Love Lies Bleeding, Bones and All, and Disgusting Love

For my first blog post this year I cannot think of a better note to start the year off on.

Last night I had the pleasure of seeing Love Lies Bleeding and I went into the movie mostly blind, having only seen a few frames of the trailer here and there and a handful of reviews that mainly centered around the sex scenes. But as the credits rolled and the silhouettes of our two heroines danced across the screen I realized I felt similarly about this movie as I do Bones and All, I fucking loved it.

Love Lies Bleeding follows Lou, a gym employee, and her relationship with mysterious body builder Jackie. The two are misfits with dark obscured pasts that find comfort in one another. Similarly, Bones and All follows Maren, a teenager, and her relationship with Lee. They both harbor a dark secret and checkered past that draws them to one another.

In Love Lies Bleeding, we discover Jackie and Lou have a history of killing people and all of it comes to a head when Jackie kills Lou's brother in law as an act of love. In Bones and All, Lee and Maren are cannibals, colloquially known as "eaters," and Maren specifically wrestles throughout the film with balancing her own humanity with her animalistic hunger.

Throughout both movies the protagonists struggle with these morally reprehensible qualities, often searching for ways and means to quell their urges completely and pretend to live normal lives, but over the course of the film and through the love cultivated by their literal partner in crime they reach a level of acceptance, and by extension euphoria.

At the climaxes of both movies the character most reluctant to give in is forced to let go through one final act of love that pulls them over the edge. Love Lies Bleeding's ending is much neater, with Lou relenting to the killer inside her by threatening her father and ending the life of someone of her own volition. Bones and All ends in a tragic, bloody, cacophony as Maren becomes a fully fledged Eater after consuming Lee, bones and all.

To me there is something so fascinating about the metaphor and juxtaposition of a concept like love against the horrors of death. It speaks to the primitive and animalistic nature of desire and is one of the most effective ways to encapsulate the unexplainable mess of feelings we navigate everyday.

Both films are gory, violent, and ripe with horror elements. But when you think about it what is more powerful than taking another life? What is more powerful or scary than falling in love? The hunger and intoxication felt by the eaters is only natural, what could be more all consuming than love?

Love is beautiful and life affirming and horrifying and absolutely disgusting. That's exactly why we're always chasing it.