Flasz On Film

“Well, the time has come,” says Barbra Streisand into the microphone having opened the envelope and glanced at the winner of the Best Director Oscar for 2010. The words “Kathryn Bigelow” jump out of her mouth like a cross between a triumphant war cry and a deep sigh of relief because deep down she knows that once those words hit the ears of those in the audience and millions glued to their TV sets at home, history will be made. Bigelow, the first ever female director to be given this most prestigious award, stumbles onto the stage, almost in a state of shock or confused daze. She has no idea what just happened. She barely holds back her tears. In fact, she’s struggling to stay lucid. But she gets it together, accepts the little golden dude with humility, gives her thanks to everyone who helped her get there, at least those whose names she can recall under the circumstances—she didn’t have a little note with her; she probably didn’t expect to win—and finishes by thanking women and men deployed overseas and wishes they all got home safe.  

There is no debate Bigelow must have realized ahead of time that it would have been seismic if the Oscar had gone to her. It was a big deal. Inconceivable even. Not only did she become the first ever female to win, but one of only four at the time to have been nominated for this award. She won in a race against her ex-husband James Cameron, whose movie Avatar had already become the biggest movie of all time. She did that having made The Hurt Locker, a movie nobody believed in apart from her writing partner Mark Boal, a handful of producers Greg Shapiro and Nicolas Chartier, and the Jordanian officials for whom it was a massive boost to have a Hollywood movie produced on their turf. And having the best opportunity to drive home the point that women can after all direct great action movies—a platform and the attention of the entire world—she chose not to turn this moment into a political statement. Which is already interesting because looking closely at Kathryn Bigelow’s career trajectory, you’d expect her to sink down to her knees with arms stretch up and her gaze pointing up at the sky, like an Olympic high jumper who just set a new world record. Yet, she did no such thing. She let her movies say it for her. 

Bigelow Buttoned Up

Bigelow’s path to becoming a Hollywood filmmaker was not an easy one. It was a brutal climb with many obstacles, pitfalls and opportunities to make just one false move and fall to her death. She was never a golden girl. Her debut feature co-directed with Monty Montgomery, The Loveless, which also happens to be the first starring role of one Willem Dafoe, was not a resounding success that would have put her on the map. Instead, she got to make her next feature, the first one flying solo, nearly six years later, and even having secured the job at the helm of Near Dark, she was allegedly kept on a short leash as producers didn’t trust her ability to deliver. I bet male directors Bigelow looked up to so much, like Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Michael Mann or John Carpenter, would have never been given ultimatums like that. She had to work double time and twice as hard to prove her worth to men in power and show she belonged in what essentially was a boys’ club of action filmmakers, under the one-strike-you’re-out policy hanging over her head like a Hollywood-forged sword of Damocles.  

And this is where her movies, starting with Near Dark which she also co-wrote with Eric Red, start to reflect more closely Bigelow’s own life on a metaphorical level. Now, in the interest of complete clarity, I don’t know any such readings have ever been openly confirmed by Bigelow or anyone close enough to her to know for sure; all I know is that art imitates life, and strong voices gravitate towards stories that feel important to them.  

Therefore, I feel empowered to see a movie like Near Dark as much more than a neo-western with vampires in it. Sure, it was a marvelous film on its own terms, as it fit within the 80s trend of vampire horror revival and classed it up thanks to Bigelow’s phenomenal visual acumen and an uncanny ability to bring immense artistry and honesty to a genre space. Her vision of a vampire horror refreshes the stale template with its Peckinpah-esque sensibilities, nuanced tonality and even distinct visual ideas like the unforgettable way vampires react to sunlight in her movie. She managed to turn the film’s final act into an homage to The Terminator while also meddling with themes and tonalities borrowed from Michael Mann’s Thief and Tony Scott’s The Hunger. However, what’s most important to me is how the film’s narrative sphere is perfectly symmetrical to Bigelow’s own life outside of the set.  

If you think about it for a second and consciously map the filmmaker’s perspective onto it, Near Dark is not necessarily a movie about a guy who accidentally falls in love with a vampire and then becomes one. In fact, even though it has been most often read as an allegorical take on the AIDS epidemic or the out-of-control drug problem plaguing American youth, there’s way more to it. Sure, all those interpretations—the literal one which is romantic and the drug/AIDS-trained lens which is tragic and socio-politically current for mid-to-late 80s—are valid, work well and I’m not here to dissuade anyone from engaging with the movie on those levels.  

However, I watch Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) in Near Dark and I see Kathryn Bigelow herself reflected in the character of someone, an outsider, invited to join a tribe. She’s a bit out-of-step with the world around her, just like Caleb, as she desperately wants to make movies… but the kinds of movies men typically like to watch, and men typically get to make. Now, I don’t exactly know how to interpret the character of Mae (Jenny Wright) and struggle between seeing her as a composite of inspirations that hypnotized Bigelow to follow the moviemaking path the way a moth spirals towards the deathly embrace of a kerosene lamp on a humid August evening and a distinct representation of another filmmaker who helped her get her foot in the door. Regardless, when read as such, the band of marauding killer hobos might represent “the boys club” of action filmmakers: people who have done this for many years and who prey on newcomers with gleefully brazen abandon. It’s a movie about getting into the moviemaking world and the struggle against the seemingly ancient forces keeping the old status quo intact. It is also a reflection of the difference between being an outsider looking in and finding yourself inside the tent looking out and realizing just how dangerous this place could be. In many ways, this romantic neo-western built upon Bigelow’s meditative visuals and seemingly unforgettable iconography embellished by the unforgettable soundtrack courtesy of Tangerine Dream is equally a tip of the hat towards master craftsmen Bigelow adores and an admission of just how perilous her own journey into the heart of darkness of Hollywood was likely going to be. And that in order for her to succeed, sacrifices would have to be made.  

This sentiment is even more clearly reflected in Bigelow’s later movie, another collaboration with Eric Red, Blue Steel. Which also happens to be an even more overt analogy to Bigelow’s own experiences as a woman making action movies in Hollywood and fighting for every inch of ground on her way to greatness. It’s right there out in the open even in the opening credits, where we see Megan Turner (young Jamie Lee Curtis) put on a police uniform. Bigelow films her up close as the perfectly ironed blue shirt gets buttoned up methodically hiding Megan’s breasts underneath. Her entire feminine silhouette disappears in the formal get-up of a law enforcement officer. It is as though Bigelow herself was letting the world know that in order to succeed in a male-dominated space—and law enforcement definitely qualifies as one (think of The Silence of the Lambs or Sicario if you’re one of those who still require convincing)—a woman needs to pretend to be a man. When in a shark tank, better be a shark. Put on a uniform and kick ass, or else you find your own ass fed to the fishes because it’s survival of the fittest out there.  

And even so, it may not be enough, as Megan finds out herself as she is forced to sit through humiliating conversations about her performance or as men in her department never take her seriously. Her judgment is always questioned. Is it a reflection on Bigelow’s experience making Near Dark where producers allegedly waited for any excuse—one strike, you’re out kind of stuff, remember—to fire her and get someone else to direct the movie? Perhaps. Megan is gaslit, undermined, unappreciated and taken for granted by male co-workers and superiors. I can’t help but see it as an illustration of the kind of struggle a filmmaker of Bigelow’s calibre would face trying to infiltrate the world ruled by big banana producers and ego-driven auteurs with their big swinging dicks to prove she’s enough of a badass to belong in their midst. But nobody takes her seriously because—in metaphorical terms—she’s a petite Jamie Lee Curtis hidden away in a baggy police uniform.  

This is perhaps best encapsulated in a short exchange Megan has with a guy named Howard, who asks her what she does for a living. When she admits to being a cop, he just raises his eyebrows in utter disbelief. “Really? A cop?” And then he gives Megan the opportunity to outline Bigelow’s thesis in one phenomenal line. He says “You’re a good-looking woman. I mean, beautiful, in fact. Why would you want to become a cop?” Forget the fact this statement is already easily pegged as a casual sexist micro aggression because it implicitly ties Megan’s worth to her physical attractiveness and makes assumptions about her ability or ambitions based on her looks. But Megan just nods as she listens to this question, one she probably heard several times, and responds with “I like to slam people’s heads up against walls.” An answer worthy of a true badass and one I choose to see as a moment where Bigelow mouths these words herself while looking into the viewfinder of the rolling camera.  

Why would you want to direct action movies when you could make dramas and rom coms like other chicks? I don’t know. Because I feel the need to film Tom Sizemore as he flies through a store window in slow motion, Walter Hill-style, as a flurry of squibs on his chest explode in a fountain of fake blood. Or maybe I feel a rush of adrenaline when I get to film a stuntman on fire. That’s why. At least that’s what I imagine Bigelow thinks in that moment based on what the movie tells me.  

However, there’s only so much you can do and so long you can pretend you’re a shark in a tank full of apex predators. Sooner or later, reality catches up. Megan doesn’t out-man other men around her and Bigelow doesn’t end up out-Cameroning James Cameron either. She asserts herself in a moody finale where Megan guns down her stalker Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver) after briefly fighting for her life and evading the fate of a would-be female victim. It’s an ending taking immense inspiration from Michael Mann and Tony Scott and delivers something superficially anti-climactic but nonetheless fitting the metaphorical reading because it shows that Kathryn Bigelow innately follows her own instincts when it matters and chooses not to pretend that she’s a macho guy-director. She looks up to her gods… but she leans into what she feels is right for the story. 

Sadly, the world wasn’t ready. Nobody bought her brand and Blue Steel failed to find an audience. People preferred to go watch Hunt for the Red October and Pretty Woman, two arguably more predictably formulaic and stylistically unobtrusive movies where “men are men and women are women,” if you know what I’m alluding to. Bigelow was still an interloper. A diver in a black-and-white outfit snorkelling among orcas. 

Bigelow Unchained

Her follow-up feature Point Break, the biggest success of her early career, shows that maybe to make it among sharks, you might have to bite into something. And thus, the movie starring young Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze (together with Gary Busey and Lori Petty) looks as though the filmmaker abandoned any highfalutin notions of trying to reinvent the action medium and infuse it with emotional depth her voice was naturally carrying. Perhaps she understood she needed to play ball to succeed.  

Sure, maybe it has partly to do with the simple fact Bigelow didn’t get to write or co-write the script and therefore the movie looks the most conventional of the lot. Still, what did I say at the top of this text? Filmmakers gravitate to stuff they get to make for a reason and Point Break continues to carry a meta-autobiographical interpretation, as it once again deals with an interloper infiltrating a seemingly impenetrable group. A nerd ex-quarterback who “takes the skin off chicken” finds kinship with hippie new age bank robbers who ride mavericks on their days off and fund their lifestyle by donning masks of ex-presidents and slamming people’s heads up against walls.  

Isn’t that a continuation of Bigelow’s conversation with the world about the trials and tribulations of trying to make it in Hollywood by following the beaten path (Reeves) and then coming up against a troupe of well-embedded auteurs who just do what they please, are not held to account by anyone and every now and then go out and film a blockbuster to make sure their bills are paid? I think it is. It’s quite an alluring prospect, in fact, to view Point Break not as a de facto study of masculinity (which is a big subject Bigelow has gravitated to anyway all throughout her career) but rather as a reflection of a deeper yearning for freedom on behalf of an artist who feels hamstrung by the need to stay within her lane, climb the ladder and hope to stay on her backers’ good side by doing a good job making mainstream Hollywood movies. It’s a movie about a call to make movies Bigelow wants to make, embodied by the character played by Patrick Swayze. It’s about the gravitational pull of artistic freedom exerted upon the consciousness of a filmmaker locked into the studio system with all its dos and don’ts. 

She doesn’t want to become like Gary Busey, whose character has been passed for promotion and now reports to guys half his age and who still feels on the inside as though he could have been a surfer like Swayze’s Bodhi. She’s still young and full of… vigour… like Johnny Utah and the movie she got to make—while the most conventional of the lot thus far—is a perfect illustration of Bigelow’s intrinsic yearning for freedom typically afforded to filmmakers who look as though they didn’t care. Therefore, the ending of Point Break makes perfect sense to me, and it also adds a lot of indispensable context to the movie Bigelow got to make immediately thereafter, Strange Days. It is an artistic act of severing ties with the beaten path. Utah let’s Bodhi go and catch the wave which is likely going to kill him. By doing so, he effectively ensures his career in law enforcement will come to an abrupt end because letting a captured bank robber and a murderer go free is strictly against the law. But he does it because he gets what Bodhi feels. He does it because he feels it too. Utah doesn’t want to be a cop. He wants to be unchained, free to roam. And Bigelow does, too. She wants the freedom to make movies James Cameron gets to make.  

Which she did, because Point Break was a big enough success for her to be trusted with a budget double the size of what she got to play with thus far. Not only that, but the scale and ambition of the movie she landed next was seemingly incomparable with anything Bigelow had tackled beforehand. Strange Days, based on a story by her ex-husband James Cameron, was a vast undertaking. It was a truly monstrous project with stunts, massive scenes with multiple extras, many sub-plots… Tom Sizemore in a wig… a high concept, a voyeuristic slant tipping its hat to 80s De Palma, loads of violence and nudity and a veritable cast of Class-A stars. It was Minority Report meets Body Double. A Philip K. Dick movie based on a story Dick never wrote. It was something else. But equally, this turned out to be a movie that simply couldn’t be marketed to anyone. Too violent to capitalize on teenagers. Too obscure for the mainstream. Too long. Too bloody. Too confusing. And just like that wave that most assuredly killed Bodhi at the end of Point Break, Strange Days almost killed Kathryn Bigelow’s career. It brought seven million dollars in domestic box office receipts and another ten from other markets. It was a tragedy. 

And as is the case with most calamities, there’s always a bit of self-reflection required to understand what happened after a box office disappointment the size of Strange Days. To internalize the aftermath, so to speak. Because not everyone gets to piss away multiple millions of dollars while staging an extravagant genre opus that probably would take multiple re-watches and some serious engagement on behalf of the viewer to begin comprehending its genius. Don’t get me wrong: Strange Days is perhaps the most misunderstood movie of the 90s. It is also deeply flawed in many ways, and it takes immense buy-in from whoever chooses to put it on (and it is hard to track down these days anyway) to look past the movie’s multiple endings, its conveniently resolved plot, or its frankly ridiculously convoluted conceit. Only having done the legwork will you see how Bigelow’s movie comments on the post-Rodney King America and how it heralds the arrival of web-enabled virtual reality where people can willingly escape their personal traumas. It takes even more squinting and veritable mental gymnastics to see how this movie talks about moviemaking and seeking dopamine-aided escapism in the warm embrace of cinema. But it’s there if you look for it. Bigelow, Cameron and Jay Cocks (who co-wrote the script) were simply asking too much of the audience while gambling the movie would speak to enough people to make its gargantuan budget back.  

Therefore, Strange Days became a tragic milestone in Bigelow’s career. It was her The Abyss, an abysmal failure to connect with audiences and an equally unmatched vision the world was simply not ready for. However, in contrast to James Cameron who, having stumbled, dusted himself off immediately and proceeded to direct T2 and then True Lies, Bigelow was not afforded any such opportunities. In fact, one wonders if James Cameron had been a female, would he ever get to follow up The Abyss with any movie whatsoever, let alone an even more-expensive sequel to his breakout hit The Terminator and then an even more bombastic Arnie vehicle a few short years later. It only goes to show that for all the kudos and goodwill accrued thanks to Point Break, Kathryn Bigelow was always one false move away from falling into the depths of director jail.  

Bigelow Reconfigured

Having directed a handful of episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, a veritable protoplast to the TV-redefining The Wire, Bigelow still didn’t have a workable route back into the mainstream of moviemaking, which is where I believe she had always belonged. You can’t make movies Bigelow wanted to make in the indie-sphere. Therefore, for one reason or another, she signed up to direct The Weight of Water, an adaptation of an Anita Shreve novel, maybe hoping it would become a stepping stone on her way out of hell. 

Now, in the interest of complete transparency, this is a movie I vehemently despise and find utterly unwatchable. Hence, I find it incredibly difficult to find a perspective to view it from in which it would make some sense to me. I bet there is someone out there who can, so I will limit myself perhaps to identifying that this piece of highfalutin book club porn transplanted nigh-on verbatim into the language of cinema may be seen as a reflection of Bigelow’s own period of banishment from Hollywood. After all, the metaphor is clearly there with one of the central characters being a Norwegian immigrant to America stranded in the nearly uninhabitable Isles of Shoals in the nineteenth century, a seemingly unsolved cold case of an axe murder of a bunch of women and a photojournalist in present day trying to make sense of it all and in the course of the story making a connection with a woman deeply troubled by loneliness and abuse. The movie is cinematic penance, both because it maps across Bigelow’s biography perfectly and because watching it feels like punishment.  

Understandably, even Bigelow completists often forget about including The Weight of Water on their ranked lists, as the movie remains difficult to access. In fact, it was initially shelved after premiering at TIFF in 2000 and earning some truly scathing reviews, before it was release in late 2002. Frankly, it’s a movie best left unwatched… unless of course you are on a mission to understand how Bigelow’s movies connect with her own life in some magical way.  

Having sunk to the bottom with The Weight of Water, something had to give and eventually Kathryn Bigelow was given an opportunity to direct K-19: The Widowmaker, a based-on-a-true-story drama about a Soviet submarine stranded in the middle of the ocean with a radioactive leak out of its main reactor core. I am told this was at the time the most expensive independent production and, weirdly enough, it was bankrolled in large part by National Geographic… where James Cameron was a board member, by the way. With a ticket price of ninety million dollars, it was a tall order for Bigelow to turn the tide and she still couldn’t make this movie a success. I don’t think anybody else could have stood a chance. She took on a cinematic submarine with a leaky core and did everything she could to make it work.  

The irony of Bigelow attempting to make a submarine movie work is simply inescapable as it fits almost too perfectly as a metaphor for Bigelow’s own attempt to rescue her directorial career, complete with notions of having to solve impossibly difficult problems while constrained by political choices made by people in positions of power, fighting against other potent egos and having to win over the approval of those whose work would eventually decide the success or the failure of the movie, once completed. Therefore, even though K-19 is a de facto attempt at historical fiction with a distinct prestige slant of its own, it is equally a reflection of the filmmaker’s uphill battle from the depths of despair, where the main conflict between Harrison Ford’s Vostrikov, recently demoted to the position of executive officer, and Liam Neeson’s Polenin, the newly appointed captain of the submarine, says quite a lot about Bigelow’s struggle against the machine of Tinseltown, should you choose to apply such a lens to your viewing.  

At this point, I am not sure whether Kathryn Bigelow is confined to only one of those two men as her avatar—and the more I think about it the more I tend to flip-flop on the subject—but I am remotely certain about at least one aspect of how K-19: The Widowmaker both informs Bigelow’s path and reflects on it metaphorically. The characters end up making tough choices which involve seeking assistance of the enemy to avoid sentencing the crew to a certain and harrowing death, which their political leaders thousands of miles away would be happy to see, all in the name of Soviet pride. Vostrikov is removed from his post, tried for disobedience, but eventually acquitted thanks to Polenin who jumps to his defence. The film ends long after the main events conclude, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The surviving crew members meet at a cemetery, salute Vostrikov, honour the memory of those who perished while trying to repair the faulty reactor leaking deadly radiation and remind the viewer that true honour and glory lies not in the medals awarded by the state (which the Soviet establishment denied them for political reasons), but in the memory of those whose lives were saved by the sacrifice of those brave men.  

If there is a lesson to come out of the K-19 experiment, an expensive independently financed prestige movie equivalent of a nuclear submarine with a busted core that bombed at the box office, it is that it may have become a turning point for the filmmaker and aided her internal reconfiguration. Bigelow, who at the time had spent nearly two decades trying to navigate the treacherous waters of studio filmmaking and struggled to stay true to her voice while directing movies she considered cool to watch, seemed to have developed the key ability many of those gods she looked up to had possessed. The ability to not care about second-guessing herself artistically and, crucially, to follow her instincts as opposed to trying to triangulate a consensus in which she could retain a modicum of freedom while keeping her financiers happy. Because there’s never a guarantee whether a movie would succeed or fail, Bigelow emerged from K-19 armed with what looks like a perspective that if she were to fail again, she might as well fail on her own terms and perish making movies she cares about leaving behind for future generations to behold and, hopefully, warm up to. 

Even though the Bigelow-class submarine surfaced in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by nothing but elements, what happened afterwards clearly illustrates that the filmmaker emerged from her period of artistic reconfiguration with enough resolve to plough on. Having directed an episode of Karen Sisco, a spin-off show tailgating the success of Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Out of Sight, teamed up with Mark Boal, a freelance journalist who wrote a piece for Playboy titled “The Man in a Bomb Suit,” a look at The Iraq War through the lens of people who put their lives on the line every day while dismantling Improvised Explosive Devices planted by Iraqi insurgents. However, in 2005 they couldn’t garner enough buy-in from Hollywood moguls, partly because K-19 was considered a disaster (and it was) and because The Iraq War wasn’t seen as a topic with a revenue-generating potential. At that time, the only other mainstream movie in this space was Jarhead, and it wasn’t seen as an out-and-out success either.  

Undeterred, Bigelow and Boal secured the backing of Nicolas Chartier under the aegis of his Voltage Entertainment, which gave them thirty million dollars to burn and eventually even ensured they could film on location in Jordan, with partial involvement from US Government officials, who later pulled out their support. The movie which ended up taking home the Oscar in 2010 had to be fought for each step of the way because, as I may have mentioned at the top of this article, nobody in Hollywood believed in the movie, nor did they trust Bigelow at the helm.  

And if you’d like to put yourself in the headspace of someone like Bigelow at the time, it doesn’t take much more than just watching the actual movie and imagining that Kathryn Bigelow most assuredly resonates well with the character of Staff Sergeant William James played by Jeremy Renner. In the movie, James is assigned to lead a bomb squad in Iraq after their previous commander dies on duty. However, James isn’t a regular grunt who does things by the book. James is a renegade who disregards protocol and cares very little about his own safety on the job. In fact, he’s conditioned to thrive exclusively under extreme pressure of a combat situation and consequently feels unable to re-integrate into polite society whenever he is sent back home. By cutting through political lines and assuming the perspective of people on the ground, people like James and his comrades Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), The Hurt Locker humanizes the war effort of the US servicemen overseas and brings the viewer up close to the danger in ways only masters of the genre know how.  

At the same time, it is a potent illustration of where Kathryn Bigelow was, artistically speaking, having come back from a string of commercial failures, some of which nearly put a bullet through the temple of her filmmaking career. By seeing Sergeant James as Bigelow’s avatar, we can clearly see that Bigelow rose from these failures like a phoenix from the ashes, inveterate, intrepid and invincible. She’s done playing by the rules set by others. She cares little about Hollywood protocol. Nobody wants my movie? Screw them. I’ll find a way. That’s her M.O. In fact, it is perfectly encapsulated in one key scene—which is in its own right an utterly blood-curdling exercise in suspense generation in an action setting—where James and his crew are called upon to investigate a potential car bomb outside of a government building. While Sanborn and Eldridge take their positions guarding the site, James investigates the car. When he finds out just how much explosive power is potentially packed into the boot of the car, he comes back to Sanborn, takes off his bomb suit and says “there’s enough bang in there to send us all to Jesus. I’m gonna die; I wanna die comfortable.” 

Again, like in Blue Steel where Megan was admitting to the camera that she loves smashing people’s heads against walls, it’s easy to imagine that James speaks for Bigelow here too. She spent a small fortune banking on this movie. Nobody believed she could pull this off and it’s totally in her gift to make it work. Therefore, she’s not going to be constrained by artificial parameters imposed on her by others, let alone let others boss her around. If The Hurt Locker was to become her funeral, she chose to die comfortable. Doing what she wanted, not what others expected of her.  

The James-Bigelow analogy goes further. James doesn’t know how to exist outside of the theatre of war and struggles with re-adjusting to living in a normal society. He only knows war and the combat zone is where he thrives. Similarly, Bigelow doesn’t know or want to make movies about people crying on a boat or confessing love over a plate of gourmet cheesecake. She resonates with Tom Sizemore’s line from Michael Mann’s Heat. For her the action is the juice. Therefore, even the ending of The Hurt Locker where James, clad in his bomb suit, walks away into the sunset to the accompaniment of the propulsive song by Ministry is nothing but an admission that Kathryn Bigelow is no longer looking for a path in her filmmaking career. She’s on a mission to make movies the way she sees fit.  

And it worked. The movie nobody in Hollywood wanted to bankroll directed by a female badass nobody took seriously because she was seen as a risky investment won six Oscars out of nine nominations, swept the awards season and elevated Kathryn Bigelow to the highest echelon of film history as the first woman ever to be given the Best Director Oscar. The movie she directed because she believed in the story, and which showed she no longer cared about what was expected of her in Hollywood was the one to make a difference. Bigelow proved to the world that she’s the ultimate weapon, a woman in a bomb suit walking towards the setting sun while Ministry blares in the background.  

Bigelow Triumphant

Now, this is where things get really interesting, at least as far as I can tell, because it is always a worthy exercise to see what a filmmaker does once being given the keys to the city. After all, Bigelow was no longer a nobody. Well, she had not been a nobody since 1987 but at least in the eyes of Hollywood producers looking for someone worthy of investing their money in, she was now a bankable commodity and her next project would likely be easier to finance and produce as a result of the simple fact that both Bigelow and Boal had become Academy Award recipients.  

Therefore, just like Francis Ford Coppola managed to convince a whole bunch of people to finance his long-gestating passion project Apocalypse Now having received the highest acclaim for The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Bigelow and Boal ended up making a movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Initially, I believe Mark Boal began working on a story concerning the ill-fated Battle of Tora Bora which took place in the early days of the War in Afghanistan and where Osama bin Laden was nearly killed. However, as the story was coming together the news came out about the raid in Abbottabad where Osama bin Laden was assassinated by the Navy SEALs, thus ending a decade-long manhunt.  

With renewed focus, Bigelow and Boal decided to turn this story into an ambitious piece of historical fiction underpinned by action, suspense and adherence to gritty realism… only to see their movie undermined by criticism of the story’s veracity and allegations of propagandistic exculpatory tendencies, allegedly glorifying the infamous “enhanced interrogation” program of detainees often held captive in contravention of Geneva conventions. On top of it all, a lot of criticism ended up aimed at the fact that the film’s protagonist Maya (played by Jessica Chastain in a veritable tour de force performance) was a composite character and that the decision to distil the work of many dozens of nameless analysts, spies and other operatives was at the very least reductive and perhaps disrespectful to their hard work.  

However, I believe the filmmaker’s duty is not necessarily to the hard facts of the matter, as it is to the story they are telling. Zero Dark Thirty is not a documentary and therefore a degree of dramatic licence is allowed even in the space of historical fiction. Furthermore, it is quite likely—especially if we continue our discussion of Bigelow’s cinema reflecting the filmmaker’s life in pictures—that the character of Maya not only fits as glue that keeps a sprawling narrative together and focused around one character’s pursuit after the most wanted man in America’s entire history, but it is also Bigelow’s own avatar in its final form. And when this interpretation is applied, Zero Dark Thirty becomes a full-blown synthesis—a microcosm, so to speak—of Kathryn Bigelow’s entire career in moviemaking as well. 

In fact, if having read this piece of mine you feel you’d like to revisit some of Bigelow’s movies to see what I am discussing here with your own eyes but you might not necessarily have the time or the inclination to go through her entire catalogue (which is understandable given the many constraints of modern busy life, though regrettable because her catalogue is mostly a shopping list of great things), do yourself a favour and watch Zero Dark Thirty because it is a distillation of Bigelow’s entire life’s pursuit reflected in the character of Maya. We see her first as she arrives in Pakistan and must elbow some living space among equally driven and occasionally antagonistic co-workers. We see her buttoned up in a shark costume as she accompanies Jason Clarke to torture sessions where she must rapidly toughen up to be able to have a fighting chance of survival among the apex predators their co-workers are. We watch Maya grow a thick skin, fight for the resources she needs to do her job, lean in, and end up wholly consumed by her singular vision… which almost costs her dearly as she barely escapes with her life having become a target of an Al-Qaeda assassination plot.  

It’s all out there on display. From awkward beginnings and attempting to swim with sharks to having a one-to-one with death and then to leading with her gut while others doubted her judgment and proving to the world she had always been destined to grasp at greatness, Maya’s character arc perfectly reflects Bigelow’s own trajectory. She enters the film as meek yet incredibly knowledgeable and when the time comes to send the Navy SEALs to Abbottabad under the cover of darkness, she’s a completely different person. Commanding, brave and incredibly confident, she makes the world fall silent when she opens her mouth. Battle-hardened Navy SEALs who have been to hell and back defer to her knowledge and judgment without a shred of disapproval or doubt. Maya who sends Navy SEALs to kill bin Laden is not the same Maya who winces at the sight of Jason Clarke’s character waterboarding a half-naked detainee. She’s “the motherfucker who found this place,” as she puts it to a room full of serious-looking CIA head honchos right after her intimate knowledge of the geography of the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden was thought to be hiding impressed on the room. She knows her stuff. It’s the only thing she’s certain of. It’s her singular mission she’s pursued her entire working life. Which mirrors exactly what Bigelow’s own pursuit of greatness must have been like.  

And it all comes together in a visceral crescendo of action and suspense as Zero Dark Thirty culminates in the now iconic raid on bin Laden’s compound. Almost forty minutes of pure adrenaline, this elaborate sequence reliant on adherence to military procedure, trust in the perspective of men on the ground and all underpinned by Alexandre Desplat’s propulsive-yet-unobtrusive score is the perfect synthesis of Kathryn Bigelow’s career-long hunt for the perfect action sequence. No longer shackled to her idols, Bigelow synthesizes the voices of Michael Mann, Ridley Scott, James Cameron and Paul Greengrass and internalizes them with ease so as to craft the most exhilarating conclusion this movie could ever ask for. Just as Maya orchestrated this moment and then sat there patiently waiting while men who trusted her judgment did her jobs to the best of their ability, Bigelow designed, storyboarded, planned and explained the vision of what was to happen when she shouted “action!” and then watched it all come together in a truly unforgettable way. The movie may have been about Maya’s decade-long hunt after the architect of 9/11, but the movie was just as much about Kathryn Bigelow’s pursuit of crafting the perfect action sequence.  

Therefore, when Maya boards the plane at the end of the film and bursts into tears—tears of joy, relief, exhaustion… who knows—I imagine Kathryn Bigelow intimately understands the state of mind Maya was in. It took her decades to earn her place among the greats of action filmmaking. But she got there. And the question then was where she would go next.  

In fairness, Kathryn Bigelow’s post-Oscar career might never be a walk in the park because she will always struggle against the same obstacles, the same outdated stereotypical views expressed by men in positions of authority who—in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary—may still cling onto beliefs that women cannot direct bankable action movies. I honestly don’t know how else to counter such opinions if not by exposing those who express them to the proof in the pudding: the absolutely amazing standout action movies like Point Break and The Hurt Locker, the post-Mann neo-westerns like Blue Steel and Near Dark or sprawling masterpieces like Strange Days and Zero Dark Thirty. It’s a real shame that Detroit, Bigelow’s follow-up to Zero Dark Thirty, struggled to find its audience despite overwhelming support from the critical community, or that her next movie, up until recently in development at Netflix, may have been shelved for unknown reasons.   

Maybe Kathryn Bigelow should have adopted the stance of her ex-husband who, having secured his Best Director Oscar for Titanic, ended his acceptance speech by shouting “I’m the king of the world!” Maybe the world would have paid more attention to her amazing output as an interloper in the world of cinema men choose to watch and women rarely get to make. Perhaps she was too embarrassed to embody this kind of cocky confidence and hid behind her work. In fact, Mark Boal had to drag her to the microphone when Bigelow was called onto the stage only minutes after getting bonked on the head with her Best Director win because the movie she directed became the year’s Best Picture winner.  

Or maybe she didn’t need to. Because as I outlined in what started in my head as a short essay about how Zero Dark Thirty is a synthesis of Bigelow’s career and ballooned to a comprehensive survey of her work, her movies tell her story much better. From Near Dark all the way up to Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s films outline the struggle to fit in, the yearning for artistic freedom, the failure to launch, the need to rethink and the resolve to remain true to herself in spite of overwhelming odds much better than even the best acceptance speech could ever encapsulate. She can choose to stay silent on the matter, but her movies shout “I’m the Queen of Action Movies!” themselves.