This year, Netflix released their adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca to less than stellar reviews. The film had a high bar to clear. Most people associate the name not with du Maurier’s novel, but with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film adaptation. To this day, the original film is an intriguing but limited exploration of lesbian representaion on screen. Without the “moral” restraints of the Hays Code, Rebecca (2020) had the opportunity to make clear what the original could only make subtext, exploring the relationship between Ms. Danvers and the titular character in more depth, or prodding deeper into Maxim de Winter’s effete aristocratic masculinity. Instead, the film offers a shallow retreat of the original’s lesbian subtext and swaps the refined and mysterious Laurence Olivier for a shirtless Armie Hammer sleepwalking through his lines. The nuance of Hitchcock’s film is neglected to tell a straight-forward story about the power of (heterosexual) love overcoming the wrath of an evil (lesbian) ex-wife. Still, this misunderstanding of Hitchcock’s original vision and his complicated relationship with queerness offers a question: What is the best way to update Hitchcock’s damning portrayal of queer people to adresses the homophobia of his films, without completely erasing all queerness in the name of sanitizing said bigotry? More generally, how would one even recognize this film as a remake if the “queer fear” common in his work was absent?
One solution may be that the best remake is the one that changes least, as with Gus Van Sant’s self-identified “experimental” shot-for-shot remake of Psycho in 1998. However, a far more interesting remake came two years prior, with the Wachowski Sisters’ Bound. While often overshadowed by The Matrix, Bound is as much a masterpiece as its younger sibling. The film follows Corky (Gina Gershon), a formerly incarcerated thief and handywoman (with an emphasis on handy), as she gets tied up in an affair with mob wife Violet (Jennifer Tilly). After the two overhear the violent execution of a mob traitor, they hatch a plan to flee the family together, taking with them two million dollars recovered from said traitor. While not a direct remake of any one Hitchcock film, Bound contains many of Hitchcock’s staple tropes: including a story about crime, tension created from dramatic irony, and exploring themes of gender, voyeurism, and the societal gaze. In fact, the film seems suspiciously similar to Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), a film which follows college “friends” Brandon (John Dall) and Phillip (Farly Granger) as they murder their former schoolmate, and host a dinner party on top of the crate where they store his body. Both films center a gay couple attempting to get away with commiting a crime of passion. The key difference is that while Hitchcock places the audience and the camera outside the couple looking in, The Wachowskis place the viewer with them. The audience is not trapped by the queer couple; they are trapped with them. One of Bound’s many strengths is that it takes nearly all of the the tropes and techniques Hitchcock used to portray queer people as threats to society, and uses them to instead explore why queer people must hide their true desires in the first place.
To say Hitchcock was fascinated by voyeurism would be an understatement. Famously, his philosophy was that suspense and tension can only be created when the audience knows more than the characters on the screen. This imbalance of power provides an opportunity for perspective. The audience feels powerless by being placed with a character under observation, such as Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), pursued by the highway patrol officer in the first minutes of Psycho. By contrast, the audience feels dread by being placed with the character doing said observing, such as Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) looking through his peephole later in the film. By rarely adopting the first person camera that dominates later Giallo and Slasher films, the audience instead is kept one degree away from the villain, constantly aware but helpless, unable to stop them from committing acts of violence. Also common in Hitchcock’s body of work are these violent men possessing characteristics stereotypically associated with gay men, such as a high voice, feminine mannerisms, and an inability to hold a gun properly. In Hitchcock’s films, queer people are deviants who exist on the margins of society, constantly looking for ways to infiltrate and kill upstanding citizens for perverted pleasure.
Rope is a prime example of both these elements. The film opens on a man being strangled, with the camera pulling back to reveal Brandon and Phillip holding the rope around his neck. After this, the camera does not cut for the entirety of the film’s runtime. The audience, invited to a party on false pretenses by the trailer, now must silently watch in horror as the criminals evade justice, even as Brandon keeps gleefully uttering puns about death and murder to his guests. Just as common are the remarks Phillip and Brandon to each other. “How did you feel… during it?” the two ask each other, in reference to their “unspeakable act.” The film is not merely about two friends trying to get away with murder. It is also about two “friends” trying to get through a social event without their affair being discovered. Because the Hays Code prohibited the open discussion of homosexuality, it could only be explored through metaphor; in this case, the metaphor of violence and physical harm done to a peer.
The homosexuality of Rope is entirely based on social expectations of what queerness might look like and audience anticipation of queer violence. Brandon is refined and educated, making jabs and starting drama like the best friend in a teen film, and waxing on about his ability to commit murder because he is “superior” to the common man. His partner Phillip, complete with a lavender suit, is sensitive and nervous, terrified that the two will be discovered, and wracked with guilt over what his hands have done. The audience is never shown what their relationship may look like outside of its construction for straight society, and by extension, never granted the opportunity to empathize with the central couple.
For closeted queer people and/or those who risk violent retaliation if they are outed, flirting is often a tense game of determining each other’s sexuality without accidentally outing oneself to someone who could harm them socially or physically. Conversly, being assumed straight by another gay person will inevitably lead to passing each other on the street with not so much as a glance. There is nearly always a degree of uncertainty in determining the sexual identity of a potential partner. This confusion and lack of concrete perception is why academic Patricia White, specifically talking about Rebecca, explains in “Female Spectator, Lesbian Spector” that “the best of Hollywood lesbian films are always in some sense ‘ghost’ movies,.” She explains, “Horror can be seen to have an affinity with homosexuality beyond the queer cast of characters or its inconsistent thematic elaboration of difference in the representation of predatory or sterile desires. For Horror puts in question the reliability of perception.”
The first thirty minutes of Bound, before the inciting incident even occurs, plays like a miniature ghost story. The two women exchange glances in the elevator. Violet drifts around Corky, offering her coffee, ever so slightly creeping closer to her. Corky can hear Violet and her husband Ceaser through the thin wall which separates their two apartments. Violet “accidentally” drops an earring down the sink and gets Corky to retrieve it for her. As the two get closer and closer, the things Violet says keep getting less and less open to interpretation. She offers to show Corky a tattoo on her breast. Their attraction for each other becomes visible both to them, and to the audience. After the two first sleep with each other, Corky rolls over and says to herself, “I can finally see again.” In Rope, the audience is introduced to Phillip and Brandon only in the moment when they become criminals. In Bound, the entire first act is devoted to providing context for the queer leads’ relationship and character. There is time devoted to understanding why the two must resort to crime in the first place. As critic Drew Gregory puts it “Bound doesn’t queer the [noir] genre just by making them both women — it queers the genre by deepening both characters. Corky isn’t a fool and Violet isn’t evil. They’re both just desperate. Hot and desperate and in love.”
Isolated in a straight world, without the security of concrete language and communication, both couples must trust that they are reading each interaction with the same intent and understanding as their partner in crime. Sound and dialogue are imperfect sources of information. Language is a minefield of metaphors and double meanings. It distorts and confuses while sight confirms. Every moment of insecurity Corky feels towards Violet comes with contextless sounds heard through the wall, oftentimes sexual. “That’s the thing I can’t stand about sleeping with women,” Corky remarks, “all the mind reading,” but yet, Corky stays. She stays on the phone on the other side of the wall, trusting that Violet will make it out, ready to provide her help when things go south. The pair recognizes that not only do they love each other, but also that only by putting their faith in each other will either of them survive. As Gregory puts it “this is ultimately just a gay movie about overcoming trust issues.”
By contrast, no such bond exists in Rope. Brandon’s paper thin pride in his actions, and Phillip’s growing guilt and inability to handle Brandon’s jokes, paint a portrait of two bickering queens, unable to sacrifice or compromise for each other. Rope’s image of homosexuality is one based in selfishness and mutual contempt. On multiple occasions, Brandon has the opportunity to comfort Phillip, such as when a friend asks Phillip why he doesn’t eat chicken. Brandon instead tells a deeply embarrassing story of when Phillip failed to strangle a chicken three years prior. “It was a task he unusually performed very competently,” Brandon recounts coyly, “but on this particular morning, his touch was, perhaps, a trifle too delicate.” It is this mocking of Phillip’s masculinity that clues their former teacher Rupert into suspecting that something is “queer” about the pair. In moments where Brandon must be sympathetic to Phillip, he instead mocks his insecurities. Much like Norman Bates, Phillip is a man whose queerness appears as a form of femininity, and whose violence comes at the behest of someone holding power over him. He is a failure of a man because he lacks the stoicism and resolve to resist Brandon’s seduction. The delicacy of his hands hides the damage they can cause.
Bound recontextualizes the violence Hitchcock often assigned to homosexual men not by removing the violence, but by equating it with heterosexual masculity instead. Like Rope, Bound has two men fighting over opening a box, but it is straight machismo and pride at the heart of the conflict. In fact, it’s part of Violet and Corky’s plan. After Corky slips into the apartment to replace the money stored in a safe box, Violet tells her husband that his rival Johnnie is the one who’s taken the money in hopes that he will flee the scene. Instead, Caesar lashes out, punching the blinds and screaming about how Johnnie is “laughing at me” again and again. The outburst is both a generalized portrait of wounded white masculinity (he even punches a hole in the drywall), and specifically resembles the kind of violence committed by Norman Bates and Maxim de Winter after having their masculinity challenged by women.
The key difference is that while Hitchcock saw queerness and deviance as the sources of misogynistic violence, the Wachowskis’ understand that far more often violence comes from straight men trying desperately to maintain power over a situation in which they have lost control. Caesar is dangerous and erratic, so frantically caught up in his own pride and scared to death of being framed that he begins to spiral into violent rage, convinced that he is entitled to revenge. From the very moment Corky walks out with the money, Caesar is doomed. However, rather than simply accept that he’s been duped, Caesar keeps digging deeper and deeper, taking everyone he can down with him. Throughout his rampage, he keeps Violet right by his side at gunpoint. If he discovers Corky, then not only are both women outed, but the entire heist goes south. Violet must pretend to be loyal to Caesar lest she and her Corky be killed. It is only through playing straight that Violet is able to survive and be with the woman she loves. It is a role she plays well, after being stuck in a relationship with Caesar for so long. She is so good at playing the role that upon learning that Violet is gay, he is convinced that Corky has done something to “his Violet.” He cannot escape his own construction of both queerness and female sexuality. He is convinced that she is someone else, and not someone whose true self was hidden from him.
Both Hitchcock and the Wachowskis have the experience of being one degree removed from queerness at some point in their lives. While never confirmed, there are many rumors surrounding Hitchcock’s sexuality, with many believing that he himself was a closeted gay or bisexual man. Likewise, since the release of Bound, both Wachowski sisters have came out as transgender and lesbian. What Rope and Bound share is that they are both films about queerness from one degree removed, but they represent different philosophies of how to approach their subject. One can argue that Hitchcock approaches queerness from a perspective of fear, scared to confront the parts of an identity that may cost him. The Wachowskis approach queerness from a perspective of love, and display a dedication to get every detail right. Rather than fall into easy stereotypes and a precedent set by Hitchcock himself, they take the time to celebrate queerness. In Rope, as with other Hitchcock films, the gay chartacters are marked by a mismatch between emotion and body, causing as schism. Where Phillip is scared and unable to control his hands, Corky is a master. Her hands are strong but nimble, delicate and precise. The Wachowskis treats something as simple as hands as a way to show the comfort and ease a gay person can posess in their body. It’s one of the reasons why Violet is attracted to her in the first place. It is the desire to be seen as you truly are, to disregard the performance you put on for others. It is the desire to no longer hear only whispers. Sound merely distorts where vision and touch confirms.
