Kathryn Bigelow’s Big Win
Last night Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to ever win the Academy Award for Best Director. As you may know, the film industry is essentially a Boys Club and if you didn’t know, well, I’m afraid it is. Though this is certainly a great achievement, a ‘milestone’, not only for women, but the industry as a whole, I can’t help but be a bit of a skeptic. As a female in the film industry, I still find it a little disconcerting that the film Bigelow was honored for, The Hurt Locker, which follows a bomb disposal team in the Iraq War, covers a very masculine topic. However, as I am writing this, I see scientia sexualis all over such a generalization. It is not a tale of men and carnal bloodshed, but an incredibly human story about a very socially relevant event. Is war such male territory, if we disregard the statistical aspects of actual combat? Just because it’s about bombs and men and war the story certainly doesn’t detach itself from women. Politics aside, this is a great feat and I thought it was an interesting question to raise.
AP Photo/Matt Sayles
In his review of the film, Roger Ebert comments on how the dismantling of a bomb has been shown so many times in cinema, but never with such humanity and perhaps that is due to the female touch. But maybe it’s something independent of gender. I am reminded of something Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own: “It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.” Why is the film industry predominantly male, even today? I’m not sure, but perhaps it can really benefit from a little more ‘woman-manliness’ or ‘man-womanliness’.
Tags: film industry, Kathryn Bigelow, scientia sexualis, Virginia Woolf, women
March 9th, 2010 at 1:18 pm
It’s been argued that Virginia Woolf gained such wide recognition in her time mostly because she imitated/mimicked/adopted a masculine writing style. Does that mean to say that serious topics like philosophy and war are exclusively male domains?
March 9th, 2010 at 1:59 pm
Well, I certainly wouldn’t think so. If she did, say, adopt a masculine writing style I can only speculate that it was out of necessity–she saw a male dominated world and in order to penetrate it she needed to join the club, so to speak. Certainly philosophy and war and all such things are topics that benefit from reflections of both genders. Maybe because of certain societal standards, for women’s opinions on these matters to enter a larger public forum, they would need to dress them up a bit in a manner of speaking that had historically already been associated with seriousness, astuteness and deep intellect.
March 16th, 2010 at 8:52 am
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/movies/14dargis.html?ex=1283922000&en=dd1368ec5b2c37ad&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=MO-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M140-ROS-0310-HDR&WT.mc_ev=click