ABSTRACT
If the lesbian apartment in Barbet Shroeder’s Single White Female has both fi ctional and real-world coordinates, the Wachowski brothers’ Bound (1996) is located in an apartment whose reference points are purely cinematic. Shorn of the cityscape usually required of the mob movie, Bound unfolds in an apartment setting in which even the architectural fi xtures seem to derive chiefl y from other fi lms about sexual dissimulation and the spatial paranoia aroused in its vicinity: toilet bowl and plumbing from The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974); shower tub from Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960); and staircase from Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). All three of these cinematic antecedents set their heterosexual plots in hotels that, like the apartments under investigation in this study, confound the rules of sexual certainty while substituting spying and surveillance for privacy. The abundance of these fi lmic associations-and the generalizations about sexual identity they readily support-can, however, obscure the fact that Bound bears a strict formal allegiance to a specifi c fi lm in which homosexual plot and apartment setting are virtually inseparable. Celebrated as an experiment in uninterrupted shooting, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), in which the indisputable homosexuality of the young male protagonists is nowhere visible, provides the theoretical template for the Wachowski brothers’ manipulations of cinematic time and space as the most appropriate means for making lesbianism, a notoriously invisible phenomenon, legible on screen. While the elusiveness of female homosexuality is crucial to the fi lm’s narrative, Bound simultaneously requires lesbianism to function evidentially and to disclose itself within the visual fi eld. Under this representational double bind, the fi lm-like Hitchcock’s fi lm before it-frequently makes up for the fundamental indeterminacy of sexuality with cinematic technique.
