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Violence As Drug: Ranking the Films of Kathryn Bigelow

On the occasion of the release of Detroit, we look back at the filmmaker’s kinetic body of work.

Violence As Drug: Ranking the Films of Kathryn Bigelow
Photo: Annapurna Pictures

Filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow is obsessed with violence as an annihilator of individuality, often implying that extremists yearn for this effacement so as to connect with a primal and potentially collective id. There’s a straight line running from the vampires of Near Dark to the bank-robbing surfers of Point Break to Lenny and the mystery killer of Strange Days to Staff Sergeant William James of The Hurt Locker to Maya of Zero Dark Thirty. These are isolated wolves, whose gifts and egotism divorce them from a society to which they feel superior, as they seek a higher visceral purity.

Bigelow understands that the act of withholding character information can be revelatory, particularly in terms of showing how a fealty to violence dries people out in the tradition of all addictions. This thematic fixation tends to get Bigelow in trouble, especially her controversial use of a Chris Hedges quotation in The Hurt Locker insisting that “war is a drug,” which is as succinct a summary of the concern of Bigelow’s art as any that has been offered.

Bigelow’s art faces a paradox that’s familiar to the action filmmaker: She explores the commercializing of violence via the commercializing of violence. In the 1980s and 1990s, Bigelow’s striking aesthetic fused sinuous tracking shots with subjective point-of-view compositions to emphasize the narcotic, voyeuristic pull of cinema. This is explicitly the subject of Strange Days, which eroticized rape as an expression of the diseased resentment that’s exacerbated between the genders by a pop culture that endlessly promises objectified sex as a distraction from mass social atrocities. Astonishingly, Bigelow was accused in certain circles of glorifying rape. No doubt, these are the same people who thought that Zero Dark Thirty glorified torture.

The sophistication of Bigelow’s staging, and her refusal to allow her characters to utter comforting op-eds in their dialogue, prevent some viewers from recognizing the humanity that exists under her determination to express the thorny ambiguities of duress and exhilaration.


Violence As Drug: Ranking the Films of Kathryn Bigelow

10. Blue Steel (1990)

After witnessing the shooting of an armed robber, stock trader Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver) grows drunk on death and stalks Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis), the police officer who killed the criminal. His fixation on violence resembles a blossoming drug addiction and a transmittable mental disease, echoing the themes of Near Dark and anticipating the narcotic death wish that governs Point Break, Strange Days, and The Hurt Locker. The armed robber’s gun tumbles out of his hand as he dies and lands next to Eugene, suggesting a sick, shorn phallus. Picking the pistol up, Eugene implicitly seeks to undo a symbolic castration.

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Unaware of his true identity and motivations, Eugene is initially attractive to Megan because she believes that he isn’t intimidated by her profession, and so his derangement is a reprieve from the sexism and condescension that she routinely faces. It’s difficult not to interpret Megan’s plight as a form of autobiography on the part of Bigelow, the rare female action maestro. There’s a daring suggestion that Megan’s a cop so as to punish men; coming from an abusive home, she’s comfortable with men only from a distance. Curtis is superb, but Silver is a disaster, playing Eugene as a foaming wolf man who obliterates the film’s gender-minded ironies. Bigelow’s staging is sleek and atmospheric yet oddly rote. As in Strange Days, the filmmaker’s genre-film predilections eclipse her more ambitious conceits.


Violence As Drug: Ranking the Films of Kathryn Bigelow

9. K-19: The Widowmaker (2002)

Aesthetically, K-19: The Widowmaker is Bigelow’s least distinguished film, as the director succumbs to the cluttered, jargon-governed stodginess of one of the dullest of genres: the submarine thriller. Though based on a true story, in which an experimental Soviet nuclear sub is disastrously dispatched to the sea at the height of the Cold War so as to intimidate the Americans, K-19 feels like virtually every other submarine movie ever made. Bigelow relies on close-ups of men who turn knobs, read meters, and square off against each other in confrontations in which their senses of masculinity and honor are at stake, finding only fleeting opportunities to utilize her skill for tracking shots that render emotional violence a nearly tactile entity.

Thematically, however, K-19 exists within Bigelow’s auteurist wheelhouse, exhibiting the filmmaker’s unresolved relationship with authority. At certain points in the film, defectors from the Soviet Union’s chain of command are celebrated as humanists while other rebels are decried as traitors. The implication seems to be that one can buck the government if the person happens to be played by an icon like Liam Neeson or Harrison Ford, though the indistinguishable masses should be content to do as they’re told. Throughout her career, Bigelow has reveled in the power wielded by good and bad strong-people at the expense of the masses, though the power dynamics of K-19 are less ambiguous than inconsistent, so as to serve a formulaic narrative of male bonding under duress.


Violence As Drug: Ranking the Films of Kathryn Bigelow

8. The Weight of Water (2000)

An underrated, compellingly uncharacteristic film in Bigelow’s career, The Weight of Water suffers from over-ambition, juxtaposing a period murder mystery with a rarefied drama of sexual ennui and shortchanging both in the process. In the late 1800s, two women are brutally murdered on the Isles of Shoals, with the crimes’ sole witness, Maren (Sarah Polley), tearfully indicating a drifter (Ciarán Hinds) as the killer. In the present day, a photographer, Jean (Catherine McCormack), travels to the setting of the crime with her poet husband, Thomas (Sean Penn), and brother-in-law, Rich (Josh Lucas), and the latter’s girlfriend, Adaline (Elizabeth Hurley), who hits on Thomas with a ludicrous obviousness that everyone pretends not to notice. It’s a busy concept, which Bigelow never entirely brings to life, as the past and present stories fail to adequately complement one another. Perhaps sensing this, Bigelow offers a few literal-minded and unpersuasive crosscuts between the narratives late in the film.

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There are grace notes though. As she proved in Point Break, Bigelow has a gift for photographing the ocean, utilizing it as a metaphor for unruly passions. The Weight of Water’s eroticism is also unusually straightforward for a Bigelow film, as she drinks Hurley in with a hungry, somewhat comic lasciviousness that shames the ogling of Hurley’s male directors and inspires curiosity as to why the actor never quite caught on as a major star. Most important, however, is Polley’s performance. The actress invests Maren with a deep-seated bitterness and yearning that brings this woman’s unaddressed needs to ferocious life, leading to an unsurprising yet nevertheless unsettling conclusion. At the end, Maren succumbs to an all-consuming rage that both releases and further entraps her, clarifying why The Weight of Water might have appealed to a poet of self-obliteration.


Violence As Drug: Ranking the Films of Kathryn Bigelow

7. The Loveless (1982)

Bigelow’s feature-film debut, co-written and co-directed with Monty Montgomery, is an unusually convincing and vivid homage to the American outlaw biker films of the 1950s and ’60s. Following a group of 1950s-era bikers in full Wild One drag as they smoke, fuck, and fight while stranded in a nowhere Southern town, The Loveless mines the period-specific trappings for repressed sexual frustration, as the bikers and locals find themselves in frequent conflict over the local women.

Bigelow and Montgomery emphasize the phallic nature of switchblades, beer and soda bottles, cigarettes, and eventually guns, as self-consciously and often amusingly hard-boiled dialogue gradually attains an aura of authentic contempt. The barroom climax anticipates the central set piece of Near Dark, and the career of Quentin Tarantino is unthinkable without this film’s distinctive mixture of aggression, pop-cultural adulation, and flakey comedy. Even portions of David Lynch’s work might owe a debt to The Loveless, particularly Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart, the latter of which features Montgomery, who also famously appeared as The Cowboy in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. This luscious faux-Technicolor film also abounds in Bigelow’s fluid pacing and framing, and is ripe for rediscovery.


Violence As Drug: Ranking the Films of Kathryn Bigelow

6. Strange Days (1995)

Strange Days now scans as a prescient examination of how the internet has separated us into our own consumptive little realms, reducing our collective humanity, while also suggesting a test run for dramatizing the sort of mass societal siege that concerns Detroit. The web was still in its infancy in 1995, though Bigelow’s visualization of the co-mingling of cinema and violence as a designer drug—a pervading occupation of her career—now suggests online videos, particularly pornography. In the film, snuff footage can be uploaded into the mind, allowing a viewer to experience taboo sensations from a safe distance, and we’re told this technology arose from an experiment in refashioning body cameras for police, which leads to the unendingly relevant concept of the suppression of people of color by militarized law enforcement.

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The L.A. riots, which exploded out of the acquittal of the police who beat Rodney King, cast a long shadow over Strange Days, indirectly anticipating the similar concerns of racial caste and power that fuel Detroit. Bigelow brilliantly envisions the near-future city as having devolved into a casually endless wave of violence. Portions of this film achieve a total realization of Bigelow’s sensually fluid aesthetic of aggression: Tableaux of streets engulfed in revelers as people of color are shackled and beaten are among the most disturbing and astonishing moments of her career, punctured with blasts of simulated snuff that merge the filmmaker’s predilections for first-person perspectives with sculpted tracking shots. Yet, the film also tells a laborious and uncharacteristically preachy story of a redeemed private eye, and the notion of white police being held accountable for the murder of black citizens is one fantastical concept too many.


Violence As Drug: Ranking the Films of Kathryn Bigelow

5. Near Dark (1987)

Bigelow’s second film revels in the irony of vampires sucking dry cowboys who, themselves, plunder land for resources. A blossoming vampire drinks from his lover/mentor’s wrist as they stand underneath an oil rig, and, earlier, a mosquito famously lands on the protagonist’s arm in close-up, the insect’s stinger resembling an oil drill.

Near Dark’s cast is composed of veterans of Bigelow’s future ex-husband James Cameron’s recent Aliens: Lance Henriksen and Jenette Goldstein are bad-ass daddy and mommy vamps, while Bill Paxton plays one of his comically hot-headed wild cards, walking away with the film in the process. Most hauntingly, Joshua Miller plays an ancient vampire who’s stuck in the body of a young boy.

Bigelow offers beautiful and terrifying images that bleed into one another with diaphanous finesse, particularly of Henriksen’s character as he’s draped over a payphone, blocking the exit of a bar that’s about to know unspeakable carnage. Denied death, the vampires are trapped, as they stand in refutation of Bigelow’s sinuous, gliding formalism, which celebrates death as release from stricture. In Point Break, Bigelow’s characters would find something in-between mortality and immortality, risking death as an intoxicating break from life, and the filmmaker’s poetry would soar to new heights.

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Violence As Drug: Ranking the Films of Kathryn Bigelow

4. Detroit (2017)

Bigelow’s recreation of the 1967 Detroit riot is one of the most remarkable achievements of her career. The terror of the film resides in the filmmaker’s seemingly casual mastery in depicting banal, hellish chaos. A devoted practitioner in the art of physicalizing political and emotional textures, Bigelow renders contemptibly laughable the notion that America’s epidemic of racism is debatable or “solved.”

As in The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow’s camera seems to be everywhere at once, incorporating montage that often seems to instantaneously compress the foreground and background of images, tracking the dangers that abound in a city that’s ready to eat itself alive. Detroit has the most evocatively hot and gnarly landscapes of the filmmaker’s career, and she follows, with characteristic fluidity, the black men and women of 12th Street as they flee the white police force that descends on them with authoritarian fervor.

No prior American film has ever so viscerally dramatized the possibility that no one in your society will help you—and that many are out to get you. (For this, white audiences may find this film more shocking than people of color.) Bigelow’s supreme career ambition, to render violence consumable to a public as a method of protesting said violence as well as said consumption, reaches its highest form of expression in Detroit. She rubs our noses in African-American powerlessness, and in the sexual fear and resentment that drives the empowered police to torture and kill, leading to a daring and troubling recreation of the beating and killing that occurred at the Algiers Motel. This sequence is Detroit’s heart of darkness, and Bigelow stretches the sequence out to such a purposefully interminable degree that we feel as if we’re witnessing the ordeal in real time, trapped.

Detroit seeks to clear the figurative room of the saber rattling of the culture wars, which distract us from the cruelty that’s part of the bedrock of America’s formation and governance. Written and directed by Caucasian filmmakers, Detroit views a racial atrocity through the prism of white guilt. Bigelow attempts a purging, a reckoning of awareness, and this is where she also runs into trouble, as her anger shortcuts her lucidity and characteristic distrust of overt editorializing.

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The fascist pain junkies of Bigelow’s cinema are usually presented matter-of-factly, but the cops of Detroit are demons straight out of a horror film. If Bigelow had managed to see the cops through a lens of affected dispassion, or even empathy, she might’ve achieved a piece of protest art as scalding and unshakable as Pasolini’s Saló.


Violence As Drug: Ranking the Films of Kathryn Bigelow

3. The Hurt Locker (2008)

The Hurt Locker is a relentless film that punishes the audiences for savoring its thrills. Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) is positioned in Baghdad as a team leader supervising the disarming of IEDs during the Iraq War. A traditional Bigelow iconoclast and adrenaline junkie, he frequently endangers his fellow soldiers so as to defuse bombs his way, often cutting himself off from his team and engaging in a battle of wills with the devices themselves.

After the comparatively anonymous staging of The Weight of Water and K-19, Bigelow rediscovers her hair-trigger timing, using montage to establish the escalating danger of the Iraqi war zones as the bombs become more elaborate and grotesque. In one of the film’s most terrifying images, James disarms a bomb only to find another wire, pulling it to unearth a web of interconnected explosives underneath the sand below him—a resonant embodiment of the combustible chain reactions that dominate The Hurt Locker.

The bomb-defusing set pieces are initially exhilarating, but Bigelow keeps returning to them and in the process wears out her audience. The Hurt Locker has no sense of down time, and little sense of beauty, except for a shot of a sunset that inspires pitiful gratitude on our part. Throughout, we’re stuck with James, a chain-smoking drinker whose emotional thermometer is always in the red.

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Bigelow and Boal don’t speculate as to whether the war made James this way or merely allows inherent predilections to find their natural water level. That sort of psychology has never been of interest to Bigelow, who specializes in dramatizing the political via the physical. The filmmaker is occupied with the oscillation of violence between disreputable excitation, numbness, and awfulness. She paints a portrait of sensory exhaustion—of extremis that renders the rest of life puny by comparison. James isn’t a sentimental renegade like Point Break’s Bodhi. By this point in her career, Bigelow understands that endless, thoughtless iconoclasm is a different kind of prison.


Violence As Drug: Ranking the Films of Kathryn Bigelow

2. Point Break (1991)

Among the most intense and beautiful of American action movies. F.B.I. agent Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) goes undercover as a surfer to ingratiate himself with a cabal of bank robbers led by Bodhi (Patrick Swayze), a poser whose philosophies of pacifism and individuality mask a streak of authoritarian self-absorption. Yet Bodhi’s fascination with courting death gives him a stature that complicates his hypocrisy. Bigelow’s at once critical of Bodhi and drunk on his magnetism, and how could she not be? Bodhi is Swayze’s most graceful and indelible creation, a sexy and poignant embodiment of the barely perceptible line that exists between revolution and corruption.

Like Near Dark and Zero Dark Thirty, this film follows an outsider who stumbles into a netherworld that seeks to operate above death by embracing its proximity. Point Break is the epitome of Bigelow’s poetry of suspension, of annihilation as transcendence, and the weightlessness of her sky-diving and surfing set pieces contrasts with the visceral, pounding corporeality of her gun fights and foot chases. Perhaps Bigelow recognized Near Dark’s central flaw: that the human hero wasn’t tempted to join the vampire clan. The filmmaker solves that problem in Point Break, forging a love story in which two daredevils get a whiff of each other and recognize kindred spirits, enacting a sweet, fleeting dance of simpatico bravado.


Violence As Drug: Ranking the Films of Kathryn Bigelow

1. Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

Continuing what The Hurt Locker initiated, the film further de-tethers Bigelow’s increasingly abstract aesthetic from the strictures of genre. Zero Dark Thirty snatches a ripped-from-the-headlines premise—the hunting and killing of 9/11 architect and al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden in 2011—and dries it out, fashioning a universal parable of the quest to contain and resolve the uncontainable and unresolvable. In this fashion, the film’s reminiscent of procedurals such as All the President’s Men, Munich, and Zodiac, as these productions share an obsession with obsession itself, as well as a distrust of American ego.

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Bigelow rhymes the behavioral intricacies of the torture sessions at the C.I.A’s Middle Eastern “black” sites with the bureaucratic procedure of conventional white-collar office meetings, showing how the two blur in operatives’ minds to inure them to the moral implications of their actions. (This acknowledgment of the numbing of perspective in the face of chaos runs through Bigelow’s oeuvre.) The true protagonists here are the webbed global infrastructures that nabbed bin Laden, as the human characters are purposeful sketches. The film is staged as a nightmare of jargon and ultraviolence, courting tedium and confusion to show how these jobs grind people down into cogs within an expanding machine of surveillance and suppression. There isn’t a narrative in a traditional sense, as characters appear and disappear and leads surface and evaporate with maddening randomness over a period of years that seem to elapse in a matter of minutes.

Zero Dark Thirty is Bigelow’s ultimate portrait of violence as an eradicator of human specificity, and her sharp, jittery editing syntax suggests the omnipresent dread that characterizes modern life—until the climactic killing, when she reinstates the supple formal fluidity of her early films, giving the audience formal beauty as an illusory reprieve from the uncertain opaqueness of her expositional standoffs. Watching as the United States grows increasingly desperate to find bin Laden and reinstate its sense of powerfulness to the world, we realize with dawning horror that he was successful beyond his wildest dreams, helping to detonate America’s self-illusion of democracy.

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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