Love Lies Bleeding Pumps More Than Iron
On how good it feels to see toxic relationships succeed.
I have an array of niche interests, and one of them is gym culture. The gym is a space where the internal and the external politely collide. A breeding ground for competitiveness and comparison. It’s a territory for complete self-absorption and for lurking. There are unspoken codes for looking around in the gym. You can appreciatively nod at someone’s perfect form during the soul-destroying Bulgarian split squats. But you categorically cannot roll your eyes or leer. Sly glances, polite appreciation, and jealous stares abound. Love Lies Bleeding invites us to look into this world in its opening credits. Close-ups of chests, biceps and thighs all in a state of intense pump. And amongst them, elbow-deep in shit, is Lou (Kristen Stewart). A loner gym manager in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico, Lou is as resourceful as she is resentful. Violence and mullets run in her family, and she’s convinced herself she needs to remain in a town she hates to protect her sister Beth (Jena Malone) from the regular and escalating beatings from her dirtbag husband (Dave Franco, always a reliable dirtbag).
When Jackie (Katy O’Brian) rolls into town with her winning smile and big biceps, it’s all over for Lou. Their relationship forms the backbone of Love Lies Bleeding and, like everything else in town, it’s infected by violence. Their love is torrid and parasitic. They use each other knowingly: Jackie needs a reason to stay put and Lou, motivation to get out. In someone else’s hands, Love Lies Bleeding would be a simple, joyous 'be gay do crime’ romp, but it’s a Rose Glass joint, and she’s interested in what’s happening under the skin.
Glass’s films so far have been curious about the clash between a character’s bodily reality and the vast, often poisonous possibility of their mind. In Saint Maud (2019), traumatised hospice nurse Maud uses self-flagellation to feel closer to god. When she feels god’s presence closest, she experiences near orgasmic seizures, ‘godgasms’. Similarly, Love Lies Bleeding’s Jackie is determined to build her body into something stronger and bigger than herself. Something undeniable. In her first encounter with Lou’s sweaty mobster father Lou Sr. (Ed Harris, one of cinema’s most menacing jawlines), she expresses her disdain for guns: “Anyone can feel strong hiding behind a piece of metal. I prefer to know my own strength.” Jackie’s a short-term creature. Her one goal is to win a bodybuilding competition. But the drive to perfect (or destroy) the outside is often informed by a great inside vacuum.
Just like she did in Saint Maud, Glass tiptoes between the grounded and the surreal, the grotesque and the beatific, by filtering a character’s perspective through their body. Both Saint Maud and Love Lies Bleeding use the bodily as a tool to explore characters obsessed with self-improvement, with reaching a state of perfect alignment with their particular gods. When we’re in Jackie’s perspective, we experience her emotions through her body. When she grows angry, upset or aroused, it expands. Her muscles bulge and veins swell. After the swell, though, comes a dramatic dysphoria. And here’s where Lou comes in, eager to pick Jackie back up.
There is a knowing imbalance of power between both Lou and Jackie that extends to the actresses who play them. Kristen Stewart, who alongside her Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson has demonstrated a genuinely weird taste and an earnest affinity for working with arthouse filmmakers, has finally found her groove as a movie star. She doesn’t disappear into characters: she wraps them around herself. Like any young person who had experienced that level of public scrutiny, she has become a composite creation. Kristen Stewart the person and Kristen Stewart from the movies and the tabloids are blended together. Love Lies Bleeding cleanly subverts her movie persona by casting her as a character who obsesses instead of being obsessed over. Katy O’Brian, meanwhile, carries none of that cultural baggage. As an audience, we’re very familiar with Stewart, but know almost nothing of O’Brian. Here, she eats up her first major role like it was written for her and no one else. The film nurtures that fascination with an undeniable newcomer from the minute she walks into Lou’s gym in her 1980s gym rat chic. Jackie is training to become a god, and Love Lies Bleeding turns her into one.
Godliness doesn’t live far away from monstrousness, though. On two different occasions in the film, both Lou and Jackie are called monsters by loved ones, and those moments sting more than any bare-knuckle punch. Jackie is, in a way, a grifter1. She’ll do whatever needs doing to get herself a meal, a roof, a free gym membership. So is Lou, though, supplying Jackie with steroids to keep her close and needy, happily stringing along Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov, proving that not all nepo babies are bad) when she needs her for something, and disposing of her when she doesn’t. Lou and Jackie's tryst is made of and for the movies. Together, they make sense in a way that they don't independently. Their love comes wrapped in violence, sure. but when it feels so good, what’s a bit of murder anyway?
I could’ve easily watched another film entirely centered on Jackie’s pursuit of maximum protein and the perfect pump.