Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews

From Style to Steel

61 From Style to Steel Nick James / 1990 From City Limits, November 29–December 6, 1990, 26. Reprinted by permission of Nick James. In 1982, London clubs were almost entirely patronized by people who had dumped their New Romantic sash cords for the frisson of torn jeans and a perfect flattop. When it came to music, those hedonists were all soul fans, but in looks they plumped for the downhome classicism of fifties rebel style. The previous year, Kathryn Bigelow’s debut feature The Loveless had opened, mostly to critical abuse. Complaints followed the line that Bigelow’s tale of the disruption of an American small town by a gang of marauding bikers was slow, pretentious, and too much in love with its period. Watching it in ’82, in a cinema full of rockabilly night owls, all I heard was laughter and delight. From the opening, which first introduced us to Willem Dafoe—astride a Harley, wearing black shades, black leather, and perfectly greased hair—The Loveless belied its dumb surface and even dumber reputation. It was a delicious, tongue-in-cheek wallow in sexual iconography whose images were soaked in a lingering ecstasy of form, at once reverent and irreverent. Eight years on, Bigelow herself is the imposing, black-clad figure of legend. The one with the “70mm eyes” and the bright new critical reputation for remorselessly going against the stereotype of a woman director. This is her reward for daring to tread through the blood, gore, and jagged metal of boytown in order to make Blue Steel, a psycho-killer thriller dipped in blood with a female cop at the center. If anything, Bigelow ’s camera is even more fetishistic now. Apart from the unique credits sequence which features a fiber-optically lit .38 Smith and Wesson revolver blown up to unimaginable hugeness, there’s an equivalent to the caressing pans across bikes, boots, and zippers of The Loveless in the 62 kathryn bigelow: inter views considerable attention paid to the lineament of the New York City Police Department uniform. “I don’t know if this fetishization of the technology of power is completely conscious,” says Bigelow. “Perhaps it’s something to do with the social climate today. People feel so powerless and there’s great vanity in power. There’s something very attractive about iconography of power, in certain rituals of identification in dress. Also there’s an instantaneous response to somebody who is very beautiful and there’s no point in denying it. You’re massaging that imagery and trying to examine, explore, and understand it.” The investigation of uniforms, buildings, and other sculptural manifestations of power was very popular among art critics and structuralists in the late seventies. Magazines like ZG carried articles on Nazi iconography and the deconstruction bible Semiotext(e) ran a “Poly-sexuality” issue with a leather-clad clone on the cover. In the editorial credits for that edition was none other than Bigelow who, at the time, was active in the Art and Language group of avant-garde art practitioners. Much has been made of Bigelow’s switch from the New York art scene to mainstream filmmaking (and her subsequent marriage to Hollywood blockbuster director James Cameron), yet her concern with the texturing of a language, particularly one of power, follows a consistent line. “I made the change to film because I love the medium,” she told me. “I felt that art world audience was very elitist. This came from my work with Art and Language. Their exquisite, painful expression—art as the modification of the social fabric as it exists—I just extrapolated from that into film where the audience is anybody. It doesn’t require a certain knowledge to appreciate it.” The move to the overrground hasn’t exactly been swift. Bigelow has completed only three movies in the time, with the 1987 cult vampire/ western Near Dark bridging the gap between boy bikers and woman cops. Near Dark played hell with both genres to wonderful comic effect, with its bunch of superhuman hayseed-vampires delighting in their bloodhungry on-the-road lifestyle, and if there’s anything about the Bigelow style that’s missing from Blue Steel it’s the knowing bulge in the cheek. “Maybe it’s a less humorous subject,” she says. “It wasn’t as fantastic as Near Dark. This was more grave.” Just as critical interest in codes of dress was interpreted and watered down for the eighties in the phrase “power dressing,” so...