cw: “Sleaze” is often used as a perjorative against drug users, sex workers, and anyone deep in poverty. This video will associate that term with those activities in the context of pop culture but I am not endorsing any dehumanizing portrayals. I have nothing but love and solidarity for drug users, sex workers, and anyone else pushed to the margins.
This year, like any queer in good standing, I went to go see Love Lies Bleeding, the lesbian crime thriller starring Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian. If you don’t know, in brief, Love Lies Bleeding is the story of Stewart’s character Lou managing a rundown small-town gym and falling in love with O’Brian’s character Jackie, a drifter who wants to win a bodybuilding competition. The relationship begins with steroids and light fisting and unfortunately takes a turn as Lou’s crime boss daddy and her abusive brother-in-law get the couple roped into an escalating series of violent encounters.
The film was shot in Albuquerque, NM and takes place mostly in crummy apartments, gross workout rooms, and dusty streets. It’s got drug use, kinky sex, and murder. The film just feels sweaty and a little too-warm, you can smell practically every scene, the old cigarette smoke, the dried urine, the body funk drifting in lazy circles.
I really loved the film, I think it’s destined to become a queer cult classic, and as I was reflecting on why I responded to it so much, I said to myself “It’s so nice to see a sleazy movie about lesbians for a change!”
And then I stopped and second-guessed myself. Because it got me thinking… can lesbians, written and directed by a woman, be sleazy? Or is sleaze definitionally a by-product of the coarse male gaze? Actually, what is sleaze anyway?
In many ways, sleaze is a lot like pornography for me, tough to define but I know it when I see it. When I think of a sleazy movie (or book or even game I guess), I think of something that combines horniness, anti-social behaviors like crime, usually drug use, usually poverty, but also something else… something tactile, something clammy or sticky or filmy (no pun intended).
I think of slightly more recent films like Killing Them Softly where Ben Mendelsohn looks absolutely ripe with BO and desperation, or Ti West’s X with its dilapidated barn porno shoot, or Deep Water, where you can practically feel the soft threads of Ana De Armas’ stockings… (i think i hauve covid)
But of course, the 70s, 80s, and 90s were the golden age of sleaze, from Walter Hill and his Warriors to Lawrence Kasden’s muggy eroticism in Body Heat to the skin-crawlingly bad time of Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer to the king baby, William Freidkin and his delicious Jade… I would pay $5000 to have Linda Fiorentino step on my neck and call me a bitch….
er…
Anywho, while I would love to sit here and show you tons of clips of 80s boobs to really drive home my point (believe me i would!) I don’t believe my handlers at Youtube would bless my efforts. So instead let’s come at this from a different angle…
First, where does the word sleaze even come from?
According to my research, the word “sleazy” originated in the late 1600s somewhere around the European textile industry. It seems to have emerged as a way to refer to fabric that was cheap, thin, and easily damaged. No one is quite sure how it got coined though. A popular folk etymology asserts that in that era, fabric from Germany’s Silesia region was considered high quality so unscupulous merchants would often fradulently market their own cheaper fabrics as “Silesian”, which became “sleazy” over time. The OED is skeptical but there ya go. (https://www.etymonline.com/word/sleaze)
Weirdly, it took until about the 1960s for the sense of “cheap and low quality” to evolve into “low class” and then eventually the “immoral, unseemly” sense it has today. This linguistic evolution seems to have happened in the midst of trends in music such as glam in the UK as well as transgressive, underground filmmaking in places like Baltimore. Society was ready to get nasty and plenty of artists were ready to provide.
(One bit that I found interesting was that “sleaze” has slightly different connotations here in the United States compared to, say, the UK. You’ll notice I’ve been focused on the kind of hedonistic, bodily elements of sleaze whereas Brits are more likely to associate sleaze with government corruption. Not sure if there are any insights to be gleaned about what that means for our respective country’s preoccupations but there ya go… https://jeremybutterfield.wordpress.com/2021/05/04/what-does-sleaze-mean-where-does-it-come-from/)
Anyway, for the purposes of this video, I’m narrowing my focus to American-adjacent genre films since it was a film that inspired this question. When we think of the iconic architects of cinema sleaze, we think of cult classics from such filthy luminaries as Frank Henenlotter, Abel Ferrara, William Lustig and Dario Argento, and beyond them, scores of forgotten directors dumping stuff straight to video for only the most committed sickos to find.
One thing you might have noticed is that these directors all tend to be men. It’s probably not a huge surprise that the filmmakers reveling in sex, violence, grit, and grime tended to be male, particularly since so many of these kinds of films depict violence against women as just a liiiittle too fun, a little too horny.
Of course, there are exceptions. I really enjoy the Slumber Party Massacre and Sorority House Massacre series of films, and they were directed by women like Amy Jones, Deborah Brock, Sally Mattison, and Carol Frank. And trust me, those films don’t shy away from violence against women either (although these directors snuck feminist sensibilities into the films wherever they could.) Even acknowledging those exceptions though, I have to wonder whether, in say 1982, someone like Amy Jones was compelled to cater to heterosexual male gazes and male cravings in a way she might not have otherwise chosen to do if she’d had the juice and the money to make what she wanted.
But yeah, for the most part, when I think of sleaze, I think of films directed by men constructing lurid yarns full of bullets and boobs designed to get straight male audiences hootin’ and hollarin’.
And this is why I started thinking about my original question about whether a lesbian movie directed by a woman could be sleazy. But upon reflection, I think the deeper question is this: in the context of genre films, is a sleazy movie sleazy because it wallows in gritty grimy taboo topics, or is it sleazy because it wallows in the male titillation those topics cause?
Because here’s the boring truth: bioessentialism is silly, of course women can be sleazy and enjoy sleaze, as can anyone else regardless of gender. In 1987, Kathryn Bigelow directed Near Dark, about some nasty vampires taking over a shit-kicker bar. In 1971, Stephanie Rothman directed The Velvet Vampire, about a horny bisexual vampire, score one for my team. And in the mid-1960s, women like Mink Stole, Cookie Mueller, and Mary Vivian Pearce were part of the transgressive Dreamlanders collective who would change cinema forever alongside John Waters.
And like, c’mon, it makes sense: the realities that sleaze represents in cinema affect women just as much as men, why wouldn’t women have something to say about it?
And, taking a quick detour out of films, one need only browse the recent activity on popular fan fiction sites to realize that women have been out there making stuff nasty for a long, long time, all the way back to the original Kirk/Spock slash fics. Hell, I bet a bunch of Greek ladies at the Agora used to swap Odysseus/Achilles vore with each other.
So, for me, it’s not that anyone can’t or shouldn’t do something. I think what I’m really trying to tease out here is whether films who revel in sleaze are doing so because it arouses their vulgar desires or because it is a reality they want to talk about and react to.
And of course, here’s the other boring truth: it really just depends on the film.
For example, let’s take Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. It’s a really effective film, an absolutely harrowing watch that crackles with this nauseating energy. The film essentially takes you on a ride-along with a serial killer and his rapist roommate and lets you watch the men work. The film depicts people in poverty on the margins struggling to get by, with all the trauma that can bring. But I would argue, at no point does the film critique capitalism’s insatiable drive to create poverty or society’s willingness to use and abuse women. Unfortunately, our audience POV is that of a collaborator with these men (in the film, they literally film their murders to watch back together for entertainment). To me, it feels like the film is gawking at the mayhem, elbowing you like “Aw sick! Isn’t that so fucked up??”
And that’s fine, not every film needs to pan over to Karl Marx at the end saying “Mama mia,capitalism she’s a spicy meatball!” (I don’t know what he sounded like)
But I compare that to a film like, I dunno, Pink Flamingos. That film also features several characters on the margins who commit rape, deal drugs, engage in incest, and then torture and kill people. What’s the difference between John McNaughton and John Waters?
For some of you, the answer will be, there is no difference, it’s all disgusting trash. But for others… well, to start, here’s something Howard Hampton wrote about the film for the Critereon Channel:
“Writing in his 2010 book Role Models about his hero and inspiration Tennessee Williams, Waters says that in the playwright’s work he saw an opening into ‘a universe filled with special people who didn’t want to be a part of this dreary conformist life that I was told I had to join.’
…You may not want to go back and be one of [the Dreamlanders], but a movie like this makes you want to be part of something as unfettered and alive. ”
(https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7845-pink-flamingos-the-battle-of-filth)
And to develop that idea further, here’s what blogger Joe Corr had to say in one of his Medium articles:
“As I grew older, and I settled into my queerness and into my gender expression, you’d have thought maybe that Pink Flamingos would have lost some of its power. That I’d look back on it the way some people look back on punk — great music, shame about the swastikas. But if anything my adoration has grown exponentially over the years. You see, beneath the camp, and even beneath the anger (who knew this film had so many layers) there’s a beating heart — one of love. Pink Flamingos is gross, punk and violent, but beneath it all there’s an underlying glimmer of hope — when the world pushes you out, there is a family out there waiting. Divine’s brood is perfectly dysfunctional — a chosen family, with a proud and loyal matriarch, who are fiercely protective of each other and genuinely happy to be together…
…Many people, queer or not, will hate Pink Flamingos because it is not normalising, or polite, or respectable. And who’d want to be respectable — at least, in the way we’re told we’re supposed to be respectable? Certainly, Divine and her family have an awful lot of respect for each other. They respect each other’s kinks. They respect each other’s gender fluidity. They respect each other’s feelings of inadequacy and grief. They are in many ways the queer ideal — passionately individual, yet fiercely familial. If I could give every young queer person one thing — film, book, album, whatever — as a guide I’d give them Pink Flamingos in a heartbeat.”
(https://mandysweats.medium.com/pink-flamingos-a-queer-beginners-guide-to-family-style-and-not-giving-a-sh-t-fa9aa3e6c96f)
And that right there, for me anyway, is the key difference. Henry and his roommate Otis are a kind of found family, but it’s not particularly queer, and certainly not hopeful. They are people living on the margins experiencing trauma, but I would argue that in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Henry and Otis are subsumed beneath it, becoming the trauma, melting into the sleazy world around them.
In contrast, Divine and her family, the Degrady Bunch if you will, experience the same trauma on the margins and instead form a community of vulnerability as a bulwark against that trauma. Henry and Otis see a world that hates them and decide to define themselves by that hate, whereas I would argue Divine sees a world that rejects her and decides instead to define herself by acceptance, inclusion, and, yes, even love. You might say that’s a overly reparative gloss I’m imposing on an irredeemable film, to which I say: <some clip>
Anyway, let’s wrap this up. Going aaaalllll the way back to Love Lies Bleeding, this is exactly why I love to see sleazy queer cinema. For me, sleaze in films is a kind of shorthand for the reality of societal alienation and abjection. Whether it’s depicting robberies, drug use, exploitative sex work, extreme poverty, or sexual violence, what it’s actually depicting is people trying to survive under a system that dehumanizes them, impoverishes them, criminalizes them, and discards them. This doesn’t mean every single character in a Frank Henenlotter film is secretly a hero with a heart of gold, because like real life, some people who experience trauma will turn around and repeat that trauma on others, and that’s not okay to do, much less something noble to admire.
This is why I think the really good sleazy films, like Love Lies Bleeding, like Pink Flamingoes, like Killing Them Softly, take it one step further, either using sleaze to call attention to systemic failures and invite action, or, using it to provide a kind of thematic blueprint for finding a reason to keep surviving and keep fighting.
Killing Them Softly uses the trappings of a crime thriller to attack the architects of the 2008 financial crash and subsequent billionaire bailout, and Love Lies Bleeding uses those same trappings to remind us that we, that YOU, deserve love no matter how low your circumstances have brought you.
In a media landscape that valorizes wealth and often airbrushes away the complicated and unflattering blemishes caused by racial capitalism, sleaze can be a powerful antidote, a demand to engage with material reality, and a canvas on which the discarded and unheard can sometimes, with a little care and a lot of empathy, create something inexplicably beautiful.