Bound: Be Gay, Do Crime

The cinematic material the Wachowskis play with in Bound comes from two related genres—film noir and the gangster film. These genres shape the viewer’s expectations, which the film will tease and tweak. Read as a gangster film: we expect Violet to be a pretty accessory to that genre’s obsession with male violence. Read as film noir: we’re expecting the femme fatale, who seduces, deceives, leads men astray, and pays in the end with her own death for daring to have an autonomous sexuality.

Bound will play with those genre and gender expectations, and then offer a different theory of femininity. One that works in part by making the feminine character femme. Violet does indeed play a decorative role as mobster arm candy. And she seems deceptive, a femme fatale. Bound has fun deceiving us about our expectations, shaped by the ubiquitous misogyny of genre films, as to what feminine deception deceives about.

Bound is an invitation to sense differently. Cinema is an art of vision and sound, but the Wachowskis make cinema that pushes the audience toward the senses that cinema touches only indirectly. “You can believe what you feel,” as Violet says when she seduces Corky. Violet asks Corky to verify what Corky sees and hears through touch, through taste, to trust Violet’s desire.

Paradox of cinematic misogyny: if femininity is defined by its powers of deception, then surely the fantasy factory that is cinema is coded feminine too. The gangster-film and film-noir genres work hard to subdue gender panic about cinema’s own femininity through a fascination with masculine violence, or through the exposure of the femme fatale, as if her downfall could localize and dispel the cinematic ruse. Bound flips the script. It puts us on the side of the feminine for once. It offers a spectacle we might verify, via the experience of our own flesh, as pointing us toward possibilities for life.

The Wachowskis’ cinema never asks us to believe in the restoration of order to the world. It’s the world itself that’s wrong, that’s false, in its totality. Their cinema never asks us to make femininity the scapegoat for the falseness of the world. Theirs is a cinema of the art of surviving the wrong and the false, by any means necessary. Their films are interested in connections across differences among those who live on the world’s fault lines. Corky and Violet are different kinds of queers who’ve tried to endure in different ways, whose trust in each other is tested, and found true.

Violet has used her femininity to survive, but she is not blind to the violence on which her chocolate-box life rests. As she says to Corky, “I used to be able to block it out. I would tell myself I wasn’t really there.” Dissociation only works for so long. We don’t know if Violet was a sex worker before she met Ceasar. Corky knows not to ask, but through the thin walls, Corky hears Violet fuck the mob’s accountant behind Ceasar’s back and has questions. “What you heard wasn’t sex,” Violet says. It was work. Work for the pur­poses of scheming to steal the money the accountant has stolen from the mob.

Corky is a good prospect for a partner in crime: handy, resourceful, game, with a truckful of tools and experience. She did time for, as she calls it, “the redistribution of wealth.” Violet can read Corky’s detachment from the order of the false, wrong world, and her desire to escape it. Corky doesn’t buy into work, family, gender, and all that. A body openly marked by its refusal, but then boxed in by that honesty.

Bound is boxes within boxes. It is fond of overhead shots. Corky in the box of her crappy apartment. Violet in her “married to the mob” box. The mob itself boxed into the repetition of mob violence. It’s “all part of the business,” a phrase that chimes throughout the dialogue. The business of power, money, and misogyny. The other name for which in Bound is “family.”

Bound is interested in boxes, in lines that cross the bounds of boxes, and also in what leaks within. Transmission beyond the boxes by sound and by telephony plays a key narrative role. In a lovely shot, the camera tracks a phone line from one apartment to another. Phone lines can be direct, indirect, or deceptive.

Bound is also interested in what spills. Liquor is the lubricant of social relations. Blood is fluid violence and the color of money. Water is feminine desire but also the body in general. Paint is new beginnings, the opacity of the past, whiteness as the blank surface for projection. Liquids are not just emblems. Each is a character with an active role in the narrative.

When Violet and Corky fuck, in the latter’s apartment, there’s no overhead shot. Instead, the camera gently circles their twined bodies. An invitation to expand the senses. The next morning, Corky says, “I can see again.” Touch, taste, sex, reinvigorate sight, and balance the senses. And it was Violet the femme who fucked Corky the butch. Once again upending expectations.

When we saw Bound back in the nineties, what puzzled Kaye and me was that it just didn’t fit with what B. Ruby Rich called the New Queer Cinema, which we avidly followed. Think My Own Private Idaho (1991), Poison (1991), Go Fish (1994), The Watermelon Woman (1996), or Boys Don’t Cry (1999). Bound fits awkwardly in that sequence of more independent films made by queer filmmakers centering queer identities and eschewing Hollywood conventions.

Apart from the transmasculine classic By Hook or by Crook (2001), what was notably absent from the New Queer Cinema that Kaye and I could find in our local art-house theaters was much in the way of feature-length trans cinema. Only much later would there be films by trans women like So Pretty and Lingua Franca (both 2019). Such a trans cinema wasn’t possible then and is barely possible now, although who knows which filmmakers got work by staying in the closet? Bound is the art of the closet. And like so much of Bound, this hides in plain sight.

The opening shot is of Corky bound and gagged in Violet’s closet, where she keeps the tools of her own trade—the feminine art of appearances. Watching it again now, I think of Bound as an allegory of its own making. Violet and Corky are not exactly Lilly and Lana Wachowski, but the mob makes a pretty good stand-in for the film business. Our heroines bring together the tools of making and believing to produce a lucrative work of make-believe. The success of Bound set them up for a lifetime of cinematic adventures. They got away with it.

Some of the Wachowskis’ signature moves are already present. First and last: that their cinema always takes place in a world that is false and wrong in its totality. This is not a cinema where a minor wrong has to be redressed to restore law, order, and harmony. In Jupiter Ascending (2015), we will get an entire universe based on extraction and exploitation, and a heroine who saves just a single planet from it.

On the other hand, the Wachowskis’ is not a cinema in which we’re seduced into reconciliation with the world’s falseness and wrongness as always inevitable. What we’re shown in many variations is the possibility of solidarity, of coming together with others, not because we’re alike but because we confront the same wrong world. We’re shown how to learn this through expanding the senses—most spectacularly in the rave-in-Zion scene toward the end of The Matrix Reloaded (2003).

There are always ways of communicating, in and against the falseness of the world, most beautifully in Cloud Atlas (2012), where the struggle of each era is mediated into the next. Solidarity isn’t premised on sameness or identity. In Sense8 (2015–18), very different kinds of people learn how to work together—and play together—using an expanded sensory capacity.

The existence of such a cinema is something of a miracle, particularly in the post-9/11 world, with its renewed pressure to align ourselves with a global order of patriotism, masculinity, whiteness. With its insidious insistence that we trust order and not each other. At the end of Bound, Corky asks Violet: “Do you know what the difference is between you and me?” Trick question! Violet avers. “Me neither,” says Corky. Not that there’s no difference, but that the difference need not be pinned down in language, need not be worn like a badge. You can believe what you feel.