Love Lies Bleeding is a rarity for a number of reasons. The independent drama from director Rose Glass puts a gay couple front and center (with both parts played by queer women, Katy O’Brian and Kristen Stewart). It’s a blend of thriller, romantic drama and film noir, filtered through a surrealist lens and 1980s noir aesthetic. It’s the kind of film we’re told over and over again that they just don’t make anymore, although it’s doubtful we ever had one quite like this. The story of a gym owner and her bodybuilder lover who face the ire of the former’s violent criminal father is a thoroughly 2024 affair, highly ambitious and gloriously nasty, even with its callbacks to classic cinema and ‘80s sleaze. At its heart is Jackie (O’Brian), an ambitious bodybuilder whose passion for Lou (Stewart) is matched only by her hunger for steroids. Cinematographer Ben Fordesman’s lens views Jackie like a superhero from a silver age comic book, a pure fantasy of strength and allure whose body seems to expand with every shot of performance enhancers. Clothes rip from her like Bruce Banner turning into the Hulk. It’s a ferocious turn from the relative newcomer, matched in sexual intensity by Stewart, and the pair set the screen on fire as their love descends into a rabbit hole of murder, drugs and toxic femininity. To be blunt, it’s a blast, but it’s also kind of radical, if only for the sheer presence of O’Brian, a highly muscular woman whose brand of physicality is practically unheard of in pop culture, modern or otherwise. So, why can’t we have more of this?
Pop culture has long dictated beauty standards, with the past 110 years of Hollywood offering the most forceful definitions. Clara Bow made the svelte flapper form beloved. Everyone tried to replicate Audrey Hepburn’s gamine ballet body, then Marilyn Monroe’s showstopping curves. Over the past decade, we’ve seen the pendulum swing from BBLs and the appropriation of Black womanhood to the revival of heroin-chic thinness through the changes to the Kardashians’ bodies. The most fetishized forms seldom differ from the severe mold of thin and white, and haven’t for many years. Certainly, the idea of a woman being muscular has never been seen as a desirable or workable type.
Whenever a woman in the public eye has dared to do a few pull-ups, the media has roundly revolted. When Madonna got very buff during her disco and yoga era, the press dressed up their disgust and misogyny with “concern” that she was exercising too much. Some didn’t bother to conceal it, such as when TMZ described her as having “an overly worked-out pair of monstrously sculpted and bloodcurdling veiny corpse arms.” It’s tough to find any coverage of Demi Moore’s G.I. Jane—where she played a soldier who became the first woman to join the Navy SEALs—that doesn’t seem confused as to why she got muscled and “unsexy” for the part. Michelle Obama dealt with years of racist and sexist insults from right-wing losers because she had defined arms. Many female athletes have suffered similar fates, from Venus and Serena Williams to Aly Raisman and Simone Biles to Caster Semenya (often accompanied by transphobic bile as creeps try to claim any kind of muscle as “proof” of manhood).
The body standards we are smothered by are tied to a rigid binary. Men are to be strong alpha types with abs you could grate cheese on, while women must be small, meek and something to be won. This extends even to stories of “kickass” heroines who beat up dozens of guys at a time. The women of Marvel and DC don’t usually get to be muscular. They’re toned, sure, but they’re never close to what Katy O’Brian flexes in Love Lies Bleeding. Not even She-Hulk got to show off in her Disney+ series. A VFX artist at Industrial Light & Magic claimed (in a now-deleted tweet) that Marvel had demanded that the character be made smaller. You know that the industry is afraid of hot muscular women when not even Jennifer effing Walters gets to have delts.
This all seems designed to pander to an outdated and unhealthy expectation of how women “should” look and for whom they pander to. (Surprise: men!) Regardless of the character’s story or motivation, putting aside whether or not it would make more sense for them to have some mass, the default of the entertainment industry is to make a woman “desirable,” and that type is still tiny, skinny and non-threatening to bored bros with no imaginations. And yet there’s clearly a hunger for body inclusivity across the board, including a vocal desire for more hot muscled ladies. Hell, just look at how the internet lost its damn mind when Natalie Portman got some guns for Thor: Love and Thunder. In The Woman King, Viola Davis’ muscles glisten like those of an ‘80s bodybuilder and seeing her strength in action is a pure thrill. In Game of Thrones, Gwendoline Christie’s Brienne of Tarth became an icon for her size and strength.
These women, particularly Davis and Portman, weren’t designed to be ogled by any person in their respective films either. Sure, audiences loved them, but they also represented a kind of welcome status quo within the narratives. They were warriors and gods, and all the other ones looked like that, so why not the women? With Brienne, her strength and apparent ugliness were textually derided by many, seen as unfeminine and evidence that no man would ever love her. That was quickly disproven in the show when Tormund Giantsbane laid eyes on Brienne and practically groveled at her feet, but her knightly honor and protectiveness were all admirable traits reflected in her physique. Viewers loved her because of her form and all it represented—over time, so did Jaime Lannister.
In Love Lies Bleeding, Jackie’s steroid abuse isn’t glamorized, per se, but the results aren’t exactly condemned either. Roid rage makes her brutally violent, but it’s often indistinguishable from her normal fury, and Glass’ camera makes it clear at every turn that her physique is extremely sexy. Becoming so strong, so indomitably muscled, isn’t body horror so much as body euphoria. This twisted transformation, in a film steeped in blood and vomit and corruption, brings Jackie ecstasy, and Lou isn’t sheepish about her desires for the results either. Jackie’s body as a representation of queer desire is palpable, something that is often implied in narratives of muscular women but not necessarily explored (all the above examples are of women who are presented as straight). Nevertheless, the allure still transcends sexuality, as many memes about Brienne and people wanting “the hot big lady to step on me” prove!
Who benefits from keeping women small? It’s not just about banning muscles either. It’s about the continued stigma towards body mass of any kind, a particular problem in the era of Ozempic. It’s about gender and race and the various intersections of womanhood that are stifled by patriarchal rule. None of us benefit from this rigidity, which smears any deviation from the formula of “man strong, woman weak” as toxic and abnormal. If cinema is to continue blazing trails for new generations then a greater expansion of the bodies we see and celebrate is but one step we can make towards rectifying this wrong. It’s not just about our own horny pleasure—although that certainly doesn’t hurt!—but about letting the world know that strength is for everyone.
Kayleigh Donaldson is a critic and pop culture writer for Pajiba.com. Her work can also be found on IGN, Slashfilm, Uproxx, Little White Lies, Vulture, Roger Ebert, and other publications. She lives in Dundee.