Shadows of Doubt: Negotiations of Masculinity in American Genre Films

10 Man’s Favorite Sport? The Action Films of Kathryn Bigelow

 Man’s Favorite Sport? e Action Films of Kathryn Bigelow Introduction With only a few features to her credit—The Loveless (1983, codirected with Monty Montgomery), Near Dark (1987), Blue Steel (1990), Point Break (1991), and Strange Days (1995)—writer/director Kathryn Bigelow succeeded in establishing herself as the only female filmmaker specializing in action films who, at least to this point, can claim the status of auteur. Bigelow’s films employ, in the words of Anna Powell, “stunning and expressionistic visuals, rapid narrative pacing, thrilling and visceral scenes of eroticized violence and physical action,”1 providing all the expected pleasures of action films. Yet at the same time they also work within the various genres that fall within the category of action cinema—cop films, buddy and road movies, westerns, horror films, and war films—to question their traditional and shared ideological assumptions about gender and violence. Some critics have hesitated to call Bigelow an auteur because of her personal and professional association with James Cameron, the creator of|   | CHAPTER  such muscular action movies as Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), who also produced Point Break and wrote and produced Strange Days. Certainly her biological status as a woman has entered into the discourse surrounding Bigelow, with critics and reviewers often referring not only to her gender but also to her physical attractiveness—hardly the kind of discourse that generally surrounds male directors.2 Yet close analysis of her films reveals a remarkable consistency of style and theme that, as with most canonical male auteurs, works in relation to the parameters of genre. The action film is perfectly suited to Bigelow’s themes. The representation of violence is of course central to the genre, and as Steve Neale notes, the ideology of masculinity that it traditionally has worked so hard to inscribe centers on “notions and attitudes to do with aggression, power, and control.”3 Bigelow’s first film, the short Set-Up (1978), which shows two men fighting in an alley while on the soundtrack two theorists interpret the violence, is in a sense a paradigm for her features to follow. All explore the nature of masculinity and its relation to violence, especially within the context of spectatorship, largely by playing on the look of the viewer as conditioned by the generic expectations and conventions of traditional action films. The “false” beginnings of both Blue Steel and Near Dark, which are tests of perception for Bigelow’s protagonists as well as for the viewer, are only the most obvious instances of the importance of looking and the look in her films. Critics have duly noted the thematic and stylistic importance of vision in Bigelow’s films—her “cinema is essentially a discourse on vision,” writes one4 —a theme that likely has its roots in her days as a film studies student at Columbia University in New York City, at a time when the influence of feminist gaze theory was at its height. Much as Douglas Sirk and R. W. Fassbinder had approached the genre of melodrama or “the woman’s film,” providing their pleasures while critiquing the ideology that underpinned them (“bending,” in Sirk’s phrase), so Bigelow works within the action film. Her music video for the pop band New Order’s “Touched by the Hand of God” is indicative of her approach: just as in the video she incongruously films the new wave band with the iconography of costume and the conventions of performance associated with heavy metal, thus foregrounding and questioning their masculine coding, so Bigelow’s films mobilize a range of the genres traditionally regarded as “male” precisely to interrogate that term specifically, as well as the politics and pleasures of gendered representations in genre films Man’s Favorite Sport? |  more generally. Gavin Smith is thus absolutely correct in describing her work as “metacinema of the first rank”5 Men with Guns While action in film has been popular ever since the Lumières’ train entered the Ciotat Station, the action film as a recognizable genre for the definition and display of male power and prowess was clearly established with the rousing swashbucklers of Douglas Fairbanks (The Mark of Zorro, 1920; The Black Pirate, 1922) and Errol Flynn (Captain Blood, 1935; The Adventures of Robin Hood, 1940). The depth of the genre’s masculine perspective is painfully clear in a movie like True Lies (1994, written and...