As long as sex work has existed—and it is, they say, the oldest profession—so has the argument that the sex is the least of it.
It makes sense: barring a calamity like two broken wrists, the basic DIY version of the product comes free. So what’s truly on sale is something else. Intimacy. Company. Flattery. Therapy.
Ken Russell’s erotic thriller Crimes of Passion zeroes in one specific angle: fantasy. People want to live out the story in their head and do it consequence-free. Everyone’s in on this exchange, especially Kathleen Turner’s Joanna, a calm and collected fashion designer who walks the streets at night as China Blue. Costumed and bewigged, she turns every encounter into a deliberately unreal performance (she’s a nun, she’s a beauty queen, she’s whatever you ask); Russell and cinematographer Dick Bush amplify this, staging China Blue’s work in a succession of boxy, neon, jewel-toned theaters in the round. It’s beautifully tacky and glorious to behold, like half the scenes are painted on black velvet. The actors contort their faces, declaim their lines, and arrange themselves into tableaux vivants; they’re professionals playing amateurs, and they know amateurs always overdo it.
This heightened reality—sometimes comic, sometimes grotesque—is what the customers are here for, and China Blue is the mistress of ceremonies. Asking any questions about pesky little issues like, say, this rent-by-the-hour motel room’s dentist’s chair would only spoil the fun.
Meanwhile, moonlighting PI Bobby Grady (John Laughlin), on the other hand, lives in a world that’s all spoiled fun, like he’s in the flubbed punchline of every tired take-my-wife-please joke at once. He signed up for married life with the woman he loved, but it’s all curdled. The lack of sex is only the most noticeable symptom of how his wife has stopped enjoying him—if, indeed, she ever did. Grady’s juvenile sense of play—his suburban party trick involves pretending to be a literal penis—may have only ever been the price she resigned herself to paying for domestic stability.
Bobby, on the other hand, wants it all, and when he realizes that Joanna and China Blue are one in the same, he sees a way to have it. It’s love, but it’s also economics: she’s two for the price of one.1
Crimes of Passion is, understandably, way more interested in the two faces of Joanna than the one quite familiar face of Bobby. He may be the double-life-living sportswear designer’s opposite number, but her alter ego China Blue meets her warped match in Anthony Perkins’s frantic, desperate Reverend Shayne.
That casting is another excuse for the film to indulge in the kind of layered, stylized artificiality it loves. Once again, we have Anthony Perkins peeping through a hole in a motel wall, eaten alive by murderous craving; once again, he’s going to don a wig for a disorienting horror film climax. But there’s the sense that the good Reverend is aware of this, that he knows the part he’s playing as well as China Blue knows hers. Their relationship is toxic and marked by terror, but there’s a perverse intimacy to it that feels like it’s drawn straight from its actors: two stars squaring up against each other, chewing on the same material, critiquing the story even as they embody it.
And while the movie’s breathing fresh, lurid life into cliches, there’s an acting one it ultimately revitalizes here too. The old question: What’s my motivation? You can tell where the elemental power here lies by who implicitly asks it and who implicitly answers. The film’s in-story director sets the scene and calls cut.
Crimes of Passion is streaming on Kanopy and Tubi.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
Streaming Shuffle
You make your royal bed, and you lie in it.
Anthologized
Alone in vast space and timeless infinity: one man in a ghost town.
Streaming Shuffle
A beautiful slice-of-life film that helped make a career.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Justified, Season Five, Episode Eleven, “The Toll”
“I believe the time has come to make some changes.”
This is one of the more Shieldian episodes, starting with an extreme action and having that billow out; it’s also got a few subplots unrelated to Art getting fucking shot – great fakeout where we think Raylan’s girl o’ the season got it – but otherwise it feels so much more tightly focused than this show generally is. Raylan finds, with his back against the wall and the stakes higher than they’ve ever been, that he’s a lawman. Sometimes it seems like there’s nothing better for a virtuous person to have their back against a wall; a shitty, impulsive asshole finds they’re a shitty impulsive asshole, but a rational, intelligent person is reminded of what they’re supposed to be doing.
Meanwhile, Boyd seems to have become purified at this point, being nothing but his rational (though extreme) action, and the Goggins shedding every bit of pretense (though not any of his style, because Boyd is inherently stylish). Ava is going through a similar, though obviously more horrifying variant of that.
Biggest Laugh: “If I admit to hitting him, could I call it child abuse and get you to take custody of him?”
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: “I guess this hotel takes that non-smoking policy pretty seriously, Mr Duffy.”
Top Ownage: Boyd getting the Walter White treatment on Picker.
Bob’s Burgers, Somewhere around season 5
One thing that frustrates me a bit about this show is that I actually would enjoy watching these characters develop forward in a meaningful way; Dave Shutton has remarked that seventeen seasons later, Tina will still be pining for Jimmy Jr, but I actually would like to see her develop forward in a way impossible with the demands of a situation comedy. This is actually distinct from its predecessor and main influence The Simpsons, where I don’t feel the drive to see, like, Lisa or Bart grow up the way I’d love to see Tina and Gene and Louise grow up.
Will never forget the Picker scene and laughing my fucking ass off. “I am GOOD at blowing shit up!”
Something that really stuck with me about Home Movies – who are from some of the same people as Bob’s Burgers – is a sense of low-key momentum even if only at the end. Brendan is going to grow up and part of that process is his loss of the camera. He’ll have to get another tool or vocation and that’s part of the journey. (Meanwhile as I’ve semi-facetiously griped, I don’t want to watch 100 episodes of Tina pining after Jimmy Jr.)
Thought I’d watch this week’s Twilight Zone episode but apparently my brain is completely gone as I took the wrong disc out of the box, didn’t notice that I was scrolling past unfamiliar episodes in the menu, and watched completely the wrong one. How will I ever keep up with the overarching storyline now!? Anyway I ended up with Mr. Bevis which wasn’t a particularly good episode I don’t think – felt like a bit of a knock-off It’s a Wonderful Knife without the emotional resonance – although still quite fun. I might watch it again when we actually reach it, in like seven months time.
Comedy episodes can be the bane of The Twilight Zone, but I’ll confess I find parts of “Mr. Bevis” endearing. Probably still on the show’s bottom tier for me, but towards the top of the bottom, if that makes sense. (To be fair, there’s only one episode I actively resent existing.)
I found it quite charming, even if it doesn’t amount to much. I still preferred it to, honestly, most of the AHP episodes – this show just seems to be more on my wavelength.
There’s generally a lot more there there with TZ, I think: even when the episode lacks substance, as “Mr. Bevis” does, there tends to be humanity or humor or meaning. I’m happy to be back to it and really glad you’re enjoying it–it’s in my top five shows of all time.
Scene of the Crime (1949) – LA homicide detective Van Johnson investigates the death of a colleague who seems to have been on the take. Before long, he goes up against a gang unwisely ripping off the Mob’s bookies, strives to clear his friend’s name, and tries to save his marriage. Yesterday I commented how “cops with troubled marriages” is sort of a cliche. Well, it definitely isn’t new. Reasonably well directed by Roy Rowland with a sometimes sharp script by Charles Schnee, this never quite takes off but it’s fairly entertaining with a solid cast – Arlene Dahl as Johnson’s wife, Gloria DeHaven as a moll, and Norman Lloyd as a sleazy and obnoxious informant – and a good score from young Andre Previn. Some bill this as noir, but while it is brutal enough – a second cop dies in the line of duty – it’s not quite there, best called a police procuedural of the sort that would eventually take over American TV.
Elementary, “The Marchioness” – Mycroft has come to NYC to open a new restaurant, Diogenes, but also to help his former fiancee. Who is both the cause of the falling out between the brothers Holmes and now the former wife of a marquess and involved in horse breeding. And she is in over her head with drug dealers and a scam to pretend her stud, Silver Blaze, is still alive. There are a few references and connections to the Holmes story “Silver Blaze” – I did say yesterday it would come back – but for the most part, this is an original story. A pretty good one if a bit too twisty. Of more interest are the affairs between the brothers, and between Mycroft and Joan, who it turns out slept together in London. It’s a bit soap opera-ish, even though there is (and never will be) any sexual or romantic connection between Sherlock and Joan. But it helps that Rhys Ifan and Jonny Lee Miller play well off each other. Olivia d’Abo plays the titular marchioness.
Pluribus S1E2 – The alien situation deepens as Carol meets five (of 12) people not infected and acts as American and angry as possible (leading to the kind of disastrous consequences that happen in real life when Americans lose their shit, usually on a larger scale). She’s just lost her wife and is not exactly in a good place but the comparison to her country is apt. Hilariously, the uninfected ask her why, exactly, should they do anything about the Pluribi*? The Mauritanian having the most hedonistic fun with the situation – including a row of beautiful Plubiri women – observes that now the prisons are empty, the color of your skin no longer matters, and you don’t need to work or even DO anything, really. The others are either in denial – Lakshmi will not grasp that this child isn’t EXACTLY her son – or are from more collectivist societies where they don’t feel the constant urge for individual expression. I don’t want to map a direct metaphor onto the show, but I couldn’t stop thinking of tech culture: seemingly benevolent, placid, willing to do anything for you (within limits), and easily upset if you tell them to fuck off.
More worldbuilding: The Pluribi are radical pacifists similar to Jain philosophy but are ambivalent about how they eat.
*the term my brother in law uses for the aliens.
The rest of DTF St. Louis
With thanks again to Bridgett for pointing me towards this! This is novelistic in a good way: tonally varied (its defining characteristics are probably its warmth and sadness, but it gets in necessary humor and astringency, too), and human. (To steal from Jane Smiley’s novel wheel, as I often do, I’d say it’s biography, joke, gossip, and confession.) It’s very wrenching in the last few episodes to see exactly how Floyd will end up where he does, as every hope falls through, and all of his and Clark’s last-ditch attempts to make him feel desirable again wind up only only ratcheting up his self-hatred–and then the death blow comes from a different angle, one he wasn’t even prepared for. Brutal stuff.
Lots of great human detail on the sidelines here, from the diligent fifteen-year-old umpire (the joke could simply be that he has a crush on Linda Cardellini’s Carol, and indeed who could blame him, but he also cares about her devotion and diligence and compassion and has bothered to observe all of it–he may see her more than anyone else does, in fact) to Peter Sarsgaard’s Modern Love, who’s so sincerely well-adjusted and–after a long time–comfortable with who he is and what he wants that he becomes almost hypnotic, a kind of unintentional guru to almost everyone he meets.
Sarsgaard is so often the most interesting part of some meh or bad movies (the moment in Black Mass where his very stupid informant screams “OHHHH, I’M A FUCKING DEAD MAN” elevates the scene from old hat crime cliche to genuine terror).
Really liked this movie – as with most Russell films I’ve seen (don’t love Tommy) – and how it plays with economics and intimacy; Bobby is genuinely hurt that his wife doesn’t just not like sex, it’s that she’s lied about it for years when the act really means something to him. China in contrast relishes playing a role and as you say this is an open secret.
Yes, that Bobby scene is great. I’m a bit harsh on him in this because I found Joanna’s material much more interesting on the whole, but the earnestness he brings to bear when he’s trying to explain to his wife that he really did see sex with her as being a physical act of love is beautiful and bruised and sweet.