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A ghost haunts contemporary cinema: that of Ronald Reagan. There is no greater evidence than a scene of Love Lies Bleeding (2024), directed by Rose Glass, in which some children chase each other while playing: their little faces are hidden under masks of who was, arguably, the first American president manufactured by television. Reagan, however, represents much more than the trajectory of one man: his figure encompasses the neoliberal rise and extreme conservatism, accompanied by neon lights, fluffy hair and songs made with synthesizers: the eighties, which have sprouted with nostalgia in the cinema, music and fashion of the last decade.
For about 15 years, a return to the illuminated nights of Michael Mann has been imposed—especially in independent cinema in the United States; to David Cronenberg’s terrible flakiness; to the barbaric and disconcerting action of George P. Cosmatos, and to the spiritual anguish of Paul Schrader. Filmmakers such as Nicolas Winding-Refn, Julia Ducournau, David Robert Mitchell, Panos Cosmatos – son of George -, Brandon Cronenberg – son of David -, Jordan Peele, Edgar Wright, Jeremy Saulnier and Glass herself have run to take refuge in the cinema with the that grew up.
These nods to the past are not new, but rather traditional in filmmaking, perhaps linked to the practices of late capitalism. Already in the classic cinema of John Ford, there is a nostalgia for the pioneers of the West whom he never met, expressed in references to the nineteenth-century painting of Frederic Remington. Ford also claimed to steal without shame from the silent filmmaker DW Griffith, with whom he worked in his youth. The later generation of French filmmakers, who grew up with Ford’s Hollywood, alluded to him and his contemporaries, and then American directors of the ’70s drew on their European predecessors and the classical era to construct their own filmographies. It seems more like a cinephile ritual than a strictly postmodern nostalgia, as the philosopher Fredric Jameson describes it. According to him, in our time cinema copies without a sense of history, that is, it reproduces the way of filming, editing, and acting of other times, but with a decorative intention that does not capture the tone of the past because it does not experience it. . A good example is The Artist (2011), a silent, black and white film made with shots that suggest not the 1920s, but at most the 1940s, and that reduces the enormous spectrum of silent cinema to stereotypical humor films. Love Lies Bleeding It has something of this technique, but it is also distinguished by an ambiguous attitude towards the eighties and a tone that goes off the rails until it displaces nostalgia.
Love Lies Bleeding (2024)
The plot is set in New Mexico in 1989 and tells the story of Lou (Kristen Stewart), a gym employee who manages memberships as well as unclogs disgusting bathrooms. This last detail is important: Glass observes the decade with fascination, but also disgust. For this reason, individualistic slogans in the gym—“Only losers give up”—coexist with infectious songs by Nona Hendryx and Gina .
Strangely for such a conservative time, the lesbian relationship between the protagonists does not face rejection and is not the only one on screen. Glass, as if she were bowing to Jameson’s opinions, seems like a firm citizen of our Roaring Twenties who imitates tropes of the ’80s without, apparently, grasping their complexity: Love Lies Bleeding it suggests what Jameson would call a pastiche; However, it seems to me more aware of this than other postmodern fictions such as the crafty Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), dedicated solely to idealization and sentimentality.
The love between Lou and Jackie gives rise to a sensory style that challenges a segment of the American public frightened by sexuality on screen. Glass does not film, of course, an explicit film, but it goes beyond the erotic insinuations, for example, of Challengers (2024), directed by Luca Guadagnino, who protects Zendaya from nudity. Glass takes more risks with his protagonists to defend eroticism, also the theme of his first feature film, Saint Maud (2019) —another pastiche, but based on the sixties and seventies—, whose horror aspects filter into Love Lies Bleeding. In fact, these elements are an integral part of Glass’s style, which emphasizes sound to generate disgust and break eighties complacency, although, of course, they do not stop simulating the imagination of David Cronenberg.
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Love Lies Bleeding, A24. (2024)
One night, during a bout of rage induced by the steroids Lou has been giving Jackie, the powerful woman destroys her brother-in-law after he nearly beat Lou’s sister to death. The muscular Jackie is seen by Glass as a kind of Hulk who gets angry for love: a monster not because of his appearance but because of his addiction, and as a result JJ’s jaw (Dave Franco) hangs as if he had been attacked by a demon. . From this point the admiration for the neon decade collapses and a suspicion begins to be detected that Glass expresses through a symbology that is sometimes truncated, but sufficiently clear.
The plot of Love Lies Bleeding It is not an argument of very defined ideas, but an anecdote that focuses on the entanglement over JJ’s death and the involvement of Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), Lou’s father, Jackie’s boss and head of local organized crime. As he anticipated, Glass prefers to communicate certain meanings with symbols, like the insects that Lou Sr. collects, which make him feel like a giant patriarch. When unreality overcomes the minimum verisimilitude of history, that role will be reversed under feminine force. Another important symbol is Jackie’s gym culture and addiction, which culminates as he shows off his muscles in the mirror and listens to the news of the Germans breaking through the torn down Berlin Wall; an announcer describes the moment as a “celebration of the individual.” Love Lies Bleeding He thus alludes to the individualism that Ronald Reagan and the American right – the precursor of what dominates the Republican Party today – so valued, and the pastiche in this scene makes the past and present look at each other as if in a mirror: Glass speaks of the eighties to refer to us. Yes in Saint Maud Glass reduced the irony of the films he was inspired by—mainly the ambiguous ones Repulsion (1965), by Roman Polanski, and Taxi Driver (1976), by Martin Scorsese—to a crude conflict between madness and reality, now avoids discussing its themes with obviousness or even coherence, but what is lost in logic gives flight to madness and originality.
In her final shots, defined by a malevolent sense of humor, we end up discovering that Rose Glass is doing something more important than a narrative essay or simply imitating an era that attracts her for its images, sounds and textures: the director escapes conventions through pure play with imagery, ideas and an insane plot. If admiration and criticism of the eighties appear, as well as themes of patriarchal domination and female rebellion, it is almost because they run through him as if in a delirium that, naturally, derives from real concerns, but is more emotion than reasoning. This is how, from apparent imitation to suspicion, and from there to absurdity, Glass abandons nostalgia and makes much more than a stroll through the cinema of his childhood: a cynically contemporary film that resists interpretation and advocates chaos. Reagan’s shadow dissolves into the same light that she began drawing it.
ALONSO DÍAZ DE LA VEGA. Film critic for Catopard. In 2015 he was the first Mexican critic invited by Berlinale Talents, the summit of young talents at the Berlin International Film Festival. He has written about cinema in The Tempest, Ambulante Magazine, Inland, Forehead, Wide Armchair and Quadrivium. On television she participated in the program My cinema, your cinema, from Channel Once. Throughout her career she has participated as a member of the jury at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, FICUNAM, Durango New Mexican Cinema Festival, Shorts México and Doqumenta.
