Blue Steel (1989)

[randy_byers]

I'm not going to be able to articulate why, but this film feels like it has Bigelow's signature visual style, unlike her first two movies. It's glossy and sleek and highly textured. There's a bit of Ridley Scott in it. The camera is moving in ways that you also see in Point Break and Strange Days. That's about as far as I can get in describing it. I find it a beautiful look, although it's highly commercial, very mainstream in a lot of ways. Good eye candy, but also great visual story-telling. Everything feels extremely tight and interconnected, one shot leading organically to the next, and every shot conveying new information.

That said, I now see why I bounced off this movie the first time. It's a psycho-killer story, and that's one of my least favorite types of story. Even worse, this is a psycho-killer turned up to 11, with all logic thrown out the window in order to achieve whatever the illogical equivalent of reductio ad absurdum is. Jamie Lee Curtis plays a rookie cop. The psycho-killer is obsessed with her. Everything he does is to get into her head. He does some really horrible things, and it just gets more and more excruciating. Just as in Strange Days, there is a horrific rape scene, although in this case we actually see it from the victim's point of view rather than from the rapist's. Because of the illogic, the escalating horrors play like a nightmare, although I'm sympathetic with those who just think it's stupid. The continuing crimes don't make sense in any realistic frame and just seem to be piling absurdity on top of absurdity.

I don't actually think it is stupid, although I don't fully understand the sexual politics and am not sure I want to watch it again to delve deeper. It's a deeply disturbing film. Going back to the quote from the the Harvard Film Archive overview in my post from yesterday, it says, "With Blue Steel, Bigelow wrote and directed one of the rare contemporary police thrillers that can be read on another level -— as a pointed questioning of whether the Hollywood action film, with its deep roots in misogynistic violence, can be used to critique itself. Jamie Lee Curtis stands out as a zealous rookie policewoman whose career choice poses an overt challenge to the patriarchal norm, a point provocatively made by Bigelow’s artful emphasis on the blatant phallocentrism of the policeman’s tools and trade." Well, I'd like to see that argument expanded, because I can see the way she's portraying gun as phallus, but I'm not sure what the movie is saying about misogynistic violence. Is it just rubbing our noses in the fact that Hollywood thrillers are about the rape of women? Is it saying the psycho-killer movies inevitably just revel in such violence? Is it trying to turn us off of such stories? Hey, I was turned off to begin with!

I guess these questions remind me of some of the questions people have asked about The Hurt Locker. Is it a conservative endorsement of war, or is it a subtle critique of the macho addiction to violence? One thing's for sure, Bigelow has a knack for posing disturbing questions with her films. Point Break is probably the closest she's come to a feelgood crowd pleaser, but even that one has quite a few barbs hidden in the foliage.

ETA: I've got your expanded argument right here: "Yuppie devil: villainy in Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel" by Kevin Ferguson goes deep in an analytical reading of the film, misogyny, and strategies for reflecting on film violence. Fascinating stuff.

Comments

[kdotdammit.livejournal.com]

I really need to see this. I have a coupon for a free movie rental that I have to use today or tomorrow. I think I'll rent this and then respond to your review!

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I'd LOVE to hear your take on it. Seems like perfect KDD territory.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Here's a little snippet from Ferguson's piece to whet your curiosity: "Kaplan also emphasizes Bigelow’s film theory training in order to draw out the self-reflexive relation Bigelow establishes between her scripts and her direction. Blue Steel’s suspenseful precredit training sequence, its association of the gun with the film camera, and its constant invocation of the theme of vision all invoke theoretical questions about the cinematic apparatus and the extent to which film audiences participate in the narrative, as well as questions about how well cinema can represent cultural experiences."