“Lesbian Chic”: Bound and Anne Heche in Wild Side (Erotic 90’s, Part 15)

You Must Remember This

Karina Longworth

Tv & Film

4.7 • 15.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2023

⏱️ 73 minutes

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Summary

At the beginning of the 90s, lesbians were a punchline for a male-gaze-oriented media, an easy target for expressing the anxiety that women might not need men after all. By the middle of the decade, women-loving-women had become the heroes of a number of neo-noir crime films, but the culture at large still rejected lesbianism when not intended to arouse men. While The Matrix has widely been reappraised as a trans allegory after the transitions of its directors the Wachowski sisters, their previous feature Bound was transparently queer, but its reception was complicated by the media’s perception of its makers. Bound was released just a few months after the burial of an extremely similar film called Wild Side. Barely seen on its initial release amidst studio recutting and the suicide of its director, today Wild Side plays as a heartbreaking and troubling example of what could have been for its star Anne Heche, who would soon after become one-half of the most famous lesbian couple in Hollywood – and suffer the career consequences. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Want to listen to you must remember this without ads?
0:03.3	Now you can when you subscribe to our new premium offerings on Apple Podcasts and Patreon.
0:10.1	Go to patreon.com slash Karina Longworth or open you must remember this on Apple Podcasts to learn more.
0:30.0	Welcome to another episode of You Must Remember This, the podcast dedicated to exploring the
0:53.1	secret and or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century.
1:00.2	I'm your host Karina Longworth and today we return to our season in progress, Arotic 90s.
1:23.9	You're a hooker. He talked about porn and graphic material.
1:34.1	So we could show the sex act all over the place.
1:42.2	I have seen one or two things in my life, but never, never anything like this.
1:48.5	In our last episode, we talked about showgirls. That episode ended with what Vengee Fair described as
1:59.6	a collective cringe within the industry about Arotic Films in the aftermath of that movie's
2:06.2	catastrophic box office failure. But it takes Hollywood a long time to turn a train around.
2:15.3	And for the rest of the decade, there were many attempts to salvage the commercial and creative
2:21.5	prospects of films dealing with sexuality. Today we're going to talk about two films from 1996,
2:30.1	which had virtually no impact on the US theatrical box office, although both had longer lives on home
2:36.8	video. This is, as I say at the top of every episode, a podcast about the secret and or
2:44.2	forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century. And these two films definitely fall under that
2:50.7	rubric. Both are crime films in the noir tradition in which two women fall in love. One of these films
2:59.7	was virtually secret in 1996, and nowadays is essentially forgotten. The other film has only
3:07.7	gained in reputation over the past 27 years, as the audience has become increasingly aware of
3:14.8	the secret history behind its making. Wildside is the final film directed by Donald Camel.
3:24.3	Co-director of the 60s cult classic Performance. Camel co-wrote Wildside with his wife,
	...

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