Spun on Juice: "Love Lies Bleeding"
The new erotic crime thriller "Loves Lies Bleeding" is a wild, violent, roid-rage ride. An elevation of the Druggy Americana film genre.
The late ‘90s and early aughts were a boom for films about druggy subcultures. The most notorious being Requiem for a Dream, known for its over-the-top, gruesome depiction of speed and heroin addiction. Arms amputated. Trading sex for drugs. Electroshock therapy. Brutal incarceration. No one who touches a substance in the film has a happy ending. It’s a gratuitous and cruel film, also wildly unrealistic. I still cringe thinking about the glitchy, feverish, looping editing. It’s a movie I will never watch ever again.
A lesser known and only slightly more watchable film of the genre is the 2002 indie Spun, about the repetitious goings-on between meth users and dealers in Eugene, Oregon. With a budget of just $2 million, the cast is stacked: Jason Schwartzman plays a meth-addicted college dropout named Ross. He buys his meth from a dealer named Spider Mike (John Leguizamo), until he gets busted. Amped to the gills, Ross meets another meth user Nikki, played by Brittany Murphy (RIP), whose boyfriend is another meth dealer, named “The Cook,” played by Mickey Rourke. Driving around on their manic binge, which seems to be the main activity of meth users in Eugene, Oregon, shit, predictably, hits the fan.
Films like Spun and Requiem are indebted to Gus Van Sant’s 1989 masterpiece of the druggy American genre: Drugstore Cowboy. And I thought about this very American style of drug movie that features freaks, drifters, criminals, people who, in the words of Kamala Harris, seemingly fell out of a coconut tree, after seeing a new installment of the genre: Love Lies Bleeding.
Love Lies Bleeding is Rose Glass’s new steamy crime thriller featuring Kristen Stewart as Lou, a gym manager with a mullet, whose wan, pallid complexion matches her anemic social life in a remote desert town. That is, until, Lou meets Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a mysterious, muscled drifter who crash lands in the small town like a shooting star. Jackie, or the more androgynous, Jack, has aspirations of being a competitive body-builder. Lou and Jack become become lovers, and somewhere in the blender of steroid injections, egg whites, workouts, and sex, shit goes haywire.
I don’t want to spoil the whole plot here. If you like sexy druggy crime thrillers, then I highly recommend Love Lies Bleeding in a way that I would NOT ever recommend Spun or Requiem, even if the former reminded me of the latter. Rather than get into plot details, and plots are not really the point of these movies anyway, I want to think aloud about this particular genre and the bleak subcultures of rural America it depicts.
I don’t really know of a good name for it, so I’m going to call it Druggy Americana. Love Lies Bleeding is a riveting elevation of the style, amped with surreal sequences, queer eroticism, Cronenbergian body horror (bulging muscles and mountainous veins), a vivid criminal underworld of gun runners, corrupt cops, and violent scumbag husbands, all wrapped in a lesbian love story that one would be right to label “toxic.” Crucially, it’s also funny. Kristen Stewart’s comedic timing and subtle delivery adds a key ingredient that’s missing from so many other American drug movies.
Love Lies Bleeding opens with the everyday doldrums of life in a remote desert town in 1989 New Mexico. Hot, sun-bleached, washed out days fade away to clear, cool starry nights. Early on, the film builds the broader world and atmosphere in which everything unfolds: The Berlin Wall is falling and President George H.W. Bush delivers his first presidential address from the Oval Office, during which he holds a giant crack-rock in an evidence bag, warning millions of Americans that, while crack may look as harmless as candy, it will lead destroy lives and entire cities.
It’s the late 1980s. The cocaine-fueled Greed is Good ethos has firmly took hold of Wall Street and is rapidly spreading its tendrils into every facet of American life. In a strange confluence, bodybuilding was having a big moment at the same time. Think West Coast “muscle beach” stuff. Spandex, high-socks, midriffs. Arnold Schwarzenegger had hit crossover success, going from obscure competitive body builder to acting in James Cameron’s Terminator (1984). All these particles are blowing across the desert in Love Lies Bleeding.
Bodybuilding and the creatures who hang around gyms already offers a unique and lived-in terrain to explore drug use. Steroids are cheap and abundant, seemingly like every other drug, all the time, and gyms are full of demanding customers. Unlike other drugs that uniquely alter the mind, the desired effect of steroids happens on the body. It’s all about the body. Molding it, sculpting it, changing and modifying it. Drugs enhance the project of mastering the body. But like every drug movie, this blade is double-edged. The more mass you gain, the harder it is to control, and then you’re spun.
When you take a lot of steroids, you’re system is pumping up with this synthetic testoserone. The stereotypical side-effects, aside from being jacked, are a loss of impulse control leading to violent and aggressive outbursts. Empirically, scientists had some difficulty studying “roid rage.” Do steroids cause an increase in aggression, or does that aggression stem from the competitive culture of gyms and the personality style attracted to bodybuilding in the first place? The obsessive attention to daily diet, hours everyday in the gym, all in service of putting on a thong or bikini to flex for an audience—it’s a baldly narcissistic endeavor. That much time, everyday, spent thinking about yourself.
But does that necessarily make one violent and aggressive? Research is pretty damn positive that steroid use does lead to higher levels of anger and aggression. Butof course, “the link” between steroids and aggression is “complex.” Of course it is.
Enter: roid rage.
On this front, Love Lies Bleeding indulges many of the stylistic flares and tenets of Druggy Americana. The effects of the roids are maximally, outrageously, hyperbolic. The injections produce intense, immediate, and in some cases, superhuman-like effects on both the mind and the body. The muscles are about to break and pop out of skin, and veins protrude like giant mountain ranges. Jack, at times, looks like she’s 9ft tall standing in a room of tiny furinture. Other times, she looks even more gigantic. The roids takes on a surreal, hallucinatory quality. And the ensuing violence is gory and merciless.
Then, there’s the dreaded comedown. Every druggy movie must show the pain of withdrawal. Love Lies Bleeding deploys a healthy dose of that glitchy editing to depict a dysregulated, out of whack system. The withdrawal from a drug usually produces the opposite effects of said drug. If heroin makes you feel blissfully warm and comfortably numb, then it’s withdrawal feels like you want to tear off your sweaty, clammy skin suit. Light, sound, touch, taste—everything is hideously felt and alien. The movie shows the flip-side of roids. Without the juice, Jackie looks small, weak, vulnerable, timid, afraid.
Though I don’t like to watch Requiem, the movie’s editing is worth a mention, and a lot of films rip its style. Requiem achieves the effect of euphoria and withdrawal through thousands of fast cuts that magnify sound and image: the loud click of a lighter, flicking a plastic bag, snorting a line, a pill bottle popping open, water bubbling, jaws clenching—these sounds are blended into instrumental, repetitive beats that create the feeling of being stuck in a loop. A life of stimulus-response, stimulus-response, until the movie’s pacing is so chaotic and fast, a thousand plates spinning, and it feels like you’re stuck on a ride that you can’t get off. Love Lies Bleeding does not go to the max like Requiem does. Love Lies goes fast, and then it slows down, and it’s better off because of it.
Just as drugs alter our perception, Druggy Americana films play on a heightened reality. It doesn’t really matter if plots are far-fetched or unrealistic, the point is not to be real, it’s about finding creative ways to express something about being human. Here, that means a lot of sex, pleasure, hedonism, and desire—all are on hyperdrive in these movies. The characters are usually running from away from something, while they’re running toward some other thing. Can they outrun it? Will they get it? What happens if they get what they want? This is where Love Lies Bleeding departs from many of these druggy movies that get lost in the whirr and woosh of “this is your brain on drugs.”
What these characters do, who they become, and how they change when their brain becomes a chemical flood zone is what’s interesting to watch. The sound, the framing, the score, the glitchy and frenetic editing, yes it can be cool to see that, but being spun out on juice in Matrix vision isn’t interesting by itself. We kind of have to care about the person whose spun out and hope they make it out of the tailspin. Loves Lies Bleeding is a wild, violent, roid-rage ride. And yes, I squirmed a little bit at the druggy editing and the hyperviolence. But I didn’t feel like I was looking for an exit the whole time. I left the movie wondering what’s next for Jack and Lou.
I saw LLB this weekend and had so many thoughts about the steroid use. Thanks for helping me think through it!