The BDE of “Honey Don’t”

In the fun and sexy second installation of their "lesbian B-movie" trilogy, filmmakers Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke subvert pulpy noir tropes to reveal the narrative convention's reliance on the phallus.

Toward the end of the Honey Don’t — the new film by Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke — the title character Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) is sitting at a stoplight in Bakersfield, California, in her battered, boat-size vintage turquoise Chevrolet convertible, when a woman (Lera Abova) pulls up on a motorcycle beside her. Honey looks over at the woman, the woman returns her gaze. They’re cruising each other, and innuendo-laden negotiations ensue (I will offer no further spoilers).

For genre filmgoers, especially those who watch noir or James Bond movies, it’s a familiar image: a swaggering, cool protagonist with a badass car, a piercing, seductive gaze, and a sex appeal that makes them irresistible to hot women. Usually these qualities are assigned to male characters. But in Coen and Cooke’s world, the gender markers are subverted, and the masculine cool gets assigned to more or less butch lesbians.     

Honey Don’t is the second installation in Coen and Cooke’s “lesbian B-movie trilogy.” Ethan and his brother, Joel, the award-winning filmmakers of the movies Raising Arizona, Fargo, and No Country for Old Men, often channeled and riffed on pulp genres like noir, Westerns, and heists. But now that Ethan has begun collaborating with his wife, Tricia, who identifies as queer and who edited many of the Coen brothers’ classics, the couple are recasting pulp tropes to focus on lesbian protagonists. In so doing, they reveal just how much pulp fiction relies on masculinity to shape the narrative                                   

Consider the first in their trilogy, last year’s Drive-Away Dolls, a road trip heist movie set in 1999. Two lesbian friends — devil-may-care philanderer Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and nerdy, repressed Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) — drive to Tallahassee. Through a series of mixups, they end up in possession of a dildo made from a cast of conservative Senator Gary Channel’s penis. Matt Damon is cast as the senator who is desperate to reacquire the phallus and ward off the inevitable scandal.

The joke here is glorious in its obviousness: The entire action of the film is driven by a penis. Only the penis isn’t attached to any one guy. It’s detachable, and can be held and used by anyone. Jamie and Marian are the protagonists of the film in no small part because they’ve run off with the erotic masculine object, which drives both suspenseful and erotic action. One of the funniest scenes in a very funny movie involves a tryst in the shower in which Marian breathlessly tells Jamie that she wants to make love with the senator’s detached member. (The Psycho nod is undoubtedly intentional.)

The influential film theorist Laura Mulvey, who famously wrote about masculinity in mainstream film in her classic 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” introduced the idea of the “male gaze.” (Not coincidentally, Cooke has specifically said she wants to use her films to “reclaim genre from the straight male gaze.”) Most discussions of the male gaze focus on objectifying women; Mulvey says that “there are circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure,” and in movies that pleasure is often specifically the pleasure of looking at attractive female bodies.

But Mulvey’s original essay focused equally on how the male gaze is directed at men: Men gaze at and identify with the male protagonist, who serves as a “screen surrogate.” As Mulvey writes, the “power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence.” In other words, the male viewer gets erotic pleasure from identifying with the man onscreen, be he James Bond or Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, as he does cool male things, including looking, perhaps even leering at women. 

Honey Don’t is not quite as broadly camp as Drive-Away Dolls, but as a noir, it’s still having a lot of fun shuffling masculinities. Honey is both the femme fatale — the dangerous, masculinized, sexually incontinent, emotionally distant, calculating woman who castrates and destroys men — and the cool, competent detective who loses their cool (and their other parts) to that femme fatale (played here by Aubrey Plaza as police officer “MG Falcone”). 

Honey comes closest to losing her cool to the femme fatale on her first date with MG. As the two are sitting at a bar discussing the virtues of knitting vs. crochet, MG’s hand slips out of frame, lower, lower, and up under Honey’s dress, as MG thrusts and Honey becomes more and more breathless. Masculine power, competence, and drive are embodied here by fingers whose skill, it is suggested, derive from stereotypically feminine hobbies. The scene brings to mind a similar manual seduction scene in the Wachowski sisters’ wonderful film Bound (1996), one of Honey Don’t’s few mainstream lesbian noir predecessors. 

Through Coen and Cooke’s lens, part of the masculine narrative pleasure of cinema is by making it available to women: It isn’t just men who can identify with the competent, cool, swaggering protagonist. Women can also enjoy the pleasures of looking at women, as we see in a flashback sequence in Drive-Away Dolls in which a young Geraldine leaps on a trampoline to peer over the fence to steal a glance at her sexy female neighbor. Narrative cinema may, per Laura Mulvey, bolster and even help create masculine identity and sexuality. But the person picking up that masculine identity and sexuality doesn’t have to be a man. If we’re passing around the senator’s penis, anyone can flex their knitting fingers and grab hold.

The two films also, though, suggest that Mulvey’s gaze was always a good bit more queer than Hollywood necessarily intended. An explicitly lesbian mainstream genre film in which women identify with and gaze at women can’t help but remind you that in all those heterosexual mainstream genre films, men are identifying with and gazing at all those good-looking guys, from Eastwood to Clooney. Mulvey insightfully notes that both identification and desire are erotic. Cooke and Coen demonstrate that the two overlap with and blur into each other. Masculinity in film is a narrative position which anyone of any gender can occupy, just as anyone can gaze at the screen and desire a range of gendered bodies.

Many critics and filmmakers have built on, questioned, revised, and pushed back against  Mulvey’s formulation (you could argue that this is Brian De Palma’s whole career). But lesbian creators have had limited opportunities to access the capital needed to fund mainstream genre films. Which is part of why Cooke and Coen’s two films (so far) mess with gaze and identification and masculinity with such insouciant glee.

Cooke and Coen are already at work on the final film in their trilogy, Go Beavers, about a female crew team who end up battling nature, à la Deliverance. Hopefully, the collaboration doesn’t end with just three films. There are a lot of straight guys who have made films about how sexy guys are when they go off and have adventures and get the girl. We need more and different perspectives to remind us that old stories gain new life when you gaze at them from another angle, not least of all because they remind you that other people were watching all along.