Femme (and Butch) Fatales: The Year of the Lesbian Noir

By Meah Petersen

“Love is a sleigh ride to hell.”

As 2024 comes to a close, I look back on the year’s cinematic experiences fondly. Looking through what I’ve enjoyed most this year has made me start to think about genre conventions from a more critical and analytical perspective. To narrow it down, I’ve been very piqued by the recent noir endeavors of this year. The noir film is something so ingrained in the American pop culture psyche, and I find it to be such an interesting phenomenon of genre and theme. Film scholar James Naremore says in his book, ‘More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts’, that “it has always been easier to recognize a film noir than to define the term”. The tropes of noir have been satirized possibly more than they’ve even been seriously utilized in film. For example, one of my first introductions to noir was Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which is a film that both parodies classic Hollywood, while serving as a definitive example of a noir film. Noir was a term given to that period of films in retrospect, stemming from the French term that referred to a film’s stylized practice of dark and dramatic lighting. Therefore noir can’t exactly be classified as a genre; its range is far too wide to encapsulate only the American noirs of the 1940s and 1950s. This left the idea of noir very malleable, and from it, the neo-noir was born. Neo-noir films adapt certain elements of the classic noir film, while bringing them into a more contemporary playing field in terms of narrative structure, thematic importance, and even marketability to audiences. There are debates as to what film or filmmaker began the neo-noir surge. Some say that Jean-Luc Godard pioneered the practice in 1960 with Breathless, but most say that the 1970s is when it really gained serious Hollywood traction. Films like Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown from 1973 and 1974 respectively set the example. The neo-noir model continued to evolve over the decades, and I found a particular wave of 1990s noir-adjacent crime films very interesting for their depiction of queerness, specifically female queerness. Films like Basic Instinct, Wild Things, and Cruel Intentions play with queerness toe in toe with the femme fatale trope. Exploitative villainy is interchangeable with homosexual attraction in these films, which remains problematic. A sultry fatal woman uses the fetishization of lesbian identity to her benefit and has performative sexuality at her disposal. Even in more progressive depictions of lesbian situations in neo-noir, characters perform as versions of themself that they aren’t in order to get what they want, like in Bound or Mulholland Drive. I’ve found Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding and Ethan Coen’s Drive Away Dolls, both lesbian noir films from this year, to be brilliant counteractions of these flawed genre tropes. Allow me to expand my gay thoughts on this. 

Love Lies Bleeding follows Lou (Kristen Stewart) as she works a dead end job as a gym manager in the 1980s Southwestern United States. She meets Jackie (Katy O’Brien), a bodybuilder, while she is training at the gym. The pair quickly become infatuated with one another, Lou even giving Jackie illegal training steroids. All the while, Jackie works at a shooting range owned by Lou’s estranged father, given the job by Lou’s brother in law, JJ. It is only after she had let JJ sleep with her that Jackie was given the job. JJ is an abusive partner to Lou’s sister, Beth, often leaving visible marks on her face and body. Jackie quickly learns of Lou’s distaste for JJ at a dinner where everything is revealed to Lou about how JJ had gotten the job for Jackie in the first place. Enraged, Lou threatens JJ only for it to backfire. When Beth ends up comatose in a hospital bed, Jackie takes action and follows JJ home. She unleashes her steroid induced strength and rage onto JJ in Beth and Lou’s honor, killing him in a bloody sequence that left JJ’s jaw dismantled from his head. Lou helps Jackie hide the body, and assures her everything will be okay. The rest of the film is from Lou’s perspective, a painful dive into her family’s business in crime, and from Jackie’s perspective, a surrealist trip to Las Vegas and back for a bodybuilding competition. From the beginning of the film, the presence of the FBI is made well known, as they are looking for Lou’s mother, who is presumed missing or dead. It is inferred that Lou Sr. pays off the local police, in scenes where he discusses JJ’s disappearance as well as his involvement in the illegal smuggling of firearms over the Mexican border with the police force. Lou Sr.’s alleged fondness of dirty money cover-ups provides ample motivation for the protagonists in this stylized noir narrative. Lou and Jackie act as a classic noir anti-hero split in two; however good her intentions, Jackie still has blood on her hands, and however hard she tries, Lou can’t separate herself from the generational corruption plaguing her bloodline. Both of them are good people, caught up in bad situations. The film ends with Jackie and Lou splitting town after exterminating all of their witnesses, at least buying themselves more time. The film acts as a kind of a Romeo and Juliet story (or Juliet and Juliet rather) where the two protagonists can only truly be together in estrangement or death. This goes back to that original idea of the morally questionable protagonist; of course you’re rooting for them, but why? It does get quite existential in the realm of noir, and it begs the question, do bad people deserve to die? What makes you a bad person, versus a good person who’s done bad things? However faithful this thematic description of Love Lies Bleeding feels to the noirs of the 40s and 50s, and how neo-noir-esque the graphic violence and crime feels, its distinct visual style separates it from any of the previous waves of noir that have existed before. The film has deeply saturated lighting, sultry and colorful yet ominously reserved. Locations typically feel like their own characters in noir films, and this film trades what typically might be a bustling cityscape for the canyons, dive bars, gyms, and shooting ranges of rural New Mexico. Every scene is an array of fluorescent neon lights juxtaposed to the unforgiving desert landscape. Love Lies Bleeding flips the traditional masculinity of an erotic thriller on its head; Jackie can be classified as a femme fatale. However, her sexuality is not weaponized and her strength is not masculinized. Her muscle definition and workout sequences are often intercut with scenes with blatant sexual imagery, paralleling her training with her queer femininity. Her strength is a draw to Lou, different from how her characterization might be depicted through the eyes of a male screenwriter or director. The choice to highlight her tenacity, dangerousness, and all around physical grit in scenes of intense eroticism brings her closer to Lou and solidifies her place in the femme fatale category.Love Lies Bleeding successfully pays homage to the predecessors of its inspiration, reminiscent of the erotic neo-noirs of the 1980s and 1990s. A queer love story through this perspective is refreshing to see in this kind of film. Different enough to cement its legacy as a new norm, while simultaneously subscribing to the key principles of what has made the classic noir stand the test of time. 

While Love Lies Bleeding takes the shape of a thrilling and sensual noir, Drive Away Dolls, released just a few weeks before, takes a more slapstick approach, chock full of dark humor. Where Love Lies Bleeding is erotic, Drive Away Dolls is raunchy. As Ethan Coen’s first directorial effort without his brother Joel attached, the film (originally planned to be titled Drive Away Dykes) starts in Philadelphia on the cusp of Y2K. Jamie (Margaret Qualley) is kicked out by her girlfriend, Sukie, after she discovers her pattern of infidelity. Jamie plans to crash with her friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) during the rough patch, but Marian has plans to drive to Tallahassee to visit her aunt. Jamie sees this as a way to see the wonders of smalltown America and the tourist destinations along the way (including many lesbian bars) and decides to accompany Marian on the trip. The girls rent a car from a drive away car service, and are mistakenly given someone else’s assigned vehicle, also planned to arrive in Tallahassee. A trio of smugglers had planned to use that car to transport a briefcase that is full of (get this) dildo molds of the penises of powerful political figures. Take a moment to process that if you need to. A powerful senator, played by Matt Damon, happens to be one of these people who have carbon copies of their appendage floating around. The senator fears his reputation as a conservative politician could be tainted if the public found out about his sexual escapades, and the girls eventually blackmail him to give them money in exchange for his little replica after shaking the criminals off their backs. Drive Away Dolls is a goofy road movie where two best friends fall in love amongst all the chaos. The irony in this film’s place as a noir is that Jamie and Marian don’t realize they are noir protagonists until the latter half of the film. It isn’t until the beginning of the final act that they realize they’ve been transporting the briefcase, along with the frozen head of Santos, who was killed in the opening scene while trying to transport the cast of the Senator’s penis (and is also played for his few minutes of screentime by Pedro Pascal). Raising the stakes of the situation by letting the characters unknowingly transport someone’s bio-hazardous belongings gives the film a comical edge that noir isn’t really known for providing for an audience. Typical conventions of the genre are at play with the underground smuggling and political blackmail, meanwhile the protagonists take more of a journey with one another than with the plot itself. The hard-boiled detective trope is portrayed in Drive Away Dolls by two different characters; Colman Domingo, plays Chief, who is one of the criminals, with hilarious sincerity. His earnestness in the role makes his performance a standout to me in a film that otherwise does not take itself too seriously, especially considering his interrogating police-like nature is counteracted by his status as a criminal. The other example is Jamie’s ex-lover, Sukie, played by Beanie Feldstein. Sukie is actually a cop, and ends up breaking the murder scandal of Santos at the end of the film. Her tough as nails power dynamic with anyone who comes in her way is not because she’s a ruthless enforcer, but it is rather a front to deal with her heartbreak. Drive Away Dolls twists the noir title to fit a more wide example of a satire; it is a noir in the B plot, and a love story in the A plot. 

Noir films of the 1940s and 1950s feel (especially in hindsight) extremely politically charged. Reflecting the years of McCarthyism, The Red Scare, and the corruption that lay underneath the fear mongering politics of the Cold War. The moral question of every classic noir is practically the same; if I stop now, I’ll get caught…and if I keep going, nothing can ever be thesame. Reflective of American nationalism and heightened awareness of foreign militaries, the original American noir period stands as a time capsule of what our nation once felt like. This is something that for better or worse is not as abundant in neo-noir, at least thematically. Many neo-noir films are more aligned with the classification of crime drama or erotic thriller, which is more palatable for the average commercial audience. Police or law enforcement have a heavy presence in many of the most popular neo-noir films, either attempting to solve a crime or following a crime as it happens. Think of films like Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction; less about political corruption and more about erotic revenge. However, I don’t believe that neo-noir is a genre that is entirely apolitical. I don’t even believe that the examples I mentioned before are void of any political commentary. I think this is an interesting conversation when discussing Love Lies Bleeding and Drive Away Dolls; to be a queer person in America is to have your mere existence be politicized. You don’t get the luxury of not caring about what laws are passed and who gets voted into office. This is something very profoundly and intelligently explored in Love Lies Bleeding and Drive Away Dolls, and fixes the problems I’ve personally noticed in the neo-noir, the crime film, and the erotic thriller. Queer characters add significant depth to a narrative that attempts to unravel injustice and political debauchery. The nuance that queer people can be and often are at the forefront of dismantling corrupt systems, whether it’s a government, a police force, or even a family, provides a layer to the idea of noir that draws me even further in. Cinema is most important in times of severe political turmoil as it documents our hopes and anxieties, and this is especially important from a queer perspective. I refer to this new era of queer noir cinema as ‘The Lesbian Neo-Neo Noir’. It’s a mouthful, and I’m probably not even the first person to think of that, but it communicates best how these films have both done something fresh while simultaneously returning to form. Love Lies Bleeding and Drive Away Dolls were two of my favorite films of the past handful of months and I hope they get their flowers in the coming years. I hope to see more films take a crack at noir conventions with a queer approach in mind.