Kathryn Bigelow's BLUE STEEL (1989)

 With every pre-Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow film I see, getting a read on her undeniably impressive talent just becomes harder. In my latest viewing entry, 1989’s Blue Steel, I can see Bigelow in this first phase of her career aspiring toward something like a postmodern, feminist Sam Peckinpah, as improbable a cocktail as that might sound. It's the sense of poetry Bigelow brings to all of these otherwise familiar images of threat and violence that makes me think old Bloody Sam might have approved, as easy as it also is to imagine him muttering something under his breath about them allowing a broad behind a camera. On a storytelling level, however, Bigelow often seems to lack some sense of how get past the basic absurdity of her genre material, an instinct which could be particularly helped by a sense of humor. It’s for this reason that her recent pivot toward the reality of geopolitics and away from the pulpy sensibility of her most famous former creative and romantic partner seems welcome to me.
 Anyone overly interested in avoiding genre’s inherent potential for absurdity would probably be best served avoiding the screenwriting services of Eric Red, here teaming up with Bigelow for the second time after Near Dark (1987). The story the two come up with is full of echoes of what will always be Red’s most memorable creation, even more than Near Dark’s redneck outlaw vampires, Rutger Hauer’s title villain in The Hitcher (1986). Plucked from urban legend, and juiced up with the invincibility of current  screen boogeymen The Terminator, Jason, and Freddy, The Hitcher seems to have been resurrected here in the unlikely form of Manhattan commodities trader Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver). Though completely different in appearance from Hauer’s roadside hobo, this expensively coiffed and dressed character has the same modus operandi, fixing on and then obsessively pursuing a single person, in this case rookie NYPD officer Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis). As Megan empties her service revolver into a supermarket stick-up man (Tom Sizemore), we can see the watching Eugene, up to then among the innocent bystanders, snapping. After he manages to pocket the felled gunman’s piece, landing Megan in trouble with Internal Affairs, he begins to pursue her, first in courtship, and then in a slasher-style rampage that targets her friends and family.
Not surprisingly, Silver’s attraction to his quarry is overtly sexual, a dynamic that the same-sex relationship in The Hitcher, between Rutger Hauer and C. Thomas Howell’s young hero, could only nervously tiptoe around. The underlying idea, though, seems to come from the same dark place, and in just as disturbingly prophetic a fashion of later events in Red's life, after his career had long since subsided into a straight-to-video Hollywood Babylon. With this real-life connection, it's tempting to detect real insight in his scripts into the superhuman villains, but too often their obsessiveness and near-supernatural powers functions as no more than a free pass for lazy writing, waiving the screenwriter’s obligation to figure out how to allow his villains to return from apparent doom for another round with the hero. The Hitcher, and to a lesser degree Near Dark, transcended these problems by playing them out in eerily isolated desert settings where nearly anything seemed possible, but in Blue Steel’s urban jungle, they pile up like unpaid traffic tickets.

Blue Steel isn't about its villain, though, but Curtis' heroine, and for all of the flaws weighing down the movie around her, the performance still stands up as a proud moment for the actress and her director. Other than Frank Serpico, there aren't many believably more idealistic new police recruits than Megan Turner, and for an actress who's often seemed suspiciously unfeminine to a vigilant American public, this "woman in a man's world"  role is as good a way as any for Curtis to confront head-on perceptions of her. For Bigelow, too, who's even more often had to face down chick-flick expectations, Curtis' character now looks like one of Bigelow’s bolder stabs, alongside Angela Bassett's great, unfortunately non-career-making turn in Strange Days (1995), at creating a credible female action hero, as far away as possible from today’s "Halle Berry in fetish gear" paradigm. The action itself is all the more impressive now in its clear and confident staging, enough that I half wish I could have seen them in isolation, so that Bigelow really would seem like some latter-day daughter of Sam Peckinpah, investing far more of herself in these shootouts and chases than typically seems thought possible of these bread-and-butter movies.
Bigelow and Red's script doesn't make Curtis' protagonist wait very long before discovering her new boyfriend's true nature,  which leaves the story with nowhere to go except up against a brick wall of credibility that The Hitcher never had to worry about. And while I can easily imagine Larry Cohen, around the time of God Told Me To (1974) or Q: The Winged Serpent (1982), or Abel Ferrara following up Ms. 45 (1981) or Bad Lieutenant (1992), making a happily sleazy piece of pulp from the same story, Bigelow’s myth-making images just blow up all of its imperfections to a point past where they could be easily ignored. For one, there are the scenes involving the abusive marriage between Megan’s parents (Louise Fletcher and Philip Bosco), a subplot that might have seemed like a good idea but is so sketchily written as to increasingly undercut any claim the movie plausibly had to commenting on gender roles. And, as said before, The Hitcher provides exactly the wrong template for this story’s villain. Though Silver certainly manages to play a memorably creepy, repellent character, there’s little here that believably connects to what we might know or think we know about either serial killers or stockbrokers, even if drawing a line between the two professions might seem more appealing these days..

Whatever you might think of Point Break, Kathryn Bigelow’s follow-up three years later, its stew of Buddhism, surfboards, Nixon masks and Gary Busey somehow held together, and straddled a balance between acknowledging its own absurdity and taking itself seriously enough to work, in a way that seems beyond this movie. Blue Steel, though, now looks like a much less successful pass at the same basic theme- of a woman striving to get ahead in a male-dominated law enforcement establishment- taken up with so much more gravity and subtlety by Jonathan Demme in The Silence of the Lambs, also three years later. Not that I would expect, or even necessarily want, subtlety from Kathryn Bigelow. But as far as putting the lie to her quick anointment as a new master of action back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Blue Steel suggests some of the pitfalls I can only hope she’ll avoid in this second wave of her career. If nothing else, we can safely assume Eric Red (last responsible for writing and directing 2008’s Famke Janssen-starring 100 Feet) will play less of a role in it than before.Blue Steel willfully courts comparison with where Bigelow then was in that first breakout stage of her career, as a woman who causes male incomprehension and rage when she picks up their traditional prerogatives of violence and guns. Blue Steel’s failure doesn’t make me angry, but it does leave me not quite understanding where it all went wrong, and hoping that Bigelow, now, better understands that herself.