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Films

Love Lies Bleeding

J.R. Dickerson decodes a film that likes to pretend it doesn’t have messages because it’s a comedy.

Katy O’Brian got ripped [muscular] for her role in Rose Glass’s second feature, the 2024 lesbian romantic comedy Love Lies Bleeding. Her character, Jackie, is a doe-eyed drifter who, sometime in the 1980’s, rolls into the small New Mexico town where Lou (Kristen Stewart) works at a gym so gritty, sweaty, and testosterone-drenched that it makes Rocky Balboa’s boxing club look like a five-star resort. After banging Lou’s cheating, wife-beating brother-in-law JJ in the back of his car, Jackie sleeps under a bridge and wakes up the next morning ready to pump some iron to prepare for an imminent Las Vegas bodybuilding competition. Viewers are left in no doubt as to her prospects. You see, Jackie codes as male in all but phallus, and her rippling muscles are given a staggeringly unnecessary boost by the steroids she regularly injects after tossing her ‘ au natural, baby’ policy aside following a single flirtatious nudge from Lou.

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