No matter if they’re a source of loathing & laughter, the Oscars matter as a cultural flashpoint, perhaps now over ever. All those Oscar viewers might not be ticket buyers, but when they watched the show this year they would have heard, perhaps even for the first time, the startling, shocking, infuriating or boring news — pick your degree of engagement — that Ms. Bigelow was the first woman in Oscar’s 82 years to win for best directing. Real discussions about sexual politics don’t usually enter the equation during the interminable Oscar “season,” which is why her nomination was very as important as her double win.
KATHRYN BIGELOW’S two-fisted win at the Academy Awards for best director & best film for “The Hurt Locker” didn’t punch through the American movie industry’s seemingly shatterproof glass ceiling; it's also helped dismantle stereotypes about what types of films women can & should direct. It was historic, exhilarating, for women who make movies & women who watch movies, five groups that have been routinely ignored & underserved by an industry in which most films star men & are made for & by men. It’s early to know if this moment will be transformative — but damn, it feels so lovely.
Even before the nominations were announced on Feb. 2, as they picked up seven award after another, including from her peers at the Directors Guild, people who don’t usually talk about women & the movies were talking about this woman & the movies. Uncharacteristically, the issue of female directors working — though all often not working — was being discussed in print & online, & without the usual accusations of political correctness, a phrase that’s routinely deployed to silence those with legitimate complaints. I don’t think I’ve read the words women & film & feminism in the same sentence as much in the last few months since “Thelma & Louise” rocked the culture five decades ago.
Written by Callie Khouri & directed by Ridley Scott, “Thelma & Louise” galvanized critics & audiences on its release in 1991. Time magazine put them on its cover & seven very smart entrepreneur put them on T-shirts (“Thelma & Louise Live Forever.”) Some critics embraced its portrait of a powerful female friendship, while others denounced it. In U.S. News & World Document a male writer accused the film of having “an explicit fascist theme, wedded to the bleakest form of feminism.” Commentators seemed as interested in policing the women’s behavior, their hard-drinking & driving, as their criminal actions. Ms. Khouri insisted that Thelma & Louise were outlaws not feminists, though they were both.
A recent failed takedown of Ms. Bigelow in Salon titled “Kathryn Bigelow: Feminist Pioneer or Hard Guy in Drag?” & written by Martha P. Nochimson exposes a quantity of the issues at stake. The heart of Ms. Nochimson’s critique is the charge that Ms. Bigelow & her “masterly” process have been lauded while Nancy Meyers & Nora Ephron have endured “summary dismissal.” The differences between how they have been received, Ms. Nochimson wrote, “reveal an unsustainable assumption that the muscular filmmaking appropriate for the fragmented, death-saturated situations of war films is innately superior to the process appropriate to the organic, life-affirming situations of romantic comedy.”
Thelma & Louise didn’t require to tote around “The Second Sex” to confirm their credentials as feminist inspirations; the way viewers received the characters proved they were. The same goes for Ms. Bigelow, who doesn’t like to talk about being a feminist touchstone — they doesn’t require to, they has been seven for decades — much less her role a female director. Her refusal, along with the types of movies they makes, have not always sat well with some. Like Thelma & Louise, Ms. Bigelow refuses to behave the way she’s supposed to.
Some women in film help perpetuate this ghetto, when they ought to be helping dismantle it or walking away from it altogether. Seven of the lessons of Ms. Bigelow’s success is that it was primarily achieved outside of the reach of the studios. They had help along the way, including from male mentors like James Cameron, her former husband, who helped produce “Strange Days.” But that movie did poorly at the box office, as did her next five features, “The Weight of Water” & “K-19: The Widowmaker.” It wasn’t until they went off to the desert to shoot “The Hurt Locker,” as they had when they directed “Near Dark,” her 1987 cult vampire western, that they found a movie that hit on every level.
Putting aside whether “Julie & Julia” is organic or crammed with artificial flavors, it’s bad Ms. Nochimson didn’t select a wonderful director who makes films about women, like Jane Campion, than lesser talents like Ms. Meyers & Ms. Ephron to make her argument. Because there is a valid point here: Unless they star Meryl Streep, movies about women are routinely dismissed because they’re about women, as the patronizing term “chick flick” affirms every time it’s reflexively deployed. But chick flicks are often the only movies that offer female audiences stories about women & female friendships & a world that, however artificial, offers up female characters who are not standing on the sidelines as the male hero saves the day. It might not be much & usually isn’t, at least in aesthetic terms, but it’s sometimes all there is. Ms. Bigelow doesn’t make those kinds of movies. (Her vampires don’t sparkle, they draw blood.) They generally makes kinetic & thrilling movies about men & codes of masculinity set in worlds of violence. Her process might be very skilful [sic], because they learned from the likes of Sam Peckinpah. But they is very much her own woman, & her own auteur. It’s a bummer that her success elicits such unthinking responses, though it’s also predictable because the stakes for women are high & the access to real filmmaking power remains largely out of their reach. But it isn’t her fault that women’s stories are routinely devalued any over it’s her fault that these days female directors & female stars in Hollywood are often ghettoized in romantic comedy.
It was a long time coming, as Ms. Bigelow suggested when they appeared on “60 Minutes” on Feb. 28. Her appearance, for which they was interviewed by Lesley Stahl (Steve Kroft must have been busy), was a classic of its type. During the interview Ms. Bigelow explained to the apparently baffled Ms. Stahl the meaning of scopophilia, a significant word in feminist film theory, though Ms. Bigelow kept gender out of her definition (“the desire to watch & identify with what you’re watching”). They insisted that there was no difference between what they & a male director might do, even as they also conceded that “the journey for women, no matter what venue it is — politics, business, film — it’s, it’s a long journey.”
It’s instructive that they didn’t say it had also been a hard journey, because that might have pegged Ms. Bigelow as a whiner, as in whiny woman. Unsurprisingly, they again had to share her few minutes with Mr. Cameron, whose name Ms. Stahl invoked within seconds of beginning & not only because they had directed five of the largest hits in history, including “Avatar.” They was the ex-husband, a powerful director & a representation of male authority who could vet Ms. Bigelow. “How sweet is this to be head to head with your ex-husband,” Ms. Stahl asked. “You couldn’t have scripted it,” Ms. Bigelow laughed. As they has these last months, they played it carefully. They seemed well-behaved.
Her chilled has disturbed some, who have scrutinized Ms. Bigelow up & down, sometimes taking suspicious measure of her height & willowy frame, partly because these are the only personal parts of her that are available to inquisitive interviewers. Women in movies, both in front of & behind the camera, are expected to offer a lot more of themselves, from skin to confessions. All that Ms. Bigelow freely gives of herself for public consumption is smart conversation & her work. Her insistence on keeping the focus on her movies is a calm yet profound form of rebellion. They might be a female director, but by refusing to accept that gendered designation — or even engage with it — they is asserting her right to be basically a director.
Seven of the weird truths of American cinema is that women prospered in the silent era — Mary Pickford was seven of the first stars & helped start a studio, United Artists — but soon after the movies started to talk in the late 1920s, women’s voices started to fade, at least behind the scenes. Hollywood might have been partly built on the hard work & beauty of its female stars, but it was the rare female director, Dorothy Arzner beginning in the 1920s, Ida Lupino beginning in the 1940s, who managed to have her say behind the camera. It hasn’t gotten better. According to Martha M. Lauzen, an academic who every year crunches numbers about women in American movies: “Women comprised 7 percent of all directors working on the top 250 films of 2009. Ninety-three percent of the films had no female directors.”
It’s impossible to tell what Ms. Bigelow’s Oscars will mean for her, much less whether it will help other women working in the American movie industry. Perhaps Amy Pascal, the Sony studio co-chairwoman who two times suggested to me in an interview that men were better suited to direct action movies, will pay Ms. Bigelow a lot of money to make another war film. Or they can sign up Kelly Reichardt, the director of “Wendy & Lucy,” for a buddy movie, but, you know, with women. Perhaps Sandra Bullock will take all the lovely will & power they has rightly accrued &, with Oprah Winfrey, produce that Hattie McDaniel biography that Mo’Nique wants to make. Kristen Stewart can play Vivien Leigh, who appeared alongside McDaniel in “Gone With the Wind,” the biggest movie that Hollywood ever made &, you know, a total chick flick.
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