' tempo and a generalised rather than fixed point of view. Its narrative strategies self-reflexively undermined gender-codings and distributed the gaze among women. There are also some covert references to lesbian debates and assumptions.

In spite of the acuteness of many of its citations of lesbian sub-culture, it would seem very clear that Bound nevertheless represented a form of appropriation which referenced lesbian discourse from 'outside'. Clearly, this is possible only in the extent to which lesbian discourse, or lesbian sub-culture, has become sufficiently institutionalised to enable coherent repetitions to be detached from the specificity of their lesbian discursive context and recirculated in dominant formations. Clearly, lesbian codes and discourses will be re-inflected in this heterosexual context but many queers would see this process as a positive de-coupling of discursively produced lesbian identifications from purportedly substantive subject positions. On the other hand, any assertion of a specifically 'lesbian perspective' becomes almost meaningless in the multiplicity of its relocations. The brothers Wachowski succinctly sum up the depoliticising effects of the consumption of 'multiplicity':

We tried to play with people's expectations, their assumptions, and the clichés of a genre, including the sexual dynamics implied by these clichés [...] If people walked out of the theater talking about the roles of men and women in genre fiction, that would be cool. But we'd settle for, "That movie kicked butt, let's go see it again." (Andy and Larry Wachowski quoted on the Polygram website, online, June 1997)

The use of 'window' effects, together with the cross-over ability of new forms of queer 'indie' cinema do not seem to reflect the 'backlash' era so much as an adaptation to hypercapitalism — a series of experiments (with varying degrees of success) to mobilise subcultural reading strategies to address multiple market segments simultaneously. The unsuccessful feminist-authored Ballad structures an exclusive address to a heterosexual-feminist audience — no longer a significant market sector. It's mode of address tends to exclude other 'segments' such as lesbians and 'postmodern' chattering-class audiences. Bad Girls, Set It Off (less successfully) and Bound use sophisticated representational codes and 'window' techniques to address multiple segments by encoding subcultural 'verissimilitudes' without excluding more mainstream audiences. Whilst queer lesbians celebrated this partial assimilation to the meanstream, feminist lesbians felt 'sold out'. The 1970s feminist aspiration to a cinema of our own seemed doomed by structural shifts in media markets in a hypercapitalist era as much as by a cultural or political backlash against feminism. The limits of 'identity politics' appeared to have been reached.