So, I read this last night and it really pissed me off. Salon managed to dig up a film writer, Martha Nochimson, who seems to have a serious issues with director Kathryn Bigelow, who's nominated for a Best Director Oscar for "The Hurt Locker."
...I'm still coming to grips with how a woman could possibly have dreamed up this spartan American soldier in Iraq, who, while obsessively romancing death as a bomb-squad ace, outdoes the most extreme images of machismo ever produced by mainstream America... But no cheers for Miss Kathy for breaking the glass ceiling by fabricating my worst cinematic nightmare. Quentin Tarantino, who should know better, having just directed a piercingly original ironic study of war and blood lust, dubbed Bigelow the "Queen of Directors" when she took the DGA award. I prefer the "Transvestite of Directors." Looks to me like she's masquerading as the baddest boy on the block to win the respect of an industry still so hobbled by gender-specific tunnel vision that it has trouble admiring anything but filmmaking soaked in a reduced notion of masculinity.
WOW. Let's not even talk about the trans phobia in that statement (trans men are "masquerading"???). It's jaw-droppingly shocking to me that in 2010 an educated person could basically write that a woman who makes a movie involving war and death, told from a male perspective, is only trying to suck up to Hollywood's male power structure. And I would think that a film professor would be familiar enough with Bigelow's body of work to know that she just likes to make action movies. Way to completely dismiss the entire career of one of this country's few successful female filmmakers.
I think that's really Nochimson's beef. She's trying to make a larger argument about what types of films, and filmmakers, are currently valued in Hollywood. (Is it really that insightful to observe that studios prefer movies with bombs over movies with long, drawn-out talky scenes? This is news?) And that's an excellent discussion to have, as part of a larger, continuing conversation about why things identified with "Male" are consistently valued over those identified with "Female."
But where Nochimson goes off the rails is when she appears to try to define "women's movies" and "men's movies" using assumptions that would make Phylis Schlafly proud. I'm a chick, so I should burn my copy of "The Wild Bunch"? (Yes, Martha, this feminist loves Sam Peckinpah. I'll wait while you clean up the shards of your exploded head.) I'm only supposed to like Nancy Myers movies? That sucks, because there's not much that will make me run faster from a multiplex than seeing the words "Nancy Myers" on a movie poster. I really don't understand how one could argue that gender-based stereotypes are hurting female filmmakers... and then use gender-based stereotypes to prove it.
And, for what it's worth, I think she's way off-base on "The Hurt Locker." I saw it as a depiction of one slice of the Iraq War, not a grand statement on that war or any war. The main character, Sgt. Will James (played by Jeremy Renner, also nominated for an Oscar), defuses IEDs and other bombs so that they won't kill hundreds of other people - not exactly a job most of us could do for long. I for one think that's a heroic thing. That's got zero to do with my opinion on the Iraq War. In this critique at least, Nochimson is unable to separate her distate for this war (maybe even all war) from the work of fictional characters, and it leads her to miss the point. She seems to be personally offended by Renner's Sgt. James, whose fatalism she confuses with machismo. (Hell, I'm glad there are Sgt. Jameses in the military. I hope there are a lot of them.)
And she has every right to dislike "The Hurt Locker." What she doesn't get to do, though, is belittle Kathryn Bigelow's right to tell whatever stories she finds to be meaningful, or tell me that my gender precludes me from enjoying them.
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