CRIMES OF PASSION
The Fantasy Business: Gendered Myths, Repression & Desire in Ken's masterpiece
Tonight (July 23rd), we are celebrating Volume 20 with a screening of Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion on 16mm at The Cinema Museum, presented in collaboration with Siren Screen. Print copies of the issue will be exclusively available at the event. Some tickets will be available on the door.
Siren Screen’s Georgia Hunter will be delivering an introduction to the film. Today, we’re sharing her essay on one of Ken’s most provocative and stunning works.
“This is the fantasy business, Reverent. You can have any truth you want.”
China Blue, Crimes of Passion
In Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion (1984), people alternate between hiding from themselves and hiding from each other. A neon-drenched-noir that mixes romantic psychodrama with seedy camp horror, at its heart it's an urban morality tale about sexual, emotional, and spiritual repression, in which everyone wears a mask. For Joanna Crane, a workaholic business woman, this is twofold: by day she’s a highflying fashion designer; by night she becomes China Blue, a sex worker who indulges the fantasies of men to meet her own deep need for connection. Played by the bold and deeply vulnerable Kathleen Turner, Joanna/China Blue embodies the emotional fallout of sexist myths that simultaneously punishes both personas for being too sexual and too detached. And, like any fable, the story explores this adult fairytale through a series of archetypes around sex, gender, and desire characteristic of Russell’s world of cinematic excess.
The Madonna-Whore complex, introduced by psychoanalyst Freud, places women into two binary roles: the pure, untouchable “Madonna,” or the degraded, sexualised “Whore.” This cultural myth not only distorts societal perceptions of women, but also self-perceptions too. Joanna is haunted by both polarising types, and moulds her life around the expectation men will box her into these categories. As Joanna, she is an emotionally guarded divorcee, now married to her fashion designer work. As China Blue, she dives headfirst into male fantasy, offering theatrical, camp-laced performances—from a seductive stewardess offering quaaludes to her male passenger, to a blasphemous nun taunting a hell-bent priest. Yet in both identities, connection remains elusive. She fears real intimacy, burdened by past betrayals despite her best efforts to fulfil the housewife role. Intimacy is instead found through her sexual fantasies, avoiding the risks of emotionally vulnerable, real relationships.
Russell critiques these archetypes from the film’s outset. In a striking opening scene, a frenzied street preacher (Anthony Perkins), a figure of religious repression and hysteria, accosts Blue under a literal man-made neon halo. He continuously condemns her while clearly coveting her, symbolizing the hypocrisy of moral gatekeepers. Meanwhile, in the sleepy suburbs, Bobby (John Laughlin), a disillusioned family man, is rejected by his distant wife, who has internalised the notion that performing sex is shameful. These moments expose how cultural pressures around female sexuality lead not to virtue, but to isolation and a lack of connection within heterosexual relationships. Connection and its lack becomes a central drive for each character, who fear dying alone far more than dying in a lukewarm connection.
It’s as a result of these fractured relationships that many of Blue’s clientele seek out her services, both physical and mental. Bobby seeks out Blue having discovered Joanna’s secret identity while tailing her on a one-off detective case he took to put food on the table. She’s “Cinderella, Cleopatra, Goldie Hawn, Eva Braun[,] Little Miss Muffet, Pocahontas”. She’s whoever the client wants her to be, offering an escape into theatrical sexual fantasy with flirty one-liners and costume-glad roleplays. “Does the truth even matter?” Blue asks, when the role she is meant to play is so dictated by whatever staged desire is to come. She invents pasts to monopolise on clients desires, blurring fact with fiction. She later reveals these fantasies are also her own escape from a reality where she’s not (and fears never will be again) romantically committed. Where the vulnerability of love is fearful, the falsities of performance become a shield—a safer alternative to true intimacy.
It’s not just when she’s moonlighting that Joanne seeks out an escape. She lives alone in a castle-like apartment, adopting masculine traits to survive a high-powered corporate environment. She fills her time with work to avoid the feeling of emptiness that no intimacy has left in her life. Her love of East Asian artwork and the belief it’s forbidden to sleep with someone who knows your secrets underscore her fear of being truly seen without a mask. The film is full of questions about identity, desire, and motive, constantly probing what people hide and why. Bobby asks his dissatisfied wife, “What do we have if we can’t be honest with each other?” Dishonesty builds walls between people, becomes an unsustainable survival strategy in a world where the truth is too scary to share.
Sexual expression as emotional repression can also be found in a far more distorted way in the morally deranged Reverend Peter Shayne. A walking contradiction, he stalks Blue under the delusional guise of saving her with a sadistic vibrator-turner-stake. But beneath his desire to exorcise the demons he associates with her sexual liberty is a projection of his own repressed desires. His gendered puritanism reflects a long tradition of misogyny cloaked in religious righteousness. Using religious extremism as armour, he plays along with Blue’s games in a bid for power rather than true connection.
In Crimes of Passion, lust isn’t always at odds with emotions, however. Bobby's unmet needs aren’t rooted in his being a sexual deviant; he wants a human union to “make love”. While questionably voyeuristic when amateur sleuthing, he doesn’t intentionally shame Joanna for her liberty. Only his carelessness to shower quickly after sex with the falsely “100% pure soap” makes Blue expect the worst. But Bobby isn’t judging her; he’s just never communicated openly about sex since it’s long been a taboo within his marriage.
Such taboos were a sign of the time; flopping upon its release, the film’s provocative sexual depictions led to its disrepute with critics and rejection by audiences. Russell repeatedly pushed the British censor’s boundaries in its policing heyday, but Crimes of Passion is not provocative for its own sake. (In fact, censored omissions supposedly make some scenes more racy.) By playfully opening with Blue dressed as an all-American Miss Liberty, the film frames sex work not oppressively, but with agency.
Russell neither romanticizes nor pathologizes sex work. Blue is not a victim, nor is she a symbol of liberation. She is a woman navigating her emotional trauma and societal scorn by creating a space, however artificial, where she’s in control. She calls her hotel working office “the safest place in the world”, a place where she is fully in charge. Carelessly using $10 bills to wrap up used gum, her wealth suggests this job is not born of desperation, as sex work often can be. Sex work is her chosen, if emotionally complicated, path. Her autonomy to choose clients and theatrical flair show that she’s not selling her body so much as performing a self-cultivated identity. While being one of the oldest professions, the job itself remains one of the most dangerous and unregulated due to the social taboos. The lack of legal protection, societal shame, and misogynistic clientele is a bigger problem than the morality of selling sex itself.
Filmed in the height of the Reagan administration, Russell unites the substantial similarities between how both sexes operate in relationships. A motif throughout the film is uncovering the truth between each character’s identity, motivations, and intentions. Everyone is searching for a truth they are simultaneously terrified of, one that can bring true connection. Joanna and Bobby reflect one another’s emotional paralysis: a boy scout who never grew up, and a love-spurned spinster. Bobby denies the truth about his dying marriage, watching TV with his wife while their marriage decays before their eyes (literally). Meanwhile, Joanna retreats into sexual fantasy, terrified to be seen truly will lead to rejection.
Even in the finale, mirrors are drawn between Joanna and the Rev in swapping clothing in a mutual showcase of two polaring expressions of loneliness. By contrast, Joanna and Bobby’s tentative union in the end offers no guarantees, but it does offer truth which results in a real connection. He admits he doesn’t know if it will last. She accepts him anyway. In a world of masks and double lives, this fragile honesty feels radical. Connection, Russell suggests, is not about certainty—it’s about the willingness to try, to face vulnerability without costume or script.
Buried under pulp aesthetics and seedy theatrics, Crimes of Passion is a love story. What it argues—sincerely, if chaotically—is that the material reality of love is terrifying, demanding vulnerability, risk, and a kind of honesty that fantasy cannot provide. A rough-handed romantic, Russell divines from the misconceptions fought between heterosexual gender wars by dismantling gendered myths and offering hard-won relationship advice.
Joanna kills the priest ultimately to protect Bobby—a gesture of love. Bobby, for his part, accepts her duality without judgment or projections onto female sexuality with mythic complexes. Their coupling is no happily ever after, but it’s honest without a degree of shame. When China Blue says, “You can have any truth you want,” it’s not declaring the absence of all meaning other than the physical escape—it’s an invocation of the heart’s desire. After peeling back the grimy layers, Crimes of Passion reveals something tender: a yearning for connection that survives even our most lurid disguises. It’s not always tasteful, but it’s a naked truth. And in a world of performance, that’s its most radical quality.
Crimes of Passion screens 23 July at The Cinema Museum, presented by Cinema Year Zero + Siren Screen.