Dry Ice Factory

Glenn Kenny has a good post up, The Red Krayola with Art & Language and, briefly, Kathryn Bigelow, about the radical art collective Art & Language and its various tentacles, including Kathryn Bigelow, who later turned her tentacle into a SQUID. "But to look at stuff such as Blue Steel, Strange Days, and particularly Point Break again through a conceptual art refraction is to see, well, almost completely different films, almost literally inverted action 'blockbusters' critiquing not just commodification of culture but gender roles and capital as well." Also a fair amount of post-punk art rock geeking.

Yes, more songs about the commodification of geeking.

Kathryn Bigelow’s extraordinary command of subjectivity has always been her outstanding talent, one which has made her a peculiar and peculiarly contemporary variant on the under sung (and underemployed) Robert Mulligan. Whereas Mulligan mostly assumed the viewpoints of young people caught up in some entanglement of love, Bigelow prefers her young adults to get mixed up in violence, preferably lethal violence. And only K-19: The Widowmaker, Bigelow’s most recent movie, lacked a bristling psycho-sexual element to the violence (no, I’m not forgetting Point Break).

-- Henry Sheehan, review of The Weight of Water

This movie was completed in 2000 but wasn't released in theaters until 2002. The distributor apparently didn't think much of it, and neither did most mainstream critics. I'm not sure what I think of it after one viewing. It's certainly new territory for Bigelow, with the story split between a modern search for the truth behind an old murder of two women on a tiny island on the New Hampshire coast, and a story set in the time of the murder on Smuttynose Island in the late 19th century. Amongst other things, this is the first time that Bigelow has done a period story, and it feels strange to have her hypermodern visual style applied to a pre-modern setting. This is also very much about the dimensions and tensions and failures of heterosexual relationships, which is usually not her main focus at all.

It's not exactly a thriller, but there is a crime of passion at the heart of it, and it does build to an explosive climax. Some of the modern story does seems a bit obvious, and my first take is that Sean Penn gives an overly mannered, empty performance. On the other hand, the protagonist of this part of the story is his wife, played by Catherine MacCormack, and it could be that the portrayal of the husband as a bit of a nobody (despite being a famous poet) is intentional. The layers of betrayal and grievance and misunderstanding are pretty complex, in both stories. There's also a languor to this film that is reminiscent of Bigelow's first film, The Loveless, and which may initially seem at odds with the generically melodramatic surface.

The movie is undeniably beautiful to look at. I just love Bigelow's visual style. The opening credit sequence is an amazing work of abstraction that incorporates elements of scenes to come. She once again (as in Blue Steel) is very focused on the gaze of her characters, what they see, what they don't see, what they communicate to each other with their glances. Again, there's an urgency undercutting the languor, a fine sense of detail and contrast amid the too-obvious motions and emotions.

It gets into very strange territory at the climax, leading some reviewers to call this a metaphysical story. Maybe so. There's some kind of transference going on between the two strands of history in the movie, but it's hard to say what the nature or substance of the transference is.

Since Sheehan has some provocative insights, I'll let him have the final word too:

Bigelow herself never seems to know what her characters are going to do or why – become vampires or stay human, stay cops or go crooked, be men or women. Some viewers like the sense of spontaneity of open-endedness this gives her film. But the same self-conscious skepticism that leads her down that path, also lays Bigelow open to charges of genre overkill. Some of us think that, in a world that celebrates The Matrix, picking out the director of Strange Days for such a charge is absurd. So it will be interesting to see what the observers who swoon over the glorified classroom exercise, Far from Heaven, will make of the living The Weight of Water.

So now I've gone back to the beginning of Kathryn Bigelow's career and watched her first two feature films.

The Loveless (1982) was co-directed with Monty Montgomery (his only directing credit on IMDb), and it is completely different from anything else of Bigelow's I've seen so far. Well, it does feature a gang of outsiders, but the tone and pace of the film are far more languid than what I'd seen up till now. This one's about a gang of bikers who are on their way to Daytona for the car races. From the cars and the music, it seems to be set in the early '60s, maybe the late-'50s. The gang is stuck in a po-dunk town in the South somewhere while one of them fixes his bike in a local garage. They are bored. Nothing is happening. They are different from the townsfolk. Lots of shots of a young Willem Dafoe in full leather staring into the distance, smoking a cigarette. Shots of beautiful bikes, beautiful cars, beautiful women, men in leather. I read somewhere that this movie is heavily influenced by Kenneth Anger's film about gay bikers, Scorpio Rising (1963), and there's certainly a fetishistic aspect to it. This one slowly builds layers of tension over a base of repressed sexuality. Much more of an art film than Bigelow's other films.

So it was a bit of a shock to the system to move to Near Dark (1987), which is a pure genre horror film. It has quite a reputation amongst horror fans for being an innovative vampire film. I'm generally not much of a horror fan myself, although one advantage of coming to something like this after having seen District 9 is that the violence here seems relatively subdued in comparison. I actually didn't find this film all that interesting. Part of the problem may be that the Buffy TV show stripmined some of its best ideas, such as rowdy vampires driving around in daylight in cars with the windows mostly blacked out. It could be that I just wasn't in the right mood, too, and that it was the wrong thing to watch after The Loveless -- despite the fact that they both feature outlaw gangs (in Near Dark a gang of vampires terrorizing the countryside). The action sequences still don't have the Bigelow signature, although there's one chase in a field that has a bit of the subjective-camera feel of later films. I didn't really enjoy Bill Paxton chewing the scenery -- quite literally at times. If the film isn't a new step in the Americanization of vampires, it may be a step in the Westernization of vampires. Vampires as hicks, rather than aristocracy. One misstep, I thought, was that the vampires weren't old enough. There's talk of living for a billion years, but the oldest amongst them is just slightly over a hundred. But maybe that was the point: that immortality is an illusion even for the undead. I did like the way that the vampires are stuck at the physiological age of when they were "turned," so that one of them still looks like a child. There were some lovely, atmospheric visuals, but somehow it lacked the exhilaration of Bigelow's best films.

So the theme of outsiders/outlaws is there from the beginning of her career, but maybe it took her a few films to get to the self-destructive adrenaline junkies. Next up is Blue Steel (1989), which I saw on video probably not long after it came out and remember as being an unexceptional cop thriller. It's about a female cop, played by Jamie Lee Curtis. I'll be curious to see whether I like it better when regarded as a Bigelow film than I did as just something a friend wanted to show me. The Harvard Film Archive overview of Bigelow's films (which I see is also where I got the Scorpio Rising comparison for The Loveless) 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. Frighteningly fast-paced and suspenseful, Blue Steel follows the increasingly disorienting cat-and-mouse game that suddenly unfolds between the novice cop and a vicious killer." Sounds more like the latterday Bigelow, and yet this film has no discernible reputation that I'm aware of. That is to say, it doesn't have the fanbase of Near Dark, Point Break, or even Strange Days.

So yesterday I put the last few touches to my piece for the next Chunga, a fanzine review about fanzine reviews which I had been stuck on for a bit. Such a relief to be done with it, even if it could be better. Now I can focus on proofreading and other phases of getting this damned zine ready for publication. Guess I need to write my contribution to the editorial, too, but I figure that'll just be a Corflu wrap-up.

I offered my Worldcon report to a favorite fanzine that I've owed a piece for over a year, and they have accepted it, so my next writing project is to revise and expand that. It's been interesting to see other responses to Anticipation around the intertubes, especially the ones that aren't favorable. I'm so used to hearing some of my friends grouse that the Worldcon is too big and too full of people they don't know that it's a little strange to see younger people complaining about insularity and racism and inability to appeal to new people. I mean, you'd think that all the insular people would have stayed home. On the other hand, it's certainly true that while I've enjoyed all six Worldcons that I've been to (the first in 1984), the last three have been the best for me because I now know so many people in fandom around the US and around the world that I can always find people I enjoy hanging out with. That wasn't always the case before.

Anyway, so yes, I watched movies last night. The Conversation (1974) was a nice exploration of paranoia, with a twist ending that took me by surprise. Very tightly orchestrated. It was interesting how it walked the line between naturalism and genre, too. At times it felt like a delicate portrait of a very lonely man, and at other times it felt like a pretty goofy spy movie satire (e.g., at the trade fair). Loved all the pre-digital high tech; I can see why this has so many fans amongst science fiction aficionados. The ending is utterly perfect. What a brilliant image of existential devastation! In fact, there was part of me that thought this was a smarter, much more feeling version of Blow Up.

Point Break (1991) is a very strange beast. Aspects of it seemed utterly rote and ham-handed. Keanu Reeves lives down to his reputation. He's just a really unconvincing actor here, and there are several scenes that he kills through sheer woodenness. However, visually and kinetically this thing sings from the very beginning, and it builds and builds to more and more complex and exciting set pieces. The first sky-diving sequence, which happens in the last third of the movie, is incredibly exhilarating. Still not sure how some of that was shot. Patrick Swayze makes up for many of Keanu's sins. The philosophy of the bad guys is actually quite seductive. There are many ways in which this feels like a typical throw-away trash thriller of the era, but it's got something going on beneath its pretty face, something deep in its bones. It feels like it has bones -- and guts. Bet my eldest nephew would love this.

After that I bounced off both The H-Man (1959) and Mothra (1961), after a half an hour of each. I blame the Old Viscosity, which pretty much destroyed me at that point. Or at least I hope that was the problem, because I'm going to be disappointed if none of these old Toho movies is of interest to me!

I tend to be leery of war movies, but based on good reviews and a compelling trailer holyoutlaw and I saw this one at the Egyptian last night. It's about a bomb squad in Iraq in 2004. It is an absolutely riveting, intense experience, since as Luke pointed out you never know what's going to happen next. One of the interesting things about it is that it takes no political stance toward the war, or at least the politics are deeply integrated into the story. There's no discussion of why these American soldiers are in Iraq, what the larger strategic or imperial goals are. It's about three guys trying to survive and perform a job, and it is in particular a character study of one guy who gets off on the adrenaline rush of defusing bombs -- of facing death over and over again.

The narrative is episodic, and the episodes are centered on different kinds of bombs -- IEDs, car bombs, a body bomb, a suicide bomber. They also run into a group of British mercenary bounty-hunters ("contractors") at one point and are involved in a gun battle alongside them. There are episodes between the bomb-defusing and combat where the tension and dread is ramped down and the characters seek release and recovery of their humanity. The camera keeps us in close; we're with the unit, almost part of it. (As with Public Enemies, there is a you-are-there video look, but it's not so anachronistically jarring.) At the same time, just as there isn't much overt political commentary, there isn't much psychological probing. For the most part we are just shown what these soldiers do, and even when what they do is personal or idiosyncratic, it isn't tied to biography or character analysis. The main character doesn't know why he gets off on taking crazy risks any more than we do. The closest we get is a soliloquy spoken to his infant son, in which he tells us how he feels but not why.

The title is enigmatic, perhaps poetic. It's hard to say what it means, but it tugs at understanding. This is a tense, terse, powerful, unsettling film, directed by Kathryn Bigelow. It left me almost physically shaken, and yet meditative. It delves unflinchingly into the horrors and dangers of war, and yet it circles around a charismatic figure who gets off on it. At that level, perhaps it is a political statement about America.