| “‘Bound’ and Invested: Lesbian Desire and Hollywood Ethnography” | Film scholar and fan of the film, Noble addresses the ways that lesbian desire has always haunted a “mainstream, popular imaginary”, discussing the history of lesbianism in Hollywood films while focusing on how Bound manages to queer binaries and manipulate gender. The author argues that the scene between Violet and Corky where they argue over identity and Corky grapples with trusting Violet’s sexuality is central to the film. The author writes about Susie Bright’s involvement in the film and how that adds to the author’s argument that Bound is an ethnographic film. She argues that Bound is a step away from heterosexual masculinity and noir that might traditionally praise heterosexual masculinity, and that it is a positive step. The men in the film are secondary, clueless chumps, and the story is all about Corky and Violet and the evolution of their relationship and their understanding of each other. |
| Noir Anxiety | In chapter 9 of Benigno Trigo and Kelly Oliver’s book, the authors discuss the ways in which the film includes factors of classic noir, including Violet’s role as a femme fatale, and the ways in which the film manipulates factors of noir to create something new. The authors note that the themes of “seeing or not seeing and knowing or not knowing” are imperative to the film, especially in regard to the femme fatale and the way that the film uses Corky’s perspective to see Violet. |
| Women in Film Noir | In Chris Straayer’s chapter, the author argues that Bound offers a “neo-noir twist” and that it not only revisits noir, but revises it. The author discusses how femme fatales in the past were not focused on their own sexual pleasure, while more contemporary noir films allow the women to be sexually sentient, and sometimes even voracious. Focusing on Bound, the author states that the women’s “criminal and romantic accomplishments derive from the exploitation of, rather than investment in, traditional sex roles”. The author argues that Bound breaks down binaries in different ways, and concludes by saying that Violet is both a femme fatale and a lesbian femme. |
| “Continuous Sex: The Editing of Homosexuality in Bound and Rope” | This is an article that delves into the connections and similarities between the films Bound and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. The author describes the noir factors of Bound, going into the details of the darkness and the voice overs in the beginning sequence and likening it to the trapped body in Hitchcock’s film. Though I find the adjective “dykey” to be questionable, the author delves into a description of Corky and her homosexuality that is obvious to everyone in the audience and to none of the gangsters in the film. The author argues that the conflation of sexual thriller and film noir succeed in the film, and that the Wachowskis succeed in making homosexuality “their film’s thematic and graphic subject”, which is more than Hitchcock was able to do with his film. The author then dives into a play by play description of all of the film, camera, and editing techniques the Wachowskis used in the film that link it to Rope, and Hitchcock’s fondness for graphic devices. The lesbianism in the film is noted as critical to the plot, though less linked by the sex and more linked by the mafia sting conducted by the two women. |
