Film Notes: Bound

Come see Bound with us at Paramount Theatre Tuesday, June 20.

“I have this image of you—inside of me—like a part of me.”

A filmmaker’s directorial debut carries a particular weight: there’s pressure to demonstrate a skill set, carve out a style, and provide a unique perspective. With BOUND, sisters Lana and Lilly Wachowski established themselves as a powerful team of storytellers, garnering a credibility that would grant them access to create the larger-scale productions that define their careers.

Initially working as screenwriters, the Wachowskis found themselves discontent with the lack of autonomy. With resolve, the sisters pivoted to focus on directing and began developing the concept that eventually became their best-known work, the MATRIX trilogy. First, though, they delivered 1996’s neo-noir erotic thriller BOUND. The premise is familiar: there are archetypes of the mob boss and his moll and the antihero protagonist, but what sets it–and the Wachowskis–apart is the film’s response to that structure. What if the antihero was a woman, and what if she’s the one being seduced, and what if the moll has real autonomy? What if the film’s women weren’t afraid of violence, and what if they broke out of those archetypes that they’ve been bound to? And what if the queer characters were fully-formed people who existed beyond one-dimensional villains or victims?

The answers to these questions signaled the Wachowskis’ approach: creating genre films that both celebrate and deconstruct their predecessors. To dismantle something, one must first understand all its parts, and Lana and Lilly clearly have an understanding of the works that they draw on. The tropes are there, but they serve as launch pads for the directors to elevate the story. Violet, the femme fatale embodied by Jennifer Tilly, is the pursuer, while the character of Corky is played by Gina Gershon, who presents the Clint Eastwood-esque masculinity we expect in an unexpected butch lesbian form.

Although BOUND is far from the first film to tell a queer love story, it was released in a time when mainstream cinema was first beginning to grow comfortable with queer characters. In the 1990s, audiences saw a surge of films like PHILADELPHIA and THE BIRDCAGE that resisted the lingering homophobia of the Hays Code days. But unlike its contemporaries, BOUND’s queerness is not central to the plot; had the Wachowskis caved to studio pressure and made Corky’s character a man, little else would change. Thanks to financial backing by Dino DeLaurentiis, though, the Wachowskis were able to stay true to their concept, resulting in a directorial debut that serves as a thesis statement for their filmography. Furthermore, these characters demonstrate that queer people are not a monolith. The audience, like Caesar and Corky, may be surprised to learn that the hyper-feminine Violet is gay; her sexuality is revealed when she recognizes Corky’s labrys tattoo and in turn reveals hers, a violet; these two symbols of the lesbian community establish their connection, a permanent marker of identity, and it’s the sharing of the tattoos that catalyzes their affair. The women are bound together–by identity, by sexual chemistry, by love, and by their heist.

The success of BOUND was the genesis for a decades-long career for Lana and Lilly, both as collaborators and as individuals. The common thread through each of their works, regardless of genre, is a philosophy of defiance, of rejecting the world’s insistence on uniformity. The depth of this philosophy was crystallized when both sisters came out as trans women; this information indicated that even in films featuring ostensibly straight characters, like THE MATRIX and SPEED RACER, there are hints at the queer experience, and in turn, a suggestion that those same struggles with identity and society are universal. Or, as best explained by Lana in a 1998 interview for Gadfly: 

“We think that not only gay people or queer people live in closets. Everybody does. We all tend to put ourselves into these boxes, these traps. And so what we tried to do is we tried to define as many of the characters through the sort of trap that they were making out of their lives. Getting out of the closet was meant to take on a bigger meaning than just the typical gay meaning.”

While seen as more of a cult classic, BOUND is essential viewing for fans of their better-known films and shows. One can trace the DNA of their dynamic storytelling and parse out the influences that inform their work, whether it’s film noir or comic books or traditional science fiction. Whether working with a budget of 4 million or 63 million, the sisters use every bit of what they can, no line of dialogue or set piece or bit of score wasted, and that attention to detail is what elevates BOUND from an entertaining crime thriller to an innovation to the genre, a pattern that the Wachowskis successfully continue to this day: creating stories that celebrate archetypes and characters who defy them.