Comparing Bigelow to (e.g.) Zack Snyder shows the difference between someone who works with a style and someone who got stuck in one. Snyder takes a grimdark sense of coloring, action, and character that comes from, more than anything, nü-metal circa 2000, and he’s never gotten past that, he just keeps applying it to whatever story he gets. Bigelow’s style always comes from the 1980s, but shifts and adapts around her story and characters, she doesn’t use the style to flatten them, which is why Blue Steel is compelling in a way that (g. another e.) Cobra isn’t. Both are based on an aesthetics of gun/dick/power, but it’s genuinely dislocating in Blue Steel and just like every other 1980s movie in Cobra. When you let your style interact with the other materials of the film, all sorts of (like you said) ambiguities and diversities start cropping up.

To your second point, The context of the film provides a possible answer. If there is an aesthetic sense that separates 80s action films from their gritty, naturalistic 70s counterparts, its that there was a refinement of frenzied expressionistic editing techniques and saturated color palette that fetishized phallic potency. The camera placed an exaggerated emphasis on the form of the male body and its weaponized accessories in ways that erotically celebrated their form. BLUE STEEL both participates and critiques this trend, basically by gender flipping the protagonist and calling attention to the gender politics of its symbolism, yet simultaneously seducing the viewer with its erotic splendor. This leads, I think, to a larger political shift in how films have come to portray capitalism less as a system of economic rationality but as a practice of domination and power. The result, tying into @disqus_hde7I14XwM:disqus’s comment, allows for contemporary social norms to be displayed as mythic archetypes of authoritarian desire.

In short, Bigelow, I think, is kind of a modern equivalent of Fritz Lang, a director whose works reveal the totalitarian impulses in popular culture not through political discourses but through psychology evoked through evocative imagery and production design. Her works bask in the relationship between pleasure and power while questioning their general morality in the text.

First up, how amazing is Curtis? I grew up with her in movies enough to take her for granted, but once I started noticing her craft, I couldn’t stop. I can’t think of a single bad performance of hers. (It does slightly break my brain that she did this a mere four years before she went winking-dowdy for True Lies, though. Those roles seem farther apart in my mind than that.)

On the questions about the pacing of this movie and the structural issues with its action sequences (like how long the initial robbery took): how much of that do you think is editing? I was thinking about your (I think?) article about the Breaking Bad episode where Hank fights the Salamanca cousins, and how the editing cuts through events didn’t explicitly show to escalate the stress and adrenaline-soaked uncertainty of the situation. This movie, using that approach in a couple of these scenes could’ve solved several problems at once.

Do you think we as a larger society continue to be aware of the phallic undertones to guns and gunplay in cinema like we used to be? I get the sense that we aren’t, necessarily, and that the power-driven escapist fantasy has been absorbed into the mainstream enough that it’s “just” a path to power (or else “just” deeply scary). There’s a lot of subtext you wrote about here that was clearly understood in the mainstream critics’ circles that seem like they’d be more easily missed today, or at least considered more esoteric a read on a film.

Which, on that note: I haven’t seen this in ages; was there much of any economic class commentary in this? Hunt being Business Money’d seems like a deliberate choice, given that practically anyone could’ve hit his beats in the larger plot. It doesn’t really seem like a Bigelow move to have him from that background just for the trappings.

Imagine what Bigelow could’ve done with THE CORE and Hilary Swank piloting a giant powerful penetrating dick. And yeah, Point Break keeps its land setting in that mythical middle ground but also takes place in purely elemental Water and Air settings as well, which suits her needs perfectly.

More on this next time, but Point Break nicely gets around that problem by taking place in a detail-oriented but clearly mythical Southland. Like Die Hard, or The Core for that matter, it gives us permission to enjoy it on that mythical level, which leads all three films to some genuinely moving places.

This is an excellent observation and it makes me think of Bigelow’s older contemporary Walter Hill — his statement that all his movies are Westerns is an indicator that he’s working in mythical settings, whether they’re actually on the range or urban. Maybe Bigelow didn’t need to go full-on Streets of Fire here for her city, but it sounds like she needed some disconnect here. This is where cliches can be useful, if you say you’re in New York but you include something like a sassy newsboy or tough-talkin Brooklyn blue collar guy, you’re clearly in Movie New York and that’s a place where realism is sketchy.

Thanks! Taking your comments backwards:

Outside of seeing how aggressive he is as a trader (without any sense of the process) and his ability to take Turner to expensive restaurants and on helicopter rides, the class angle doesn’t come up. I’m actually OK with that, because again, Bigelow looks to be going for a sense of power here that transcends all our social categories, including class. Also, this came out the same year that American Psycho was published, and that pretty much ran the table on the convergence of violence and class.

Something that goes all through Blue Steel and has become largely forgotten in our age of mass shootings with AK knockoffs has been the sense that gun/dick/power is something that has to be controlled. Bigelow does so much with the images of holstering/unholstering and the sense of potential power. Like you said, it’s coming down to either just power or just fear, and at its best, this is a film about the necessary convergence of the two.

The editing could have improved the pacing; so could flat-out dropping some material. Lose all of the speeches by Silver (Rutger Hauer in The Hitcher would have been a lot less scary if he’d done that much yakking) and the second scene with Turner’s family and you’ve saved 5-10 minutes right there. The robbery scene, as Bigelow intended it, is pretty much impossible; she wants to show Turner’s escalating fear (and she does!) but that means she has to stretch the scene way past the breaking point.

Curtis is amazing, not just here but in general; that she did this and A Fish Called Wanda within, what, 18 months? speaks to her range. I also dig the way she keeps coming back to Laurie Strode as a kind of talisman for her career, because why not? It doesn’t limit her at all.

Here’s some things you can write about:
https://letterboxd.com/films/year/1932/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1932_in_music
https://www.goodreads.com/book/popular_by_date/1932

And here’s who’s writing!
TBD: BurgundySuit: Popeye
TBD: BurgundySuit: Scarface
TBD: BurgundySuit: The horrors of Betty Boop
TBD: Usernametoolong – Daïnah La Métisse and/or Million Dollar Legs
TBD: Joey Lee: I Was Born But…

Oct 18th: Miller: The Most Dangerous Game
Oct 25th: John Bruni: Trouble in Paradise
Oct 31st: vomas: White Zombie

And coming next month, 1997!

https://letterboxd.com/films/year/1997/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_in_music
https://www.goodreads.com/book/popular_by_date/1997

TBD: Wallflower: The Designated Mourner
TBD: Pico: Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
TBD: clytie: The Sweet Hereafter
TBD: Jacob Klemmer: Cop Land
TBD: Jake Gittes: Lost Highway
TBD: Jakes Gittes: The Butcher Boy
TBD: Jake Gittes: Eve’s Bayou

Nov 1st: Joseph Finn: Batman: The Long Halloween
Nov 2nd: Celeste Dobropolski: Selena
Nov 3rd: Babalugats: Cure
Nov 5th: Drunk Napoleon: Batman and Robin
Nov 6th: Son of Griff: LA Confidential
Nov 7th: Gillianren: Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion/Grosse Point Blank
Nov 8th: Persia: Boogie Nights
Nov 9th: Persia: Orgazmo
Nov 10th: Joseph Finn: My Best Friend’s Wedding
Nov 12th: Anthony Pizzo: George of the Jungle
Nov 14th: Celeste Dobropolski: Final Fantasy VII
Nov 16th: CM Crockford: Perfect Blue
Nov 19th: Drunk Napoleon: The Castle
Nov 22nd: Angelica Lyzette Garcia: Homogenic
Nov 26th: Wallflower, Drunk Napoleon, BurgundySuit, Miller, Ruck Cohlchez, and clytie: The Year in the Simpsons Roundtable
Nov 28th: Bhammer100: Oz
Nov 29th: Miller: Alien Resurrection
Nov 30th: Celeste Dobropolski: Good Burger