Kathryn Bigelow: An outsider looking in

In the old-boys club that is modern Hollywood, there are few surer ways to kill off a promising film career than by getting yourself labeled a “feminist” director.

Over the years, Kathryn Bigelow has quietly steered clear of that facile epithet, even while many film critics and academics have insisted that her movies cry out to be examined through the twin lenses of gender and genre.

But on the evidence of her latest movie, the taut war thriller “The Hurt Locker” -- a front-runner for this year’s Oscar for best picture -- Bigelow deserves to be recognized as one of cinema’s most astute analysts, male or female, of masculine identity. And although her perspective shouldn’t be tagged as “feminist,” it’s one that shakes up traditional notions of what men are and how they behave, whether on a battlefield, in the depths of a nuclear submarine or surfing off Malibu.

Purist admirers of Bigelow’s kinetic camera work and visceral storytelling might scoff at such Freudian esoterica. Although her movies have been relatively low-budget, non-studio affairs, they mostly fit the mold of action-genre pictures.

Some of her earlier films, such as “Blue Steel,” “Point Break” and “Strange Days,” shared certain stylistic tics and tropes with the works of the alpha-male auteurs who wrote, produced and/or executive-produced them, including Oliver Stone and Bigelow’s ex-husband, James Cameron (whose “Avatar” may be “Hurt Locker’s” chief Oscar rival). Over time, however, her movies have grown more narratively assured and psychologically penetrating, while no less intense.

(In her adjoining essay, my Times colleague Betsy Sharkey makes the case for viewing Cameron as a kind of stealth feminist filmmaker. Perhaps what his and Bigelow’s parallel, partially intertwined careers suggest is a growing fluidity and flexibility in how gender perspectives function in film.)

Critics often have focused on Bigelow’s evident appetite for loading up her movies with guns and steel, car chases and loud, baroque explosions. Well, why shouldn’t she? Violent imagery in art never has been an exclusively male preserve, even if a Bigelow or an Artemesia Gentileschi seems to come along only once every generation.

But this emphasis on the macho technical trappings of Bigelow’s films is misleading. Unlike so many of her male colleagues, Bigelow isn’t drawn to big bangs and mano a mano encounters simply to stoke the hormones of 14-year-old boys.

Her deeper interest lies in men’s tribal rites and rituals; their fears, posturings and warrior codes; their feelings about sex and fatherhood; their conflicted loyalties and clashing ideas of what leadership and heroism mean. Like one of her inspirations, the ultra-bloody Sam Peckinpah, Bigelow is intimately concerned with the bonds that connect men with each other, and the values that connect them with themselves.

At the center of it all, in so many of Bigelow’s films, are men (and occasionally women) trapped in alien landscapes and disorienting spaces, trying to reconcile the tension between their professional duties and the adrenaline rush of living on the edge. Like the playwright David Mamet’s male characters, Bigelow’s struggle with the knowledge that they are defined and perceived more by what they do than by who they really are.

These are themes that Bigelow has returned to throughout her career: in “Blue Steel” (1989) with Jamie Lee Curtis playing a cop battling sexism and a serial killer; in “Point Break” (1991), which stars Keanu Reeves as an undercover FBI agent infiltrating a criminal gang of Zen surfer dudes; and in “K-19: The Widowmaker” (2002), with Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson as rival Soviet submarine commanders, coping with a secret mission gone lethally wrong.

In “Hurt Locker,” Bigelow’s deconstruction of the masculine persona finds a perfect expression in the film’s main character, U.S. Army Sgt. William James, played by Jeremy Renner. An explosive-ordnance disposal expert, Sgt. James has been assigned to lead a three-man team in Baghdad whose job is to find and either dismantle or detonate so-called improvised explosive devices in post-invasion Iraq. (Warning: spoilers ahead.)

Like the lethal bombs he must deactivate, Sgt. James is a potent mix of stable and unstable elements. Fittingly, he shares a name with one of the founding fathers of the American philosophy of pragmatism, which holds that the test of whether an idea is good or bad is whether it actually works in the real world. (Screenwriter Mark Boal, who based the film on his experiences as an embedded journalist, confirms that the name is an inside joke.)

Sgt. James is a serial risk-taker, a danger addict whose comradely bonhomie camouflages an explosive personality. His daredevil artistry impresses his military superiors but scares the wits out of his more cautious squad mates, played by Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty. While Sgt. James focuses on his deadly task with a surgeon-like intensity and precision, the scene around him fairly bristles with anxiety. Bigelow turns up the fear with vertiginous panning shots of the surrounding rooftops, where snipers may be lurking, or someone waiting to set off a bomb with the mere push of a cellphone button.

In short, Sgt. James is a more extreme version of a familiar figure in Bigelow’s movies: the man of action who imagines himself to be firmly in control, but suddenly finds himself in a situation beyond his abilities.

Bigelow’s attitude toward such characters is invariably one of empathy and discernment. At the same time, by depicting men struggling, and sometimes failing, to master their environments, her movies subvert the conventional audience expectation of being able to identify with a strong male protagonist, says Amanda Howell, a film scholar at Griffith University in Australia.

In this way, Howell says, “The Hurt Locker” contrasts starkly with many combat films of the latter post-Vietnam era, such as Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo films and “Top Gun” (1986). The invincible John Rambo and the swashbuckling rebel pilot played by Tom Cruise marked the start of an effort by Hollywood to reclaim the figure of the heroic U.S. soldier following the national trauma of Vietnam.

One of the most interesting strategies of “The Hurt Locker,” Howell observes, is the way the movie’s two most traditionally heroic characters, played by big-name actors Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes (the anti-heroic star of Bigelow’s “Strange Days”), both are killed within minutes of their appearance. That forces the audience -- and, perhaps especially, the male audience -- to seek identification with the less-chiseled and charismatic Sgt. James.

Sgt. James isn’t bitter, wounded or psychotic, like many characters in early post-Vietnam movies (“The Deer Hunter,” “Coming Home,” “Taxi Driver”). But neither is he a trigger-happy killing machine. Instead, he’s a new type of screen “hero” for a new era of citizen-soldiery. From his own perspective, he’s a man doing his courageous best to finish the job at hand, displaying what the classical Greeks thought of as the manly virtue of techne, or technical skill.

Yet the audience comes to understand that Sgt. James has been condemned to wage a fight with no clear long-range objective, a confusing “forever war” in which it’s difficult to tell who his adversaries are, let alone determine where they’re hiding. Achilles and Odysseus had their issues, but at least they always knew who was trying to kill them.

Sgt. James’ predicament obviously speaks to the United States’ current challenge in battling shadowy insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. More broadly, it reflects a crisis of male identity in having to navigate a course between conformity and duty, and creative individuality and rebellion. Susan Jeffords, a professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Washington Bothell and the author of “Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era,” identifies this dilemma as a fundamental “bifurcation of expectations of men in American culture.”

Despite its ambivalent view of masculine identity, “The Hurt Locker” still belongs to the most guy-centric of all movie genres. As Howell points out, the war picture still is a place where primarily male characters and male audiences can go to test their values, belief systems and relationships to institutions, history and country. In that sense, the war movie remains a cultural citadel of male privilege.

Now, by asserting her right as an artist to enter into that combat zone, Bigelow has established herself as one of the gutsiest filmmakers around.

reed.johnson@latimes.com