Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar win has provoked the kind of debate about feminism and film that hasn't been seen since Thelma & Louise

Published on Wednesday 17 March 2010 18:02

KATHRYN Bigelow's two-fisted victory at the Academy Awards for best director and best film for The Hurt Locker didn't just punch through Hollywood's seemingly shatterproof glass ceiling; it has also helped dismantle stereotypes about what kinds of films women can and should direct.

• Kathryn Bigelow was presented with the Best Director Academy Award by Barbra Streisand last week for The Hurt Locker. Picture: Getty

It was historic, exhilarating, especially for women who make movies and women who watch movies, two groups that have been routinely ignored and underserved by an industry in which most films star men and are made for and by men.

No matter if they're a source of loathing and laughter, the Oscars matter as a cultural flashpoint, perhaps now more than ever. All those Oscar viewers might not be ticket-buyers, but when they watched the show this year they would have heard, perhaps even for the first time, the startling, shocking, infuriating or uninteresting news – pick your degree of engagement – that Bigelow was the first woman in Oscar's 82 years to win Best Director. Real discussions about sexual politics don't usually enter the equation during the interminable Oscar "season," which is why her nomination was almost as important as her double victory.

Even before the nominations were announced on 2 February, as she picked up one award after another, including from her peers at the Directors Guild, people who don't usually talk about women and the movies were talking about this woman and the movies. Uncharacteristically, the issue of female directors working – though all too often not working – was being discussed in print and online, and without the usual accusations of "political correctness", a phrase that's routinely deployed to silence those with legitimate complaints. I don't think I've read the words women and film and feminism in the same sentence as much in the last few months since Thelma & Louise rocked the culture nearly two decades ago.

Written by Callie Khouri and directed by Ridley Scott, Thelma & Louise galvanised critics and audiences on its release in 1991. Time magazine put them on its cover and one very smart entrepreneur put them on T-shirts ("Thelma & Louise Live Forever"). Some critics embraced the film's portrait of a powerful female friendship, while others denounced it. In US News & World Report, a male writer accused the film of having "an explicit fascist theme, wedded to the bleakest form of feminism". Commentators seemed as interested in policing the women's behaviour, their hard-drinking and driving, as their criminal actions. Khouri insisted that Thelma and Louise were outlaws not feminists, though they were both.

Thelma and Louise didn't need to tote The Second Sex to confirm their credentials as feminist inspirations; the way viewers received the characters proved they were. The same goes for Bigelow, who doesn't like to talk about being a feminist touchstone – she doesn't need to, she has been one for decades – much less her role a female director. Her refusal, along with the types of movies she makes, have not always sat well with some. Like Thelma and Louise, Bigelow refuses to behave the way she's supposed to.

A recent failed takedown of Bigelow in the online magazine Salon, titled "Kathryn Bigelow: Feminist Pioneer or Tough Guy in Drag?" and written by Martha P Nochimson, exposes some of the issues at stake. The heart of Nochimson's critique is the charge that Bigelow and her "masterly" technique have been lauded while Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephron have endured "summary dismissal". The differences between how they have been received, Nochimson wrote, "reveal an untenable assumption that the muscular film-making appropriate for the fragmented, death-saturated situations of war films is innately superior to the technique appropriate to the organic, life-affirming situations of romantic comedy."

Putting aside whether Ephron's Julie & Julia is organic or crammed with artificial flavours, it's too bad Nochimson didn't choose a brilliant director who makes films about women, such as Jane Campion, rather than lesser talents like Meyers and Ephron, to make her argument. Because there is a valid point here: unless they star Meryl Streep, movies about women are routinely dismissed because they're about women, as the patronising term "chick flick" affirms every time it's reflexively deployed. But chick flicks are often the only films that offer female audiences stories about women and female friendships and a world that, however artificial, offers up female characters who are not standing on the sidelines as the male hero saves the day. It might not be much and usually isn't, at least in aesthetic terms, but it's sometimes all there is.

BIGELOW doesn't make those kinds of movies. (Her vampires don't sparkle, they draw blood.) She generally makes kinetic and thrilling movies about men and codes of masculinity set in worlds of violence. Her technique might be masterly, because she learned from the likes of Sam Peckinpah. But she is very much her own woman, and her own auteur. It's a shame that her success elicits such unthinking responses, though it's also predictable, because the stakes for women are high and the access to real filmmaking power remains largely out of their reach. But it isn't her fault that women's stories are routinely devalued any more than it's her fault that these days female directors and female stars in Hollywood are too often ghettoised in romantic comedy.

Some women in film help perpetuate this ghetto, when they should be helping dismantle it or walking away from it altogether. One of the lessons of Bigelow's success is that it was primarily achieved outside the studios. She had help along the way, including from male mentors, including James Cameron, her former husband, who helped produce Strange Days. But that movie did poorly at the box- office, as did her next two, The Weight of Water and K-19: The Widowmaker. It wasn't until she went to the desert to shoot The Hurt Locker, just as she had when she directed Near Dark, her 1987 cult vampire western, that she found a movie that was a hit on every level.

It was a long time coming, as Bigelow suggested when she appeared on the US TV show 60 Minutes at the end of February. Her appearance was a classic of its type. Bigelow explained to the apparently baffled presenter, Lesley Stahl, the meaning of scopophilia, a significant word in feminist film theory, though Bigelow kept gender out of her definition ("the desire to watch and identify with what you're watching"). She insisted that there was no difference between what she and a male director might do, even as she also conceded that "the journey for women, no matter what venue it is – politics, business, film – it's a long journey".

It's instructive that she didn't say it had also been a hard journey, because that might have pegged Bigelow as a whiner, as in "whiny woman". Unsurprisingly, she again had to share her few minutes with Cameron, whose name Stahl invoked within seconds of starting and not only because he had directed two of the largest hits in history, including Avatar. He was the ex-husband, a powerful director and a representation of male authority who could vet Bigelow. "How sweet is this to be head-to-head with your ex-husband," Stahl asked. "You couldn't have scripted it." Bigelow laughed. As she has these last months, she played it carefully. She seemed well-behaved.

HER cool has disturbed some, who have scrutinised Bigelow up and down, sometimes taking suspicious measure of her height and willowy frame, partly because these are the only personal parts of her that are accessible to nosy interviewers. Women in movies, both in front of and behind the camera, are expected to offer a lot more of themselves, from skin to confessions. All that Bigelow freely gives of herself for public consumption is intelligent conversation and her work. Her insistence on keeping the focus on her movies is a quiet yet profound form of rebellion. She might be a female director, but by refusing to accept that gendered designation – or even engage with it – she is asserting her right to be simply a director.

One of the strange truths of Hollywood is that women thrived in the silent era – Mary Pickford was one of the first stars and helped start a studio, United Artists – but soon after the movies started to talk in the late 1920s, women's voices started to fade, at least behind the scenes. Hollywood might have been partly built on the hard work and beauty of its female stars, but it was the rare female director, Dorothy Arzner starting in the 1920s, Ida Lupino beginning in the 1940s, who managed to have her say behind the camera. It hasn't got better. According to Martha M Lauzen, an academic who annually crunches numbers about women in American movies: "Women comprised 7 per cent of all directors working on the top 250 films of 2009. Ninety-three percent of the films had no female directors."

It's impossible to tell what Bigelow's Oscars will mean for her, much less whether it will help other women working in the US movie industry. Perhaps Sony studio co-chairwoman Amy Pascal, who once suggested to me in an interview that men were better suited to direct action movies, will pay Bigelow a lot of money to make another war film. Or she can sign up Kelly Reichardt, the director of Wendy and Lucy, for a buddy movie, but, you know, with women. Maybe Sandra Bullock will take all the goodwill and power she has rightly accrued and, with Oprah Winfrey, produce that Hattie McDaniel biography that Mo'Nique wants to make. Kristen Stewart can play Vivien Leigh, who appeared alongside McDaniel in Gone With the Wind, the biggest movie that Hollywood ever made and, you know, a total chick flick.