Ten minutes into Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion (1984), blunt-bob-wigged lady of the night China Blue (Kathleen Turner) steps into her darkened crash pad and is quickly grabbed, her screams muffled by a hand over her mouth, and appears to be violently raped. This is all a bait-and-switch, though; after his final thrust, the assailant—really a john who has prearranged the scene with China—implores, “I didn’t hurt you, did I?” China, who adopts a tough, gum-popping New Yorker persona for this client, is clearly capable of delivering a range of fantasies. We’ve already seen her as “Miss Liberty,” a Southern belle in a pageant sash whose oral skills as a flautist translate elsewhere, and later she’ll play both dominatrix and nun.
In a stroke of the absurd industriousness often characteristic of high-class sex worker narratives, China’s after-hours work accompanies a lucrative day job as a fashion designer. This is how China crosses paths with Bobby (John Laughlin), a rather flaccid suburban electronics salesman with his own moonlight career as a PI investigating corporate espionage. He soon discovers that China’s (Joanna by day) secret is not selling patterns to competitors, as her boss suspected.
Bobby tracks China to the red-light strip where she, conveniently, both hooks and rents a room. The setting is a real block of Hollywood Boulevard, but with the flat, hand-painted signage of its peep-shows and dirty movie theaters, it looks more like a backlot—or, perhaps, a low-budget, sex-themed amusement park. Sex in Crimes of Passion has a cartoonish quality. While Bobby turns his video camera on China on his first night of surveillance, another streetwalker tries an absurd pickup line: “How about a shot of the Grand Canyon?” and lifts her skirt to flash him. And during China’s encounters, still images of classic erotic art—Aubrey Beardsley prints, Japanese woodcuts—flash onscreen, pushing sex once again into the realm of the two-dimensional.
Lurking throughout Crimes of Passion is the pseudo-reverend Peter Shayne (a twitchy, Bates-ish Anthony Perkins), a street preacher who proposes to “save” China while he sniffs poppers in peep shows and fantasizes about murdering go-go dancers. Along with his bible, he carries a cache of absurd sex toys, among them a knife-sharp vibrating dildo that literalizes his displaced desire for annihilative penetration. Sex, even its iterations that play above-the-board with violence, is essentially harmless in the Russellian imagination. What really violates is repression.
Crimes of Passion screens tonight, September 22, at Nitehawk Williamsburg as part of the series “Kathleen Turner.”
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