Why ‘Bound’ Is Still One Of The Best Queer Films Ever Released

Two years before they were given $63 million to make The Matrix a reality, the Wachowski sisters were struggling to finance their debut film.

Studios were interested: the siblings had written a sexy neo-noir thriller with suspense, style and a smattering of violence, but there was one problem. Did Corky, the leather biker ex-con who falls for Violet, the wife of a mafia henchman, have to be a woman?

“People at other studios would read the script and say, ‘If you change Corky to a man we’re really interested’,” Lana said in a 1998 interview with Gadfly. “And we were like, well, that movie’s been made a million times, so we’re really not interested in it.”

But the siblings held their ground. Twenty-six years after its release in 1996, Bound has cemented itself in the canon of sapphic films that are lived-in, rather than filled with gratuitous (and ill-informed) sex scenes and seemingly heartless, sociopathic bisexual women. Starring Gina Gershon as the butch Corky — far-flung from her last role in Showgirls as the ultra-femme Crystal Connors — and Jennifer Tilly as the seductive pin-up wife Violet, Bound is a story of relentless and unavoidable desire, led by all-time chemistry between its leads.

Despite this, Bound isn’t mostly left off the conversation around the Wachowskis. But while its $6 million budget and neo-noir conventions can’t compete with the scope of follow-up The Matrix nor the ambition of Sense 8 or Cloud Atlas, Bound is the simplest, clearest articulation of the throughline of their work (both together and separately): How a body can be electrified by love, transformed from a site of constriction to liberation. It’s also their most enjoyable, flirting with philosophy and visual feats but never bogged down by them.

“Isn’t It Obvious? I’m Trying To Seduce You”

Bound opens in confusion, a shot of a long, metal ship poking outwards into a dark space. The camera surpasses it, and boxes, coat-hangers, clothes become clear: we started on the ceiling of a walk-in wardrobe above the light fixture, and we’ve moved down to Corky, gagged and tied up on the floor, passed out.

It’s right on the border of too literal: she’s bound and in the closet? But the film is playful with its tropes: the next scene is a flash-back to how Corky and Violet meet, glances on an elevator behind Violet’s husband’s back — so obvious and daring, the two never once trying to really hide. Their stares aren’t coyish flirtations; it’s cruising, proof that both know exactly what they’re doing. And they did.

Their stares aren’t coyish flirtations; it’s cruising, proof that both know exactly what they’re doing.

“[When we were making it], I kept thinking, ”What do you guys, [the Wachowskis] know about being women?,'” Gershon said in a 2019 EW interview with Tilly, looking back on Bound. “‘How did you write this thing?'” And little did I know, at the time, they were really feeling something. They really were feeling bound up inside. So, it became that the metaphor had a deeper meaning. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, aren’t they clever writers.’ I thought, ‘Wow, they were going through this, and the world didn’t know.'”

Beyond the Wachowskis’ own lived experiences as queer women (though neither had come out as trans at the time of filming), Bound was also realised with help from feminist sex writer Susie Bright, who consulted on the film and helped choreograph its now-famous sex scene. It arrives just 12 minutes into the film; Corky, who is helping renovate the apartment next door after getting out of prison, is interrupted by Violet, who has lost her ring in the sink. It’s a ruse, leading to an almost single-shot sex scene which streaming service Stan, where it’s currently available to watch, provides a content warning for as “high impact”. But there’s no nudity: instead, there are shadows and tracking shots of hands as they move around, of mouths, of biceps and necks.

Gershon notes that the way every shot was planned reminded her of how the Wachowskis’ made graphic novels before Bound, and you can see how this style continues in The Matrix, where immense cyber-systems are filmed up-close, with tracking shots of cords and code. The sex scene is notoriously erotic for a reason, but it’s also somewhat mechanical in a Wachowski way: not cold or alien, but ordained, as if the two were programmed to love.

“They didn’t want it to be a man’s version,” says Tilly. “There’s a male version of what lesbians are, and you see it in the soft-core porn movies all the time. They really wanted to get it right. They wanted to be very respectful of the lesbian community. They wanted it to be very, very authentic and raw, not pornographic. Although it was pornographic because we’re hot.”

Porn is explicit, and Bound‘s sex scene is all shadows and gestures to what’s just off frame. It is interested in the ecstasy and release of connection, not the sex itself: from there, the love story is cemented, and the film shifts from a romance to a neo-noir. Together, the two need to be free, and Violet hatches a plan where they steal $2 million her mafia husband Caesar (Joe Pantoliano) briefly has in his possession after his enemy Johnnie (a young Christopher Meloni) ‘retrieves’ it from someone, splattering each bill with blood in the process.

Their plan to frame him is intricate, precise, mathematical, completely removed from what we know these women to be. But it is also highly emotional, as it’s based around Violet convincing Caesar that Johnnie has stolen the cash and manipulating him into a melt-down that will let them run away without suspicion. While the film’s Gershon and Tilly’s, Joe Pantoliano is deranged as he’s gaslit into madness and murder: you could almost feel empathetic for him, so powerful is Violet.

JOE PANTOLIANO: oblivious boyfriend in a lesbian movie, huh? well I’m gonna do something no oblivious boyfriend in a lesbian movie has ever done before

ME: accept it gracefully and wish them all the best?

JOE: oh no. not that.

JOE: ? I’m going toooo steeeal thaaaa SHOOOOOW~ pic.twitter.com/W2BGuvoWZF

— Chloe Alison Escott (@vesselskirt) August 30, 2021

“There was a scene where Corky’s putting in all her little burglar tools [in her ears], and they intercut it with me putting on my lipstick and my mascara,” said Tilly. “The Wachowskis said, “Those are your tools. Those are Violet’s tools and [those are] Corky’s tools. This is how Corky gets by, by stealing, and this is how Violet gets by, by painting her face.”

Corky and Violet are seductors and survivors; they aren’t lesbians torn apart by longing or tragedy, as is so often the case in sapphic cinema. It’s a joy to watch, as evident in the screams and roars of the audience at Queer Screen’s recent retrospective showing, as part of the 29th Mardi Gras Film Festival, where couples dressed as Corky and Violet for the night. Festival director Lisa Rose says the film has a special place in her heart, as someone who came out shortly after the film was released.

“I remember Margaret and David reviewing it on The Movie Show and both really liking it,” she laughs. “And then I just kinda thought about it [lots]. I grew up in Tasmania, and I don’t even know if it was shown in Tasmania — when I came to Mardi Gras in 1999, I drove around to all these video stores to try to find a copy of it to buy. And I eventually found it, strangely in the lower North Shore.

“Back then, in the ’90s, there weren’t many lesbian films that cut through into the somewhat mainstream. There was that, But I’m A Cheerleader and [The Incredibly] True Adventure Of Two Girls In Love. There just weren’t lesbian films cutting through — and to have Gina Gershon, who had just come off Showgirls playing the complete opposite character, going from high femme to soft butch, that was exciting.”

While we might not have to drive between video stores to find non-exploitative films about queer women, Rose adds that Bound still stands out even in 2022 as a neo-noir, rather than a period drama or ‘straight’ love story. “We don’t get enough queer genre films,” she says. “The thing about films like Bound: even though it’s 26 years old, it really stands up. Because it’s so stylised, nothing about it feels dated.”

---

Junkee is a proud media partner of Queer Screen’s 29th Mardi Gras Film Festival, which runs from Thursday 17 February to Thursday 3 March, before heading to the Blue Mountains and Canberra in the subsequent weeks. Tickets for theatre and on-demand screenings are available now.

Bound is currently streaming in Australia on Stan.

Jared Richards is Junkee‘s Drag Race recapper, and a freelancer who writes for NME, The Big Issue, The Guardian and more. He’s across the internet as @jrdjms