Swelling Chests and Shameless Sex: Love Lies Bleeding and Evoking Cronenberg
Words: Ariana Martinez
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Director David Cronenberg is considered a landmark filmmaker of cinema concerned with the flesh, and the bodily burdens of those who dare traverse the hellscape of reality into the hallucinogenic, the scientific, the absurd. In that same pulsating vein, director Rose Glass' budding oeuvre – her sophomore film, Love Lies Bleeding, an emblematic thriller invested in the satiating and nauseating images bound to romantic deceit – has led to comparisons to Cronenberg's filmography.
Love Lies Bleeding debuted to an eager crowd at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Glass' first feature, Saint Maud, was released in 2019 and established plenty of visual and narrative interests that swell in this second film, notably that of redefining notions of pain. In Saint Maud, the body is a vessel to channel God, and the titular Maud frequently says, "May God bless you and never waste your pain," implying that even suffering can be divine. Her perspective ultimately culminates in the greatest sacrifice in the name of glory.
In her newest film, Glass travels back to 1989 and supplements God with another holy experience: queer love. The film shadows a New Mexican town populated by people shoving their secrets into canyons, and one family in particular is reaching a breaking point. Lou (Kristen Stewart) bears her father's (Ed Harris) namesake and manages his gym, though they are estranged due to a shared criminal past. Lou Sr. owns a gun range, a front for his illegal gun-running operation. He employs his son-in-law, JJ (Dave Franco), whom Lou despises as he abuses her sister, Beth (Jena Malone).
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One night, a stranger with a backpack firmly strapped onto her broad shoulders rolls into town. Jackie (Katy O'Brian) is unlike anyone Lou has laid eyes on before, a real muscle chick. Like most people who dread being stuck in a dead-end town, Jackie is just passing through and heading to a body-building competition in Vegas; she just needs to save up some money and train. Finding solace in the four walls of both Jackie's gym and home, their story exhibits that if pain is weakness leaving the body, then orgasms are the fruitful successes of shared labour. The film follows Jackie's new training trajectory as Lou introduces her to steroids to help her along.
The initial takeaways are clear: it’s a story of moral ambiguity set against bodily passion and fury, immediately reminiscent of Cronenberg films, including Videodrome and Crash, which Glass cited as a reference film for the cast to study. "Sex and violence have always gone very well together. It's like bacon and eggs. If you look at the history of cinematic violence, there's always a sexual component in violence and a violent component in sexuality," explained Cronenberg for The Telegraph. The parallel to food is a clever one explored literally by Glass, as Lou assumes a tender domesticity in supporting Jackie by separating the yolks in her breakfast and ravishing her body for extra sustenance. The violence accompanying their relationship is slow to burn but expertly foreshadowed in the editing when Lou and Jackie share their first "I love you" in bed.
Following the exchange, there is no romantic aftermath of sitting in this feeling, but instead, an abrupt cut: every expression of care is packed with a punch. As Jackie continues to indulge in steroids en route to becoming a demigod, it is Lou's agony regarding her sister's condition that propels Jackie to force her body beyond muscle, beyond sex, and angle it toward violence in the name of justice.
"You know, I'm an atheist. I don't believe in an afterlife and I don't believe in karmic recycling. So murder for me is an act of absolute destruction. You are destroying a unique creature that never existed before and will never exist again, someone whose life experience is unique, and I take that very seriously," Cronenberg told Wired in 2007. Alternatively, Rose Glass spoke about her religious upbringing often in interviews after making Saint Maud. Identifying as secular, Glass described to Vulture that “even if you don’t have faith, the idea of succumbing to ecstasy, coming out of your body, connecting with something bigger than yourself, is something anyone can relate to.”
“The initial takeaways are clear: it’s a story of moral ambiguity set against bodily passion and fury, immediately reminiscent of Cronenberg films.”
Operating similarly to Cronenberg in knowing the value of the somatic senses, Glass directs the weight of death onto Jackie to track how one woman can surpass strength and fall into carnage. But, as the film continues, Glass weaves in more pulp sensibilities to show that not all deaths are created equal. In Love Lies Bleeding, life is easily taken and hardly mourned in favour of the living and their frenzied transformations. Both Glass and Cronenberg commit to lavish violence that is trashy but not gratuitous, expected of the "low art" pulp genre, and yet wholly fun and fucked up in service of a story about metamorphosis. The camera relishes in engorging flesh and throbbing tendons as Jackie inhabits the "becoming-body" as described in Rosangela Fachel de Medeiros's essay on Cronenberg's characters, inspired by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s theory of becoming, or deterritorializing and creative transformation and flux. Jacob Holsinger Sherman further defines Deleuze’s becoming, stating it “operates by risk, danger, the throw of the dice, and contagion… forc[ing] one to swallow the heart of the world and explode with the beating of its cosmic tempo,” imagery likened to the precarious lovers who come to transcend their dull town and chase after a utopia of imperceptibility.
Often, in Cronenberg films, the (usually heterosexual) couple at the centre of the narrative is denied something; their union, if intact, has shifted and remains unfulfilling in some way. In Crash, Catherine and James' sex lacks the necessary pain and suffering from a car accident to fully satisfy their sexual appetite. In The Fly, not only does Veronica slowly lose Seth to his insect-self, but she must be the one to free him from what remains of his tormented body. These are not necessarily cynical endings, nor are they anti-affection or love; Cronenberg is simply not interested in moralising his finales with happy endings. Unlike Cronenberg and even Saint Maud, Love Lies Bleeding engages in a giddy, gory, dream-like triumph for its lovers. Though Maud achieves her goal, the film's brief final shot reminds the audience of a perspective not belonging to Maud, of the dramatic irony of her wish-fulfillment, winking that her truth is only her own. Alternatively, Jackie and Lou emerge viscerally euphoric, and even one final hiccup can't get them down, the wink to the audience merely being a last chuckle. There is hardly a loss in sight or anything to suggest our heroines won't drive into the sunset; the credits even feature their miniature silhouettes dancing together.
In the film, Glass experiments with more absurdist comedy, and while Cronenberg is one to sprinkle in wry humour, Love Lies Bleeding offers a lightness, a joy not as readily available in his filmography, distinguishing the two artists even further. Love Lies Bleeding is thoroughly sanguine in its viewpoint and gore, and while comparisons to her forbear can and have been made, Glass has achieved nothing short of her own original, gritty bliss.