It wasn't until the last ten years that Kathryn Bigelow moved from being thought of as a director of slick genre pictures to one of the best craftspeople in the industry. Her Oscar wins for 2009's The Hurt Locker validated nearly thirty years spent making interesting, visceral entertainment and changed the course of her career completely. She also managed to shake off the shadow of her ex-husband, James Cameron, who loomed large over her career despite them only being married for two years.
Following a well-received but virtually unseen first feature in 1981, Bigelow would make a name for herself with the release of the neo-vampire action western Near Dark, where she showed an adeptness for mixing and matching genre tropes to create films that reside almost outside of classification.Yes, she is primarily thought of as an action director, but it's her kinetic style of filmmaking that leads people to that conclusion. Of her films, Point Break is the only one which fits comfortably and completely into the action genre, leaving the rest of her filmsopen to a good old fashioned genre debate.
One thing Bigelow's films nearly all have in common is that they are usually box office disasters. Only three of her ten filmsturned a profit theatrically—Point Break,Zero Dark Thirty, and The Hurt Locker, which turned a profit on its Oscar season re-release—and both Strange Days and K-19: The Widowmaker were such monumental flops they each derailed her career for several years. Thankfully a filmmaker's work isn't always judged by box office success, and Bigelow is one of those directors whose films are constantly being reevaluated and rediscovered by new generations.
Let's head back to the beginning of her career, when Bigelow released her first feature film mere months before her 30th birthday...
The Loveless (1981)
With her first film, Bigelow harkens back to the motorcycle gang films that had an explosion in the early 50s and again in the late 60s.The film would mark the official screen and starring debut of Willem Dafoe, following an uncredited role in Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, playing Vance, the leader of a rowdy motorcycle gang stopping over in the small backwoods town on their way to Daytona. They manage to cause all manner of trouble, simply for being who they are, though the real trouble begins when Vancetakes a liking to Telena (Marin Kanter), the daughter of a local business owner who wants the gang out of town.
The first nude scene in any of Bigelow's films comes 52 minutes into this flick, where we get a nice look at Kanter's keister as she lays on a bed following sex with Dafoe...
When her father tracks them down at the motel several seconds later, we get a quick flash of frontal as Marin hopsout of bed...
Though it doesn't really bear any of the Bigelow hallmarksthat would develop over the years, it's not without merit. Dafoe does his caged intensity thing well, though there's not the usual joy you find in Dafoe's work, understandably so given the dour subject matter—his love interest offs herself after killing her own father in the film's final moments. The film was selected to play at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1982, but languished another 2 years on a shelf before being unceremoniously dumped into theaters in early 1984.
Blue Steel (1990)
The cop thriller was a bustling genre throughout the late 80s and into the early 90s, so it makes sense that a female director would want to get in on the action and tell the story from a female cop's perspective. Blue Steel is a distinctly female take on the cop thriller,as Jamie Lee Curtis' Megan Turner is a rookie cop in a male dominated world. She is pursued throughout the film by Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver), a psychopath who stole a perp's gun during Turner's first big bust as a cop.
Inhis three-star review of the film, Roger Ebert likenedit to Curtis' big star-making turn in Halloween,as she plays a woman determined to fight back while being doggedly pursued by a seemingly unstoppable man. He also points out the obliviousness of most of the male authority figures in the film, showing that there is a uniquely feminine perspective to the film that's simply not present in other examples of this genre. There is a special disdain the film reserves for those oblivious male authority figures, demonstrating how Curtis' character must always be on the defensive because she has enemies on both sides of the law.
Late in the film, when Curtis and her love interest, Clancy Brown, head home to get busy after thinking they've vanquished Silver's malicious Hunt. However, he is lying in wait for them, showing up to sexually assault Curtis, who subsequently shoots him. As she kicks him off of her and rolls out of bed, we get a quick flash of Curtis' buns and bush...
It's telling that this is the only female nudity in the film and it's more or less accidental. Silver shows off everything as he is flung off of Curtis, and we see Clancy Brown's buns later when Curtis finds him on the bathroom floor. For my money, this is further proof that a woman was behind the camera, as this sort of thing wouldn't fly in your standard late 80s/early 90s cop thriller.
Point Break (1991)
If you're putting together a Mount Rushmore of action movies, I would sincerely hope that you would carve out a space for Point Break. In an inverse of Blue Steel, Bigelow now follows a male rookie cop into the testosterone-filled world of surfers, washed-up football players, bank robbers, and whatever it is that Gary Busey is doing in this movie. Keanu Reeves stars as Johnny Utah—a name that rivals Commando's John Matrix for best action protagonist name ever—a rookie cop assigned to a case of bank robbers known as the Ex-Presidents, due to their use of latex masks of former US Presidents during their robberies.
Teamed with Gary Busey's Detective Pappas, Utah is sent undercover to infiltrate a local group of surfers that Pappas thinks could be the Ex-Presidents. Here Utah meets his co-love interests. First is Lori Petty's Tyler, a half-baked love interest for Reeves who bolts the minute she finds out he's a cop—though not before giving us a flash of bush as she removes her bikini bottoms beneath a towel...
Utah's more substantial, albeit platonic, love interest is Bodhi, the leader of the surfers/bank robbers, played with beautiful grace and charisma by the late Patrick Swayze. I'm sure that many a Cinema Studies graduate thesis has deconstructed the super-charged homoeroticism on display in Point Break, but it really is worth pointing out that the only substantive relationship the film's two leads have is with each other. They're two sides of the same coin and it all builds to that glorious moment—brilliantly parodied in 2007's Hot Fuzz—where Johnny can't bring himself to shoot Bodhi and thus fires his gun into the air in an impotent rage while screaming through clenched teeth.
Again, all of that is in the subtext—barely—and the film is fraught with sexual tension more than it is with actual sex. The film's only nude scene proper comes during a bust gone bad where RHCP's Anthony Keidis famously gets shot in the foot. More famously, however, is when Keanu gets savaged by a fully nude Julie Michaels, who proceeds to kick the hell out of the rookie cop...
Seriously, if you don't love Point Break, we can never be best friends.
Strange Days (1995)
No film better predicted the ultimate corruption of technology than 1995's Strange Days. Set in the not-too-distant-future-at-the-time of 1999, the film revolves around this technology wherein people can put on a headset and experience, first hand, something that someone else has seen or done. It's not long, of course, before a black market pops up forsex and violent experiences, which is where Lenny Nero comes in.As played by Ralph Fiennes, Nero is a former cop who now peddles bootleg discs. One of his discs allows you to be a voluptuous woman who is getting some lesbian loving from Dru Berrymore...
Lenny soon stumbles on to a conspiracy when he receives a disc that appears to show a woman, Brigitte Bako, being sexually assaulted and murdered...
Because the technology allows you to also feel the emotional state of the person who was recording the material, this proves quite an unpleasant experience for Lenny. He soon uncovers a conspiracy involving the police and many of the men he used to work with, and it's up to him and Angela Bassett to stop them!
The film's emotional core is centered around Lenny's ex, Faith, played by Juliette Lewis. Lenny has a favorite disc he uses often showing him and Faith returning from the beach and her stripping down and taking a whore's bath...
Seeing the couple in happier times does Lenny a world of good, and he replays this moment of happiness as often as he gets the chance...
Later in the film, he's reunited with Faith, but this time Juliette Lewis' topless scene is shot in such a way as to indicate that Lenny's fantasy is gone and he's now seeing her in the cold light of reality. It's a really nice juxtaposition to the other scene, which he's probably replayed hundreds of times, if not more...
The Weight of Water (2000)
Following a five year hiatus in which she directed some television, Bigelow returned with her firstfilm based on previously published material. The Weight of Water is based on New England author Anita Shreve's book of the same name about a photojournalist in the present unraveling a mystery from the past, while also having to keep an eye on her philandering husband. The present day photojournalist Jean, played by Catherine McCormack, discovers some macabre secrets about a 19th century woman named Maren (Sarah Polley) who survived an attack that left two of her friends dead.
Jean's husband Thomas is played by Sean Penn, who has invited his brother Rich (Josh Lucas) and his brother's girlfriend Adaline (Elizabeth Hurley) to come along to New Hampshire for some fun in the sun while his wife is busy working. It doesn't take long for Adaline to begin messing with Thomas, a famous poet, by flattering him and sunning herself topless on the boat...
The first time that Jean notices Thomas eyeing up the topless Adaline is when she cools herself down with an ice cube...
The film, for the first time, takes a rather critical eye toward its female characters. Maren is harboring a dark secret—spoiler, she's the one who actually killed her two friends and she allowed another man to take the fall—while Adaline is clearly a toxic female presence, content to throw a monkey wrench in her boyfriend's brother's marriage with no second thought. The male characters are all rotten as well, don't get me wrong, but this is the first time that Bigelow really casts a squinted glance at her female characters.
Detroit (2017)
After a nine year hiatus, Bigelow came back in 2009 with The Hurt Locker, becoming the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar. She followed that up with Zero Dark Thirty, another critically acclaimed box office hit, the first and only film of her career to earn both of those distinctions. For her third collaboration with writer Mark Boal, Bigelow chose to dramatize the 1967 riots in the city of Detroit, wherein a group of racist police officers turned a routine complaint into a civil rights violation.
Bigelow and Boal's outrage over this incident is apparent in nearly every frame of this unflinching film, but it's easily the most emotionally draining film she's ever made. It's an intense and long film, with almost no levity and a committed cast that sell the horror of this situation. The film's only nudity comes under rather horrifying circumstances. Hannah Murray stars as one of a group of young people, both black and white, rounded up in a hotel following a prank gone wrong. One of the overzealous cops rips at her dress, tearing it off and briefly exposing her breasts...
Though she covers up, Murray spends the next several minutes topless before the cop is finally talked into letting her put on a shirt. Like so much of the nudity in Bigelow's films, it's not designed to titillate. If there's a common thread to the nude scenes in her film, it's that they're all done to prove a point within the overall narrative. Point Break and Blue Steel: Women are badasses who will beat you up—or kill you—without bothering to put clothes on. Strange Days: Technology will ultimately be corrupted and used mostly for porn or murder. The Weight of Water and Detroit: People can do really terribly things to one another when they're exposing themselves, or being exposed.
With no announced projects on the horizon, I sincerely hope we don't have to wait another five to seven years for another Kathryn Bigelow film. She's one of the sharpest, most incisive voices in film and we need more films from her.
Check out the Other Directors in Our Ongoing "SKIN-depth Look”Series
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Non-nudeimages via IMDb
