Content area
Full Text
Examining Kathryn Bigelow's movement from independent countercinema to mainstream Hollywood, this article compares The Loveless and Near Dark to Blue Steel and Point Break and discusses how Bigelow's work balances contradictory issues of gender and ideology.
Kathryn Bigelow s first four films (The Loveless, 1982; Near Dark, 1987; Blue Steel, 1990; Point Break, 1991) represent a trajectory that spans independent countercinema to mainstream Hollywood. In an attempt to foreground the relationship between alternative cinema and mainstream film, I intend to argue that the narrative techniques of Bigelow's early films, which countered dominant cinematic codes, are incorporated and worked over in the films she directs in Hollywood. By positioning her early works of countercinema, The Loveless and Near Dark, as platform texts and examining them in relation to Blue Steel and Point Break, I suggest that, in Hollywood, this director is developing or responding to certain opposirional ideologies she established as central in her formative work.1 Furthermore, Bigelow's directorial presence both engages and problematizes auteur theory, one of the few existing tools for conceptualizing cinematic authorship. The division between mainstream and countercinema-which film theorists as varied as Claire Johnston and Kaja Silverman have been in a long process of deconstructingoffers a rather nonproductive route for theorizing authorship and feminist aesthetics,- Instead, I suggest that we view the careers of women directors such as Bigelow as a process in which their independent and Hollywood films are seen in dialogue with each other.
Roland Barthes's pronouncement of the death of the author in 1973, in which he called instead for the birth of the reader, affected feminist scholarship in contradictory ways. On the one hand, feminists began to pay more attention to theories of spectatorship and to bolster their own methodologies such as "reading against the grain." On the other hand, the author's death came at an inopportune time for feminists. Just as a few women were gaining some access into commercial and independent filmmaking, auteurism became an outdated tool with which to theorize meaning, identity, and textual production.3
But feminism and gay/lesbian studies, in tandem with ethnic and race studies, maintain an investment in political agency that precludes full acceptance of poststructiiralist edicts. Michel Foucault looks to the day when "behind all these questions we would...