Setting The Glass Table

'Love Lies Bleeding' and the limits of 'the vibe'.

No, I enjoyed watching ‘Love Lies Bleeding’, it’s just that…

What have we got to look forward to from what is being called the ‘vibes era’ of cinema? It’s a nebulous term, made popular by internet movie discourse, but we know what it means: aesthetics beat particulars, the journey is more important than the destination, don’t think just feel, lots of colour filters and pretty people looking sad to synth soundtracks. Basically, it’s the prioritising of ambience and aesthetic humidity over plot and character and all that useless old chaff. 

Looking at that list I’d have to say that I’m all for it. Genre film making is at its best when looking to more contemporary and experimental areas of technique. Directors, particularly in the horror field, should constantly be refreshing their palates by looting from less narratively driven mediums like avant-garde cinema, video games and fine art; looking toward making their films more impressionistic and less motivated by A-to-B dynamics. Plus, I like staying up late, getting significantly altered and watching old grindhouse trailers on YouTube while listening to African drumming records. This is my thing! The Vibe Era should be absolutely my thing!

A list of precursors to this nebulous tendency would also be pretty auspicious. You’d have to include ‘Suspiria’, for example, as well as Carl Theodor Dreyer’s ‘Vampyr’. ‘Messiah Of Evil’; even something as cosmetically stuffy as Jonathan Miller’s ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come To You’ is marked more by its overarching feeling of dreadful collapse than by its plot or character progression, of which it has very little. And yet most of the recent films that have been hailed as examples of ‘Vibe Cinema’ on Letterboxd et al haven’t worked for me. ‘Skinamarink’ was a fine try, but was just too damn long, ‘The Outwaters’ was a clueless, boring disaster, and ‘Antrum’ was another fine effort, but made some baffling choices that sank it completely.

But those are all capital ‘H’ horror movies, so when it was announced that Rose Glass, director of the fantastic ‘Saint Maude’, had made a bloody desert-set crime thriller taking place in the world of competitive female body building, with a particular emphasis on gristly horror, redneck neo noir-isms, bodily fluids, with Ed fucking Harris in a supporting role, and that it was Vibe-y to the max, it was time to lock and load. A crime film, given that it’s a genre with stricter narrative rules than horror, should be able to deliver a balance between pure aesthetics and storytelling, went the reasoning. And so, I watched ‘Love Lies Bleeding’, and I enjoyed it, and yet…

Well, it’s certainly beautiful. ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ is a damn well realised film, richly shaded in all the colours of the dark. The performances are committed and occasionally courageous, the synth soundtrack dusky and haunting, the lighting fresh from an opened artery. It’s a symphony of shit and puke, blood and muscle, sex and sweat and commits to its scummy milieu completely. When the first thing you show is your leading lady with her arm down a vomit blocked toilet then you’ve got to work hard to keep to that miasmically disgusting level. It is achieved. It is a comprehensive trip.

The problem with ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ is how it chooses to string its pearls. The set-up is typical Jim Thompson-esque scum bag Americana: a big-dreaming stranger walks into a corrupt town and falls in love. They try to escape, but with every mistake they’re wound tighter and tighter ‘round the pin. Nothing original, nothing new. The familiarity is the point, just start the fun. And so begins a festival of subverted expectations, from the film’s hysterically exaggerated portrayal of body building culture, to its grotesque dives into Cronenbergian horror, to its down-to-the-knuckle (well, considerably further than that actually) lesbian sex scenes, ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ methodically and unmistakably sinks into its vibe and marinades there, becoming a de facto hangout movie for people who enjoy feeling like they’re overdosing in a cheap motel room. This works great for the first two thirds of the film, but going into the last half hour it was difficult not to shake a recurring question. One that immediately makes me sound like exactly the type of stuffy gatekeeping critic that the Children Of The Vibe are trying to topple: “What is this film saying?”

It was interesting that in the week after watching ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ I watched Jonathan Kaplan’s 1992 film ‘Unlawful Entry’, which seems to be going through a period of rediscovery following its levitating to the top of the Prime Video lists. It’s a good example of the trashy erotic thriller of its day, what with it starring dependable ‘90s actors – Kurt Russell, Madeleine Stowe, Ray Liotta – having a recognisable L.A. setting and featuring someone sinisterly peering through some slatted blinds on the poster. It’s exactly the kind of thing my mum would sit downstairs and watch on video with a glass of wine after sending the kids to bed. But what was really striking was just how much it was about things. In its two hour runtime it touched on police corruption, marital infidelity, race relations in post-Rodney-King Los Angeles, white suburban flight, masculinity in crisis, gun ownership and I think the only thing missing was a reference to the first Iraq war, but I might just have missed it. This was a film going out of its way to gussy up its tawdry draping and be as topical and full of import as possible.

The contrast with the thematic sparseness of ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ was remarkable. Because ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ is not really about anything. It’s a shopping list of brightly coloured cool stuff that sings when it’s all put together. Eventually Glass’s film starts to feel as if its purely aesthetic trappings – its vibe - are sucking the life out of the rest of the action. The crime plot, perfectly synched to begin with, sails off into the sunset, as though its telling were a burden that all involved couldn’t wait to be rid of. Two detective characters vanish as if they were never there, leaving nothing important in their wake - a symbolic disappearance if there ever was one. By the time ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ has turned into ‘Wrapping Dead Bodies In Rugs: The Movie’, it isn’t just that it lacks thematic heft, it’s as if the film isn’t even bothered about its own plot, meaning that, unmoored from pretty much anything that matters anymore, it floats off into whimsy. 

I’m not going to argue that ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ would be immeasurably improved by shoehorning in references to the collapse of Communism and the Hillsborough disaster (it’s set in 1989), but it’s interesting to reflect on whether this emphasis on vibes, this focus on the set dressing rather than the play, necessarily comes at the expense of coherence. All of the films I’ve named above fix themselves on one side or the other, and all their failings, big or small, come as a result (the most satisfyingly realised, being ‘Oh Whistle And I’ll Come To You’, isn’t feature length and so probably has it a bit easier). At what point does the table start to sag under the weight of its own decoration? And what kind of structure, if any, do you need to support it? It’s going to be fun to see how this generation of film makers grapple with these questions.