
Though several deliciously sordid queer noirs have made their way into the cultural fabric of the past decades (Mulholland Dr. [2001], Stranger By The Lake [2013], The Handmaiden [2016]), 2024 represents the boldest and most plentiful display of noir queerness since the nasty ’90s. Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding, Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s Femme, and Ethan Coen’s Drive Away Dolls each bring a specific energy and vary greatly in how they queer up the noir genre, but they all share a desire to push past the established tropes and narrative arcs reserved for the more conservative protagonists of noir, even if they need to live inside those tropes first in order to disrobe them.
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Neo-noir – those films made after the classic film noir period of the 1940s and ’50s – has been gracing screens with violent twists on the genre’s tropes since Hollywood’s Production Code officially ended in 1968. The carnage and eroticism that were mostly suggested in earlier films now shined brightly in tableaux of stark red blood and sweat-soaked sex. However, the spotlight remained on morally gray (but pitch-black) characters on doom-laden paths – this time, the world around them offered new traumas and anxieties to pull the dark from. Yet, despite the freedom allowed to filmmakers post-Production Code and social strife born from years of homophobic and transphobic violence, queer noir still remains a niche product. Not that noir need always make a grand statement on the current events plaguing the world, but it does feed off of them – whether it be to produce a rallying cry against systems of oppression or a distorted mirror to reveal unwanted truths.
Queerness and queer characters have been commonly codified into classic noir films (Peter Lorre’s gay villain Joel Cairo appears in what is considered the first noir film, The Maltese Falcon [1941]), but some of the more successful neo-noirs of the ’80s and ’90s have decodified the queerness and integrated it into their narratives. Will Patton’s Scott Pritchard in the 1987 Kevin Costner vehicle No Way Out is a gay character who explicitly conveys the queerness implicit in George Macready’s Steve Hagen in The Big Clock (the 1948 noir that No Way Out remakes). Though No Way Out doubles down on the villainous gay character of the classic noir period, the outward nature of the character’s queerness points to a willingness to say what was murmured in the past.
If noir, and thus neo-noir, is a vessel for the dark undercurrents of society, and the loosening of censorship in enables filmmakers to tackle stories never before scripted much less filmed, surely queerness would seem ripe to bust down the pearly gates of polite society. Unfortunately, many neo-noir films simply heightened and further eroticized the gendered relationships of classic noir. Due to both the studios’ disdain for queer stories (which to the indie-based New Queer Cinema movement of the ’90s) and the demand for profitable heteronormative erotic thrillers inspired mostly by the success of 1992’s Basic Instinct, queer noir never flourished. But it did surface in Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992 as well), telling the sordid true story of Leopold and Loeb, the gay couple responsible for the 1924 murder of a 14-year-old boy, and the Wachowskis’ hot and rough lesbian noir Bound (1996).
These two films are representative of very particular paradigms in films of the ’90s: Swoon, with its challenging subject matter and experimental structure, dares viewers to look at an ugly episode in gay history and forces them to reconsider what a “proper” representation of queer characters means; while Bound reconfigures a classic noir setup from a feminine and queer perspective, twisting expectations until nothing of the old school is left.
With these two knockout, pitch-black pieces of pulp out in the world since the early ’90s, it’s shocking that it took almost three decades for a series of queer-soaked noirs to define a year in film. Though several deliciously sordid queer noirs have made their way into the cultural fabric of the past decades (Mulholland Dr. [2001], Stranger By The Lake [2013], The Handmaiden [2016]), 2024 represents the boldest and most plentiful display of noir queerness since the nasty ’90s. Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding, Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s Femme, and Ethan Coen’s Drive Away Dolls each bring a specific energy and vary greatly in how they queer up the noir genre, but they all share a desire to push past the established tropes and narrative arcs reserved for the more conservative protagonists of noir, even if they need to live inside those tropes first in order to disrobe them. In fact, all three films relish the fact they’re noirs, simultaneously aiming for entertainment and provocation. They all embody, in different degrees and shades, the nature of confrontation, pulp excess, and genre revisionism that some of the more controversial neo-noirs set in place.
As mentioned before, though neo-noir reproduced many of the gendered doomed relationships of the ’40s and ’50s, films like The Last Seduction (1994) and Wild Things (1998) were anything but retreads. They pulled apart patriarchal social norms and shattered the male ego with a smile and the flick of a cigarette, without the femme fatales getting caught in the process. This noir threesome of 2024 takes the same destructive path, and though there is some fun to be had, there are also deep questions of queer identity and codependency that further fracture the road ahead.
Though not the most incisive or boundary-pushing of the three, Drive Away Dolls is probably the most proudly queer of all. While it is directed solely by Ethan Coen (who with brother Joel has contributed to the neo-noir canon such classics as Blood Simple [1989], Miller’s Crossing [1990], The Big Lebowski [1998], and No Country for Old Men [2007]), his wife Tricia Cooke, longtime editor for the brothers’ films, serves as co-writer of this raunchy crime comedy that is very much in the filmmakers’ wheelhouse.
The structure and setup are pure Coen brothers: two friends (Margaret Qualley as Jamie and Geraldine Viswanathan as Marian) set out on a road trip to Tallahassee, Florida, ignorant of the fact that their rental car was meant to be picked up by three criminals who would transport an important asset within the car to an important person. Chaos ensues as the two friends, one carefree and hypersexual, the other stressed and prudish, continue their trip without the knowledge that they are now targeted to be apprehended and possibly killed. It’s a pretty basic premise that leads to a lot of darkly comic set-pieces and the usual Coen-esque encounters with quirky and quick-witted miscreants. Nevertheless, as both friends are lesbians, this crude caper acquires new layers of meaning and opportunities.
Having already twisted the noir tools sufficiently to their needs, the Coen brothers possess a distinct style and language that throughout their career have deconstructed everything from the classic femme fatale to the coincidences and cruel violence that comes with committing a crime. Thus, Drive Away Dolls doesn’t innovate much in the way of storytelling and style, regardless of the fact that only Ethan is at the helm. Cooke’s contributions, though, seem to manifest in character and circumstances. The main element present in Drive Away Dolls that Coen films mostly lack is a straight-up look at female sexual desire and warm, intimate explorations of female friendship that evolve into love. While Miller’s Crossing, the most queerly coded of the Coen brothers’ films, directly addresses male friendship, it does so through violence and deflection, brilliantly crafting the story of a man who can’t fully commit to the idea of losing the person he most respects and loves. Drive Away Dolls, on the other hand, doesn’t shy away from the desires brewing in the background as Jamie and Marian’s relationship shifts to the foreground. The film comes alive when the genre is queered, while the rest of the noir elements (the shady killers, the hidden stash) all feel like remnants from an unproduced script.
Drive Away Dolls’ tone is comedic and raunchy, proudly sexual and insistently explicit in its queerness. The film also possesses a strong sense of lesbian community as Jamie and Marian meet at a gay bar where Jamie is dumped by her girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), as well as a quietly effective scene where they meet a whole lesbian soccer team who invite them to a basement party. This contributes to the film not feeling like the queerness is happening in a vacuum; we are introduced into Jamie and Marian’s world, and it’s the rest of the world that feels out of time and backward. As the now-lovers drive south into Florida, they encounter all the hallmarks of conservative America, amongst them billboards of upstanding family-man senators vowing to uphold the sanctity of the nation. One such senator, Gary Channel (Matt Damon), turns out to be the person awaiting the delivery of the car’s contents: a suitcase with plaster dildos made from important men’s erect penises, one of which is modeled after the senator’s own. In the blink of an eye, Jamie and Marian become noir heroines, blackmailing the senator in a get-rich-quick scheme that almost blows up in their faces.
A wacky and almost harmless film, Drive Away Dolls could have dug deeper into conservative hypocrisy and the hate-mongering it has bred, but what the film does serve is a timely middle finger to the systems that dictate what is normal and tolerable. As McKenzie Wark explains in her essay “Bound: Be Gay, Do Crime” for the Criterion Collection, “the Wachowskis’ is not a cinema in which we’re seduced into reconciliation with the world’s falseness and wrongness as always inevitable. What we’re shown in many variations is the possibility of solidarity, of coming together with others, not because we’re alike but because we confront the same wrong world.” Drive Away Dolls lives and breathes in that same coming together to face a wrong world.
Love Lies Bleeding, from queer British director Rose Glass (Saint Maud [2019]), is not only proudly queer, it’s also daringly confrontational in its representation of queerness and female characterization. Far from the glamorously sensuous Catherine of “Basic Instinct” (played by Sharon Stone) and the clean but kinky Matty Walker of 1981’s Body Heat, Glass’s film pushes the vision of a “strong female character” to its limits. Lou (Kristin Stewart) and Jackie (Katy O’Brian) are as far from glamorous as the noir angels and devils of yesteryear, one an antisocial gym manager and on-the-spot janitor, the other a bodybuilding drifter looking to reach Las Vegas for a bodybuilding competition. However, for the two queer characters, it’s love at first sight. In a way, neither has seen someone like the other in their time either stuck in place or on the road. It’s an encounter that sets off all kinds of sexual fireworks because, as when Corky meets Violet in Bound, they found each other when they least knew they needed each other.
Once the noir elements start to truly kick in, it’s all soaked in sweat and blood only possible from positioning the happenings squarely from a queer point of view. Having taken steroids offered to her by Lou, Jackie, au naturel up to this point and stressed about the upcoming competition, begins to abuse the drug and in a big twist halfway through violently kills Lou’s brother-in-law JJ (Dave Franco). A meat-headed, homophobic, wife-beating man, JJ had just put Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone) in the hospital, and Lou’s violent reactions set in motion the killing machine Jackie has slowly become. What this uncovers is a dark and shockingly efficient Lou, who quickly moves to dispose of the body and plans to reveal the criminal acts of his father (Ed Harris) in the process. It’s an act of desperation, love, and revenge all melded into one. Once all the cards are revealed, neither Lou nor Jackie neatly fit into any female noir mold made before them. These are not the hypersexual fatales bent on destroying the nuclear family or the macho goof, nor are any of them innocent waifs waiting in the wings for the “good” guy to come back. These are women with dirty pasts and a dirtier present, the noir hellscape threatening their romance but never destroying their love.
Even Bound’s Corky and Violet look cleaner than Jackie and Lou ever do throughout the entirety of Love Lies Bleeding’s runtime. And this is precisely where Glass wants to take this story: just a step further than what has come before. At this point, the noir genre has been queered up with few though notable films, but Glass and screenwriter Weronika Tofilska take everything already done in the past and inject it with steroids. Just as the femme couple from Bound are not only successful in their scheme against the macho mafia but come out unpunished, so do Jackie and Lou get away alive if not clean. What distinguishes Love Lies Bleeding is its invigorating focus on the couple’s codependency and queerness as a means of escape.
Once the blood is spilled, Jackie and Lou need each other more than ever, despite the numerous complications their decisions put in their way. Even a lesbian foil in the form of Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), whose obsession with Lou becomes an important plot point, is not enough to keep Jackie and Lou apart. In a heartbreaking scene in the third act, Jackie calls home after having just been manipulated to kill Daisy. Her little brother answers, and through tears she tells him “don’t ever fall in love, okay? It hurts.” Their mother takes the phone away when she learns it’s Jackie and before hanging up tells her: “You stay away from us, you monster!” A thesis line beautifully lined up by Glass and Tofilska, this moment sums up the queer pain and found love the couple represents.
Set in New Mexico in 1989, Love Lies Bleeding takes place in the median line of now-classic neo-noir, and it grabs the opportunity as hard as Jackie falls for Lou, and steroids, in the film. It basks in the Midwestern tinge of dirt and magenta reminiscent of cinematographer Robby Müller’s best (To Live and Die in LA [1985], Repo Man [1984]). In a sense, this is a playground put together lovingly by Glass, but she never gives in to parody or pastiche to approach her takedown of the clean, strong female lead. Instead, she makes a surreal but human exploration of strong female leads who are not as strong as they are without each other. In the ending’s bonkers manifestation of this codependent love, Jackie seemingly becomes a giant and saves Lou from death and the hands of her father. Obvious as it is, it’s a striking and in-your-face display of weirdness that invites viewers to take it all in unashamedly. Glass seems to be saying “if this is what you want, here it is. You don’t like it? Fuck it.”
In his book Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir, Foster Hirsch seems to be quite worried at the prospect of queer sex in noir, noting that “since most sex in noir is tinged with pathology, the genre is likely to remain dangerous ground for homosexual representation.” Dangerous ground indeed, though not necessarily for the reasons Hirsch seems to be implying. It is dangerous because it is able to unearth social pathologies present in heteronormative representations and throw them back at the conservative paragons of the genre.
Love Lies Bleeding and Drive Away Dolls are prime examples of reworking sex into noir without the judgments and gender biases of classic Hollywood filmmaking. Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s Femme not only reworks sex in noir but uses it as a weapon to target machismo and homophobic hate. It tells the story of drag performer Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), who is brutally beaten by a group of men after a drag show. Amongst the men is Preston (George MacKay), a closeted gay man who later begins a sexual affair with Jules, unaware that he’s the same person he assaulted in drag. As the two continue their clandestine encounters, Jules plots his vengeance by way of revenge porn.
The premise of Femme itself is steeped in noir. The quick and slick disruption of normalcy present in the very setup of the story calls to mind classics like Thieves Highway (1949) and especially Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), whose racially charged premise of a bigoted white criminal (Robert Ryan) paired with a black man (Harry Belafonte) for a heist sets in motion noir of a different, more socially minded kind. Nevertheless, as pressingly social as Femme is, the film is mostly concerned with a personal darkness of the soul through which themes of queer identity and macho violence boil over. With a clear vision to queer up the genre and inspired by the intense films of the Safdie brothers (Good Time [2017], Uncut Gems [2019]), writer/directors Freeman and Ping succeed in crafting a noir that could never possess the gravitas it so feverishly conjures if not through the queer lens. While the film clearly displays the reverence the filmmakers have for the Safdies, it has its own brand of intensity. Rather than relying on the breakneck pacing of Good Time or the suffocating structure of Uncut Gems, Femme builds its drama through unbearably tense situations and their implications.
Released in the UK in 2023 but only having premiered in limited presentations in the US in 2024, Femme rounds out the queer threesome of the year with the most unabashed display of noir bleakness and sordid behavior. As Jules approaches Preston, a series of sexual encounters are filled with danger and threat due to their shared history. MacKay, with his slicked-back hair and baby face, calls to mind Richard Attenborough’s psychopathic Pinkie Brown from the British noir Brighton Rock (1949), and it’s this intensely noir look that becomes Preston’s very own drag. His machismo is a performance, similar to how Jules embodies Aphrodite. The main difference here is that Jules is at his most comfortable as Aphrodite, whereas Preston’s persona is but a facade, a mask to show his macho friends.
In one of the most potent scenes of the film, after having been surprised at his own flat by his flatmates during one of their encounters, Jules and Preston attempt to mingle normally with the group. The group decides to play fighting game Street Fighter V, boasting and challenging each other in typical macho displays of superiority. When Jules says he’s good at the game, having initially been shown to be shy and introverted, the group invites him to play. Jules crushes every man who steps up to the plate as Preston watches in awe and with desire in his eyes. Jules had been playing the game toward the beginning of the film, an escape from the trauma of his assault, and now has turned the tables, thematically, on them.
There’s only one problem with Jules’s revenge: his feelings toward Preston. As the story progresses, it further complicates its characters as the filmmakers provide an empathetic look at Preston and his circumstances. Though Jules begins his revenge plot as his own sort of performance art, it’s Preston who eventually feels himself with Jules without having to prove his macho status with the rest of his gang. Predictably, Jules begins to have second thoughts about his plot, even after he successfully records Preston having sex with him. This predictability is not a flaw but more of a logical conclusion given the information the audience has received. The unpredictability of the story simultaneously manifests through the mystery of whether Preston will learn that Jules is the same person he beat up in front of his friends, and what he could be capable of if he finds out. In a heartbreaking climax, after Jules has finally felt himself enough to bring back Aphrodite onto the stage for his birthday and Preston is tricked by one of Jules’s friends to attend the party, the curtain is opened wide and all truths are revealed. After a violent confrontation between the two, Jules fighting back rather than being a victim again, Preston breaks down, sobbing on the pavement as Jules leaves him. As with the best of noir, there are no clean getaways and no clear winners.
Femme pulls off a tricky balancing act. It is tense but also sexy. Taking inspiration from the ’80s and ’90s erotic thrillers and specifically the steamy sex scenes of Body Heat and Basic Instinct, where danger and sensuality go hand in hand, the film pulls off being thrilling entertainment even while the audience fears for Jules’s life. It calls to mind the 2013 queer noir Stranger by the Lake (2013), but without the self-consciousness of genre it plays with. That Femme can be so challenging and so sexy and entertaining at the same time is a testament to the filmmaking on display. It is a heavy film, no doubt, one that leaves the audience in emotional disarray, but it is also a refreshing statement on the freedom found in queerness and drag. And though Femme is the prime example of queer noir of the 2024 queer trifecta, both Drive Away Dolls and Love Lies Bleeding also take pleasure in providing thrills and shocks in equal measure. Each of these films present queerness in different shades of gray, without passing judgment on the damaged hearts at their cores. On the other end of these dark alleyways, shady gyms, and broken roads looms a new queer noir landscape.
Works Cited
Hirsch, Foster. Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo Noir. Limelight, 1999.
Wark, McKenzie. “Bound: Be Gay, Do Crime.” The Criterion Collection, June 18, 2024. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8509-bound-be-gay-do-crime
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All images are screenshots from the films discussed.