I'll Watch Anything

Kathryn Bigelow first came to my attention during my teenage years, when her film Strange Days loomed large in my imagination.  It was one of my most viewed VHS tapes; I inhaled the film’s heady combination of millennial dread, racial tensions and problematic techlogical advances.

According to a recent article in the NY Times, this is the year for female directors.  I welcome any advancment in the gross lack of directorial jobs afforded to women, but the real tests for any mainstream American filmmaker are at the Box Office and the Oscars.  With the Academy’s history of awarding bronzed mea culpas to artists whose past classics were ignored, could this be the year that Kathryn Bigelow is nominated, and wins the Best Director Oscar for Hurt Locker?

She certainly deserves it; while Hurt Locker may not be the best film of the year, it certainly is the best directed.  Bigelow turns her attention back to the subject of her best films: expressions of hyper-masculinity and extreme risk-taking.  The film has been a critical and, considering its small budget, financial success.  Watching the Hurt Locker also enriched my understanding of Bigelow’s oeuvre.  In this article, I will examine her 1991 B-movie masterpiece Point Break through the lens of the thematically darker Hurt Locker.

Before I get to the meat and bones of those films, however, let me speak briefly to the aesthetics and content of modern action films.  From the films of John Woo and James Cameron down to d-movie disasters, action movies of the past thirty years share protagonists who act before they think.  This has mostly served as a means to an end, a way to set up spectacular special effects sequences; and within the moral universe of these films, is explained half-heartedly through character development.  The audience is told that, well, John Everyman would jump through forty glass windows in a row from a helicopter because his wife is dead.  Or Steve Hardnipple is the craziest motherfucker on the force, so its not unbelievable he would light himself on fire to save that orphan.

While this sort of narrative laziness has become a (sometimes celebrated) cliché of action movies, Bigelow manages to breath new life into a stale-seaming idea.  In her hands, these reckless heroes are both bigger-than-life, and frustratingly human.  They seek out extreme risk, whether jumping out of an airplane with no parachute, disarming roadside bombs with no bomb suit or surfing Typhoon waves to their deaths.   In noticeable opposition to most action film directors, however, Bigelow refuses to tacitly endorse their every move.  She presents these sequences spectacularly, without any sensing of holding back; at the same time, they do not exist in a moral vacuum.  She leaves her heroes, and the audience, on the hook.*

In Point Break, Bigelow opens the film showing the story’s two protagonists, Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) and Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) as near god-like vehicles of physical beauty, shooting targets in the pouring rain, surfing curling tubes of crushing water, opposite, separate but alike, a yin-yang (another cliché used to great effect).  Although separated by the law, Utah and Bodhi both thrive by being the alpha males within coded macho environments (the FBI and a gang of bank robbing surf bandits, respectively).

The films climatic sequence occurs near the end of the film when Utah jumps out of a plane in pursuit of Bodhi.  Not matter that Utah has no parachute, he is determined to catch the fleeing criminal, whom he tracks falling through mid-air. He grabs Bodhi, and holds gun to his head, commanding him to open the chute.  Bodhi, whose death wish is more pronounced than Utah, refuses, daring Utah to die with him.  Bodhi and Utah nearly have a Romeo and Juliet moment befitting their romance, but Utah drops his gun, and pulls Bodhi’s chute.

Now I think this action scene is note worthy for two reasons, aside from its inherent thrilling quality.  Firstly, it marks a point in American pop culture when extreme activities such as skydiving and bungee jumping here getting a lot of attention, and always seemed to be escalating.  Today someone was jumping off some thousand-    foot cliff with a cord, tomorrow that would have to be topped.  In some ways, the gang in Point Break live according to that philosophy.  They seek a bigger and bigger rush, until they find the one that brings their death.

By viewing Bodhi and Utah along side Bigelow’s soldier heroes of Hurt Locker, however, you start to a sense of a holistic archetype Bigelow is creating.  In her films, action heroes wreak havoc and destruction more out of compulsion than as an end to a greater mean.  Sgt William James, the loose canon of Hurt Locker, disregards proper procedure or safety while heroically disarming massive bombs.  He does so not out of a visible desire to save human life, but out of an acquired taste for the adrenaline rush of war.  His habit becomes so strong that he puts it before his unit’s safety, and his own life.

Viewed similarly, Bodhi and Utah seem like much more doomed figures.  They cannot fit into the regular fabric of society; and while Bigelow does seem to grant Bodhi’s gang (and the vampire gang in Near Dark) a distinct counter-cultural dignity, their violence never seems to be glamorized, or tacitly justified.  Bigelow and her DPs often switch to POV shots during robberies (at the end of Point Break, and notably in opening sequence of Strange Days).  This technique gives the audiences a fresh way to vicariously enjoy the rush of armed robbery.  But it also has an unnerving effect: its as if Bigelow is confronting the audience with their appetite for such criminal recreations.

It is no new idea that action heroes represent a cartoonish manifestation of old-fashioned male supremacy.  Between my machine gun virility and these 10 commandment pecs, there is no interpersonal or diplomatic issue that can’t be resolved, etc.  The idea I think Bigelow is bringing to the table is that the audience supports and replenishes this peculiar worldview and moral universes through their appetite for destruction.  The act of viewing, however passive, is an active support of the product.

So what’s worse, that the world is in the hands of great men bent on self and mutual destruction, or that we idolize these men?

*Clearly, some action films attempt to criticize their protagonists’ actions, but these treatments feel at best undercooked, and at worst just name-checked, to me.  Harry Callahan is a maniac in Dirty Harry; but Clint Easwood is so damn cool.  Sid from Sin City is a killing machine, but he saves the damsel in distress like 1-D Lancelot.

The hacks of today (Ratner, Bruckheimer, Bay, etc) want the best of both worlds, the visual and moral edginess of The Searchers or Taxi Driver, with without context or moral implication.  Characters can be bad or good or good to be bad or being bad to be good, or just a constantly shape shifting truck, it doesn’t matter.  Shit blows up, guaranteed.  They don’t want to alarm us with our own blood, so they have to bury the characters souls in a CGI grave in a universe far, far away, where life is meaningless because you saved at the previous level.

This entry was posted on September 12, 2009 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Timothy Parfitt with tags Hurt Locker, Katheryn Bigelow, New Classic, Point Break, Timothy Parfitt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.