The Hug Box: Knife + Heart (Yann Gonzalez, 2019)

Once again, you're getting an early newsletter for a purpose: The final order cut-off for Be Not Afraid #2, my horror comic series with Lisandro Estherren, is today, June 9. You can see a preview of it here and read some stunningly kind reviews of the first issue. After that, please go ask your comic shop to save you a copy.

Also: My non-fiction book DILF: Did I Leave Feminism is due out October 14. You can pre-order that anywhere you get books, including Bookshop.org.

Heaven, the Talking Heads told us, is a place where nothing ever happens. Knife + Heart expands on that theory by offering that gay porn might be the same thing. 

Knife + Heart was pitched to me as a “queer giallo homage,” which is not a phrase to make the heart sing: A highly artificial, art-house reconstruction of an already highly artificial, arty genre stands to be (if you’ll pardon the word) masturbatory. Still, I think Knife + Heart beats the charges — somewhere in the middle of the movie you become painfully aware that it has a lot to say. That it says these things in a campy and tasteless manner is part of the point. 

We open in the back of a club, where a twink is raped to death by a dildo with a knife in it. Okay, fine! We open a little over five minutes beforehand, on flickering golden frames of gay porn, starring the twink in question. There’s quite a lot of explicit gay sex, in this movie, before you ever see the explicit gay murder, which (given that the murder happens exactly six minutes and forty seconds into the movie) is impressive. 

The murder itself is gory and upsetting enough to serve as a litmus test for the rest of the movie — the actual violence is avoided with Psycho-style cuts around the impact, but if you don’t enjoy seeing queer characters brutalized and brutally punished for their sexuality, Knife + Heart is probably not for you. (Frankly, given the news, I’d forgive anyone for needing to opt out.) The real message of the movie, though, is in how the scene keeps cutting in frames of porn between knife blows: Bliss, horror, ease, struggle, art, life. 

As the movie evolves, we realize that this killer is stalking a troupe of queer pornographers, hanging out around the set of their latest movie and picking off the cast members one by one. They respond, naturally, by making a porn parody of their own imminent murders, so that the movie is always switching back and forth between erotic and horrific versions of the same story. (Yes, the movie does have trans characters — I honestly cannot say how well or ill they are portrayed, since “sensitivity” or “good representation” are explicitly not the benchmarks for which Knife + Heart aims.)

The mystery, however, is less important than the fact that these characters are only safe or happy when they’re fucking on camera. Porn is a kind of queer utopia — a place where sex just happens, frictionlessly and effortlessly and without consequences — precisely because it leaves out all the trauma inherent in queer reality.