Bound understands the oldest advantage women have in a crime story: a bad man’s certainty that he has already measured them.
Corky is an ex-con with grease under her nails. Violet is the gangster’s girlfriend in a tight dress. Every man in the movie thinks he knows which one is dangerous and which one belongs to him. He is wrong twice.
The movie does not ask their desire to prove anything. It is not a lesson, a detour or a tasteful badge pinned to the movie. It is the beginning of trust, and trust is the mechanism of the robbery. Sex does not interrupt the plot. Sex changes who will risk what for whom.
The women keep the story
Plenty of thrillers borrow lesbian desire for heat and hand the story back to a man. Bound refuses. Corky and Violet make the plan, revise it when it breaks, survive the violence and keep the money. The mob supplies danger. The women supply intelligence.
That distinction matters. Gina Gershon has said she saw Corky as the hero: she gets the girl, the car and the victory. The film also brought in writer and sex educator Susie Bright as a consultant years before intimacy coordination became standard practice. Accuracy was not a garnish. It was part of the construction.
No punishment for appetite
The radical ending is not that two women kiss. It is that they drive away. Queer women have been murdered, institutionalized, abandoned or corrected at the end of stories for generations. Bound knows the history and chooses escape.
This is what queer crime can do when it is not frightened of its own women. Give them appetite. Give them bad judgment. Give them tools. Let desire make the danger worse. Then let them use what everybody underestimated.
That is not representation. That is two women driving away with the keys.