A rare thing around our house: the rewatch. Don’t get me wrong, I will rewatch movies and shows in the way a favorite meal might comfort someone. I am definitely in with the crowd that will drop into any episode of The Office and know the very next line out of the mouth of the character on screen. In my younger, pre-streaming, days I would put a DVD from one of the season boxed sets into the player and let it play through until I fell asleep.
In case you wanted to know why you should set a timer to turn off your TV after a few hours – that’s why. The DVD menu would reload and wake me up at 2 in the morning, long after the office culture had dragged me into sleep.
To rewatch a serial drama or an entire movie rarely happens. As of this writing, Shogun hangs in the balance because my wife was too invested in something on her phone and missed about 15 minutes worth of subtitled conversations in the last episode – meaning she will need to rewatch it before we can continue the series together. With little irony, she also abandoned reading the novel about 150 pages in.
I can’t blame her, the novel is very dense. I didn’t bother past the fifth page.
I bring all this up because Carly openly invited the idea of watching Love Lies Bleeding last night as it had just arrived on a streamer. She had seen it at the Grail Moviehouse – an indie joint here in Asheville – with her mom when it was first released. “I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s totally your kind of movie.”
And she wasn’t wrong. It was just the right kind of weird, violent, desperate movie that ends in an fashion that is authentically and Americanly romantic. The storyline is right out of the hardboiled crime novels of a Hammet or Jim Thompson and the style speaks to the weirdness/ magical realism of a Lynchian flick mixed with the unapologetic violence of a Coen Brothers or Taylor Sheridan movie.
Personally, I’ve always been drawn to the tragic sparseness of the American West. I love how it is captured in Hell or High Water – set in West Texas but shot mostly in New Mexico. Hot, desolate, vacant, and lawless. The local sheriffs do what they can to keep disputes under control and every so often a pair of federal lawmen arrive in an attempt to excise what they consider the “cancer” of the town.
They never succeed. It’s a different kind of justice. Just take a look at the lawman at the end of any Cormac McCarthy novel.
Love-lies-bleeding is also an amaranth flower – a bushy, red thing that is used in a variety of dyes and some seasoning. It was also the plant you sent to your Victoria Era love who you missed desperately as it stood for hopeless love in the old language of flowers. I appreciate the interlacing between the turns of phase in our culture and the titles of pulp novels – one persistently borrowing or canonizing from the other.
