"Lick my injuries, bitches" -- Kathryn Bigelow has an Oscar for each gun; image courtesy of chroniclejournal.com
When I originally decided to do an entry on Juliette Lewis covering PJ Harvey’s “Hardly Wait” and “Rid of Me” in Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, it was to be written about in the spirit of righteous indignation. You see, Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker was nominated for Best Picture. Bigelow herself got a nod for Best Director. This is noteworthy because a) The Hurt Locker is awesome despite some minor problems and potential commonalities between it and the Lethal Weapon series, b) it was made for a pittance, and c) Bigelow is one of four women to be nominated for Best Director. And while Lina Wertmüller, Jane Campion, and Sofia Coppola preceded her, none of them won. So I was certain that James Cameron’s Avatar was going to take home those coveted Oscars.
But it didn’t! Bigelow won both awards last night. Cheers! Suck it, Cameron.
So, I haven’t seen Strange Days yet, as I didn’t get to it before the Oscars. Of Bigelow’s movies, it seems one most people are pretty “feh” about. All my friends seem to love Point Break and many critics champion Near Dark. I’ll get to all of these when I have the time. And from what I can gather from these scenes, Lewis’s Faith is very much to-be-looked-at by Ralph Fiennes’s protagonist Lenny Nero, a criminal who yearns to reunite with his ex-girlfriend. And she’s vulnerable to further objectification as the bad object I always try to problematize: the female singer shimmying about on stage without an instrument.
But I’d like to consider two other things about Bigelow and Harvey.
1. The foreboding attitude behind “Rid of Me” is somewhat poignant in the context of Bigelow’s career. Prior to The Hurt Locker, the last movie she made was 2002′s K19: The Widowmaker, which garnered disappointing reviews and box office returns. Though several other male contemporaries continued to work in that time, Bigelow couldn’t get a project greenlit. And she was only given $11 million to make The Hurt Locker, but clearly didn’t need billions of dollars to create the movie’s taut, gripping, visually spectacular action sequences. You may wish you never met me, but you’re not rid of me, Hollywood.
2. The discussion of Bigelow’s brief marriage to Cameron and how masculine her movies are suggests further kinship with Harvey. Harvey briefly dated Nick Cave in the mid-90s, and people draw comparisons between the two. People have also magnified the masculine quality of Harvey’s sound and lyrical approach, particularly early in her career. And like Harvey, Bigelow really wishes you’d stop focusing on her sex and gender in relation to her work.
While I can’t take emphasis away from these things, I can get excited at the influence these women may have on future generations of musicians and filmmakers. As Kristen at Act Your Age points out, director Emily Hagins may be a sign of things to come. Like Bigelow, who plays with conventionally “masculine” film genres, Hagins makes horror movies, which tend to be a dude’s game. I can’t wait to see and hear what is to come.
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