As an action woman in a medium ruled by men, the Oscar-winning director has always bucked convention. But does her new film about the hunt for Bin Laden defend the use of torture?
Next month, the new Kathryn Bigelow movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden opens in British cinemas. It's called Zero Dark Thirty and it arrives in eye-catching style, trailing a great noisy convoy of criticism, praise and controversy.
When production was first announced, several Republican politicians and various rightwing groups accused the film of being a propaganda weapon for the re-election of Barack Obama; the idea was that a film about the apprehension and killing of Bin Laden would reflect well on the president.
The conservative watchdog Judicial Watch claimed that the Obama administration had unfairly and improperly given Bigelow and her writer-co-producer, Mark Boal, access to classified information. And a Republican-directed pressure group, involving former CIA officers, created a media campaign that attacked Obama's "dishonourable disclosures".
In the event, Obama swept to victory without any help from the film and when it was finally released in America earlier this month the flak came not from the right but the left. Almost as one, America's liberal intelligentsia spoke out to denounce Zero Dark Thirty for implicitly supporting the practice of torture by suggesting that it led the American secret services to Bin Laden, whereas the available evidence shows no such thing.
"In addition to providing false advertising for waterboarding," the New Yorker's Jane Mayer wrote, "Zero Dark Thirty endorses torture in several other subtle ways." Her colleague Richard Brody argued that the film not only inaccurately provided a justification for torture but that it deliberately removed any context that might have explained the jihadist cause.
"If you fall under the movie's sway," he declared, "you become complicit in its chain of suggestions and association." Other commentators were not nearly so delicate. Michael Wolff called Bigelow "a fetishist and a sadist" who had produced "a nasty piece of pulp and propaganda".
Bigelow has defended her film as a neutral action film whose authenticity lies in its attention to visual and atmospheric detail, rather than historical record. "The film doesn't have an agenda and it doesn't judge," she said. "I wanted a boots-on-the-ground experience."
She made a similar point about her previous film, the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker, when some observers noted that it took no position on the Iraq war. And there is little doubt that over the course of her career, Bigelow has proved herself to be a visceral entertainer while steadfastly resisting the temptation to proselytise.
She doesn't want to change the world. She doesn't even want to change cinema. She just wants to expand its experiential limits. As she has put it: "I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about what my aptitude is and I really think it's to explore and push the medium. It's not about breaking gender roles or genre traditions."
As one of the very few women directors in Hollywood to build a substantial body of commercial work, she has had to carry the weight of feminist expectation, especially as in some respects Bigelow is a feminist out of Hollywood central casting.
Tall, striking and athletic, she is physically tough and emotionally independent. A youthful-looking 61, she is single and lives alone. She thrives in the kind of adverse working conditions that even the most macho of male directors would think twice about undertaking. And even her leisure pursuits – climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in subzero temperatures, for instance, because, she said: "I like to be strong" – sound like endurance tests of character.
But Bigelow has never really been a feminist film-maker. Early in her career, she made Blue Steel, a thriller about a female cop that subverted conventional images of male dominance, yet even then her interests appeared more semiotic than ideological.
Instead, she has been described as a "Hawksian" woman, like Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, a beauty who is happiest hanging out with the boys. Several of her films have either had all-male casts or have – as in the case of Point Break, the finest surfer heist movie of all time – featured only minor female parts.
As she once said: "I never make a decision about a role with feminism as a criterion." Nonetheless, the decision to focus the narrative of Zero Dark Thirty on an independent-minded female CIA agent is one that's further riled some of the film's critics, who have seen it as a means of concealing the dubious morality of American interrogation techniques behind a progressive tale of female empowerment.
Maya, as the agent is called, is based on a real person, but her part in locating Bin Laden has been enhanced for dramatic reasons. The film prides, and indeed sells, itself on its authenticity, but it also demands artistic liberty. Bigelow, wrote the critic David Denby, wants "to claim the authority of fact and the freedom of fiction at the same time".
This may be so, but perhaps Maya is also a version of the director herself. She is driven to the point of obsession with completing her task and Bigelow has spoken of her own all-consuming approach to film-making. Once she begins a project, she said: "There will be an urgency and then I can do nothing else but that."
Yet she did not start out with the intention of becoming a film-maker. She was born in northern California to a librarian and paint factory manager who dreamed of becoming a cartoonist. Having studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, she got a fellowship to the Whitney in New York.
She lived in downtown Manhattan when it was rough and ready and was part of a conceptual art collective that put her in touch with the likes of Susan Sontag and Philip Glass. She and Glass made a living by moving into old print factories and turning them into lofts.
It was during this period that she experienced an epiphany at a double bill of Mean Streets and The Wild Bunch. By her own account, the visual energy of the two films "took all my semiotic Lacanian deconstructivist saturation and torqued it. I realised there's a more muscular approach to film-making that I found very inspiring".
It may come as no surprise to learn that she studied film theory as a graduate student. The upshot was that she decided painting was "a more rarefied art form with a limited audience" and that film was "this extraordinary social tool that could reach tremendous numbers of people".
It was in 1978, while still on her graduate course, that she made a short film, The Set-Up, about two men in an alley beating each other up. On this occasion, she did have a political message. Discussing the meaning of The Set-Up's violence, she once said: "You think that the enemy is outside yourself – a police officer, the government, the system – but that's not really the case at all. Fascism is very insidious, we reproduce it all the time." Doubtless her latest critics would agree.
She sent the unfinished film to the director Milos Forman, who was then a professor at Columbia University's film school. He liked what he saw, immediately offering her a scholarship.
Beginning her career in feature films with 1982's The Loveless, a moody reworking of the Marlon Brando classic The Wild One, she went on to make a series of distinctive genre films, including Point Break and the futuristic thriller Strange Days. But it wasn't until 2008's The Hurt Locker that she gained the widespread recognition that her industry reputation and body of work deserved. (She was the first woman to win the best director Oscar.)
Much was made of the fact that The Hurt Locker, a relatively low-budget movie, competed for awards, and particularly the Oscar for best film, against the mega-budget Avatar, directed by James Cameron, who is Bigelow's ex-husband. The couple were in a two-year marriage from 1989 to 1991, but it apparently ended amicably enough because Cameron wrote Strange Days, which was released in 1995.
As it turned out, Bigelow beat her ex to the Academy award, but it perhaps says something about the limits of her commercial appeal that The Hurt Locker was the lowest grossing best picture winner for half a century. This is the Bigelow paradox: her instincts are populist but her intellect is not. For all her vitality, she is drawn away from the mainstream, where she can give voice to the misfits, oddballs and idiosyncratic ideas that populate her films.
One of the ironies of the Zero Dark Thirty saga is that it began life as a film about the failure to catch Bin Laden. Had the Marines not intervened at Abbottabad, Bigelow might have produced a cultishly admired film with a short life. Instead, she has to make do with a box-office success and a big stink.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2012/dec/30/profile-kathryn-bigelow-film
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