Honey Don’t!

The second instalment in Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s planned ‘lesbian B-movie trilogy’ offers a queer perspective on the detective genre and on class and religion in contemporary America.

Private investigator Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) in Honey Don’t! (Focus Features).

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This post is part of the regular ‘One Take’ series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warning: Violence (in trailer); Sexual abuse; Narcotics; Domestic violence; Queerphobia.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, Honey Don’t! is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

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In Bakersfield, California, the death of barmaid Mia Novotny in an apparent car accident brings Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley), a private investigator who was about to take her on as a client, to the scene of the crash. Honey believes the death may have had something to do with Mia’s membership of the Four-Way Temple, an Evangelical local church run by the charismatic, womanising preacher Drew Devlin (Chris Evans). Reverend Drew abuses his position to sleep with his female congregants, while the Temple also functions as a front for his drug-dealing business, supplied by a French narcotics ring through their intermediary, Chère (Lera Abova), which he runs with the help of his dim-witted henchman Shuggie (Josh Pafchek).

Honey runs her detective agency with the help of her secretary Spider (Gabby Beans) and maintains friendly relations with the local police through her connections with homicide detective Marty Metakawich (Charlie Day), whose romantic attentions Honey, a lesbian, amusedly rebuffs. Instead, she begins dating MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), who works at the station’s information desk, and with whom she shares an immediate sexual chemistry. Honey’s private life is also marked by a close relationship with her sister Heidi (Kristen O’Connolly), whose eldest daughter, teenager Corinne (Talia Ryder) has an abusive boyfriend, Mickie (Alexander Carstoiu).

The Four-Way Temple attracts further adverse attention when one of Drew’s congregants and dealers, Hector (Jacnier), accidentally kills a customer who propositions him – not least as the dead man’s suspicious boyfriend, Mr Siegfried (Billy Eichner), is another of Honey’s clients. Yet Honey’s investigations into the church’s activities become all the more personal when Corinne herself mysteriously disappears.

World-building in Bakersfield

Honey Don’t! is the second instalment in Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s planned ‘lesbian B-movie trilogy’ of films centring lesbian characters within blackly comic takes on particular genres. It follows on from last year’s Drive-Away Dolls, in which Qualley also starred: a late 1990s-set road trip movie about two lesbian friends who, while driving from Philadelphia to Tallahassee, unwittingly become involved in a murder-theft intended to preserve a Republican senator’s reputation. As I noted in my piece on that film, Drive-Away Dolls depicts a world on the cusp of changes not yet quite arrived: the permeation of everyday life by the internet and mobile phones; and the wholesale polarisation of American politics. In this context, lesbianism is almost subcultural, a set of social as well as sexual practices that trade on specialist knowledge (which Qualley’s character, Jamie, prides herself on possessing) not set up directly against the mainstream, but nonetheless distinct from it.

To a large degree, the fact that Honey Don’t! is set in the present day makes for little difference in these regards. Aside from one or two moments, the film does not specifically connect the small-p politics of its story with the big-P Politics of the MAGA movement and its antagonists. There are relatively few technological or social details that clearly situate the film in the 2020s rather than the 1990s, and those that are present often deliberately riff on the anachronistic nature of some of its characters.

Yet Honey Don’t is very specifically located geographically. In 2008, Bakersfield voted by around three-to-one in favour of Proposition 8, eliminating the right of same-sex couples to marry in California. Last year, Kern County (of which it is the administrative seat) voted more narrowly 57-43% against Proposition 3, which amended the state’s constitution to remove a stipulation that marriage was between a man and a woman, as well as 59% for Donald Trump in the Presidential Election. Bakersfield’s ethnic composition has shifted substantially over the past three decades, from 21% Hispanic or Latino in 1990 to 53% in 2020; its non-Hispanic white population share declined from 66% to 29% over the same period.

Bakersfield in Honey Don’t! captures these political and demographic dynamics, and the implicit inequalities and respectability claims that accompany them, as well as the city’s low density, road-centric layout. Mia Novotny’s mother Kia (Kinna McInroe) pointedly tells Honey that her family are homeowners and do not ride the bus to get around Bakersfield. Corinne, who works in a diner, equally notably does commute by bus (when not being picked up by her abusive boyfriend, who lives in a trailer). We are also shown the ways in which class, ethnicity, masculinity, respectability and queerphobia all intersect, from Hector’s fatal humiliation at being offered sex by another man, to Honey bonding with MG over the latter’s experiences of being physically assaulted by her ‘war hero’ father.

The lesbian as private detective

As a genre exercise, Honey Don’t! both uses lesbianism as a means of subverting the private detective as a type, and the world of the private detective as a means for portraying lesbianism. Honey is an unsentimental pursuant of sexual pleasure: the first time we encounter her, she concludes a tryst by abandoning her lover in order to investigate Mia’s death; later she finds a kindred spirit in MG, with whom she shares a distaste for clingy partners. She is hard drinking and proud of the fact. She has an eye and memory for detail, and a working method that is old-fashioned but precise. Her relationship with Spider sends up the characteristic portrayal of the secretary as office wife, in that she is often little requiring of the heavily gendered support labour the latter figure typically provides.

Honey therefore both epitomises some of the masculinist qualities of the private detective and pokes fun at some of the shortcomings inherent in this chauvinism. Being a private detective and a lesbian does not locate her beyond the milieu of her class and gender, but it does provide her with independence from it. This is evident in her relationship with Heidi, whose multiple children Honey dotes upon, but whose willingness to keep having more she gently chastises her for. Honey, by contrast, never seems concerned with remuneration for her work, but her profession (and distance from heteronormativity) means she can financially support her sister, drive around Bakersfield in a convertible, and always dress impeccably. She exists in a world marked by men’s violence, but whereas this is routinely executed incompetently and impotently, she is capable of using force with skill and ingenuity when it is required.

Private detection, like lesbianism – as in Drive-Away Dolls – is subcultural. Honey works with the police in a transactional but unconfrontational manner, possessing her own line of work that neither infringes upon nor is infringed upon by theirs, but is also not entirely transparent to them; mirrored by Marty’s haplessly asking her out, despite her repeated rejoinder that ‘I like girls’. Private detection and lesbianism require knowledge that others lack and an ability to notice what others miss, whether the fetish-wear concealed with a vestal robe, or the verbal exchanges and clothing choices that mark someone’s sexuality and sexual availability. In a city of faux-respectability and facades, Honey is comparatively worldly, familiar with ethnically, socially, and sexually diverse sites and characters.

Evangelicalism, masculinity, and exploitation

Honey Don’t! captures the role of religion in Bakersfield through its depiction of the Four-Way Temple and its leader. Again, for context: Christian organisations of different denominational compositions have played a significant role in California’s anti-LGBTQ+ politics, with Evangelical churches particularly vocal in opposition to Proposition 3 last year. The growth in Bakersfield’s Latino population has been accompanied by Catholicism’s ascent as far-and-away its dominant religion, with the share of the metro area’s inhabitants who are Catholic hovering at or above the one-in-four mark since 2000. However, the share who are Evangelical Protestant – split between an array of denominations and non-denominational churches – has nonetheless remained steady at around the one-eighth mark during the same period. The Temple’s multiracial congregation, including the hispanophone Hector, represents Evangelical Christianity’s insurgent, adaptive appeal.

If Honey’s, MG’s, and Hector’s family histories are coded as Catholic in the retrograde gender politics they have grown up navigating, the Reverend Drew embodies a very different type of Christian masculinity. Handsome and immaculately coiffured, with his sculpted facial hair and smart-but-casual outfits, outside of his pulpit he exercises a relaxed but self-satisfied charm. Inside of it, flanked by large photographs of himself – signalling a vanity that veers towards encouraging worship of himself rather than God – he preaches sermons that are ludicrously vacuous in their oxymorons but insistent upon their devotion and commitment to God, the Church, and himself.

Reverend Drew charismatically blurs the line between theology and profanity, using grandiloquent spiritual metaphors to describe his grooming, propositioning, and sexual activity with his younger female congregants. He employs similar language in discussing the church’s narcotics acquisition and distribution with the male church members employed in that dimension of its activities. The Four-Way Temple is a parasitical and corrosive presence in Bakersfield, preying upon especially young, working-class women and men in search of purpose and community, in a manner encapsulated by its bus-side adverts. As a private investigator, a lesbian, and a disbeliever, Honey is immune to the Reverend’s transparent charms, but also alert to his church’s allure for her co-citizens. And in this way, through the perspective of its protagonist, Honey Don’t!’s queering of the detective genre provides its means for exploring the politico-religious dynamics of contemporary America.

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