Romance and the Lesbian Couple: Heavenly Creatures

Abstract

This book has so far examined three of the most widespread iterations of the violent woman as she appears in cinema: the psychologically disturbed hysteric, the monstrous woman as a scientific curiosity and the sexualised female killer. A fourth common figure of violent femininity is the murderous lesbian, a type that has many different manifestations in popular cinema. She appears as the esoteric vampire in films like The Vampire Lovers (Roy Ward Baker, 1970) and The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983); a ruthless antagonist in films such as Cleopatra Jones (Jack Starrett, 1973) and Foxy Brown (Jack Hill, 1974); and a seductress with Sapphic tendencies in Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) and Side Effects (Steven Soderbergh, 2013). Like the hysteric and the monstrous animal-woman, the cultural aetiology of the violent lesbian archetype can be traced to the way women’s violence is connected to feminine sexual dysfunction. As Lynda Hart writes, ‘Lesbians in mainstream representations have almost always been depicted as predatory, dangerous, and pathological’ (1994: vii), whereas Andrea Weiss argues that ‘the most persistent lesbian image in the history of the cinema’ is that of the lesbian vampire, a figure who encapsulates the ‘pathologizing’ of women’s same-sex relationships because of the vampire’s association with infectious disease (1992: 84, 87).