Photography by Alex J. Berliner/Beimages/Keystone
Barbra Streisand couldn’t contain herself. It was obvious she’d been tapped to present the Oscar for Best Director because it was expected to go to a woman for the first time in history. Even before opening the envelope, she couldn’t resist gloating at the prospect, adding as a tacky afterthought that the prize might also go to the first African-American ever to win it (Precious director Lee Daniels). Then, revealing that Kathryn Bigelow had won for The Hurt Locker, Streisand placed her hand over her heart, as if heralding the dawn of a new age, and declared: “The time has come!”
That the Academy has taken such a long time—82 years—to honour a female director makes this landmark as much an embarrassment as a triumph. And there’s no small irony in the fact that the first woman to crack Oscar’s glass ceiling prefers not to brand herself a feminist filmmaker, even if she is one. Unlike the only other women ever nominated for Best Director—Lina Wertmüller, Jane Campion and Sofia Coppola—Bigelow makes movies that don’t promote a feminist, or even a feminine, sensibility. She specializes in action movies populated by cowboy heroes—a gang of iconic bikers (The Loveless), a clan of vampire road warriors (Near Dark), a surfing FBI agent (Point Break), a nuclear submarine captain (K-19: The Widowmaker), and a bomb squad daredevil (The Hurt Locker). Her sole action heroine, played by Jamie Lee Curtis in Blue Steel, is a rookie cop with a gun fetish who seems to have erased her gender.
Pundits had a field day with the David-and-Goliath showdown between the soft-spoken Bigelow and her often bombastic ex-husband, Avatar director James Cameron. To drive home this Hollywood fable, the six-foot, 58-year-old athletic beauty was seated conspicuously in front of the 55-year-old Cameron at the Oscars, looking many years younger—like the trophy wife who got away, and was now about to take the trophies. But this convenient fiction is as far-fetched as the notion of her as a feminist torchbearer. Bigelow, who is now dating The Hurt Locker’s Oscar-winning screenwriter Mark Boal, 36, seems to be on excellent terms with her ex. They never expressed a discourteous word about each other during the awards campaign. And on the red carpet, Cameron cheerfully predicted she would carry the day.
In economic terms, however, the David-and-Goliath narrative was apt. This was a contest between the biggest movie of all time and a small indie film that died at the box office—like other war-on-terror films—and was resurrected by critical acclaim. Oscar loves an underdog, and what was more startling than Bigelow’s coronation as Best Director was that The Hurt Locker toppled Avatar for Best Picture. In that regard, her victory is not so much a blow for womanhood, but for the embattled world of low-budget, independent film.
Bigelow has never made a studio picture. Although she has worked in commercial genres, occasionally with big budgets, and has seen her movies distributed by studios, she is by no means Hollywood’s most bankable female director. That would be Nancy Meyers, who cast Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, those grumpy old Oscar co-hosts, in It’s Complicated. Unlike Meyers, Bigelow has never made anything that could be remotely construed as a “chick flick,” not even her one film about domestic trauma, The Weight of Water (2000), which is far too weird and complex to be tarnished with that populist tag.
Bigelow is the thinking woman’s thrill-seeker, an artist and intellectual who discovered the kick of submerging her ideas in muscular action movies. Spanning three decades, her career has taken her from the fringes of conceptual art to the grit of the Iraq war. She grew up near San Francisco in San Carlos, Calif. Her mother was a librarian, her father a paint factory manager. (Both are now deceased.) A talented artist, Bigelow graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute, and continued to paint as a scholarship student at the Whitney Museum, where she studied with Susan Sontag. Moving on to earn a master’s in film at Columbia University, she became enamoured with postmodern fashions in film theory that interpreted cinema as semiotic code.
At Columbia, with a $2,000 arts grant, she made her first film, The Set-Up (1978), a 17-minute short featuring Gary Busey (!) as one of two men fighting while a pair of semioticians deconstruct the images of violence in a voice-over. Then she turned her Columbia master’s thesis into the script for her first feature, The Loveless (1982), a gorgeous but inert biker movie that she co-directed with Monty Montgomery, who later produced movies for David Lynch. The Loveless is a stylized tale of a motorcycle gang that descends on a small southern town in 1959. Bigelow has called it “an amalgamation of Scorpio Rising, The Wild One, and Written on the Wind,” and it’s most notable for launching the career of Willem Dafoe, who was cast in the lead role.
In the film you can literally see Bigelow’s high-art theories finding physical substance in erotic images of Americana—from Brylcreemed hair, black leather and a slowly fondled Zippo lighter, to a brunette gamine in a red Corvette who’s destined to die with a gun in her mouth. With its static frames and painterly composition, The Loveless was conceived as a Sergio Leone western in biker drag, which accounts for the slow pace—something Bigelow would soon abandon with her signature style of kinetic action. But in the DVD commentary, calling the film a “haiku of itself,” she marvels at its “purity”—a word she later used to describe The Hurt Locker. (Bigelow still tends to use cerebral language even to dispute cerebral filmmaking: “I always think it’s more exciting to physicalize a character,” she once said, “than to make that character live only in a cerebral context.”)
