ScreenWize

The dramatic opening scene of the 1995 film Strange Days features Ralph Fiennes plugging himself into another man’s reality. Whilst sitting on his bed with his eyes closed, Fiennes starts up a special device that enables him to take a vivid ride through someone else’s memory of a violent armed hold-up that ends with a wild chase across the rooftops.

Strange Days was written by James Cameron (who’s latest film Avatar has just been nominated for nine Oscars), and was directed by Kathryn Bigelow (who’s latest film The Hurt Locker has also been nominated for nine Oscars). The two filmmakers – who go head to head with their filmsin seven categories at next month’s Academy Awards ceremony – were married at the time they created Strange Days, and if you want to understand the starting point for the differences between Avatar and The Hurt Locker, and indeed the two directors themselves, you need go no further than three sentences on the first page of the script for Strange Days. As the “trip” that Ralph Fiennes is experiencing as one of three robbers gets underway, the screenwriter gives clear instructions to the director: “WE ARE ONE OF THESE GUYS. Real honest-to-God point of view, with no cuts, no music. This is not film, it is human experience.”

Cameron – a Canadian, and son of an electrical engineer - has always been obsessed with how technology can enhance the human experience – both in his storyworlds and in his moving-making craft. His movies – from The Terminator and Aliens to The Abyss and Avatar are dominated by a sense that technological enhancement of the body or mind is the ultimate source of power. Indeed, the idea is present in his earliest work. After teaching himself special effects whilst studying physics at college, Cameron made an incomplete 12-minute short called Xenogenesis in 1978. Set in the future, a female human called Laurie battles a giant robot while her helpless male colleague hangs over a precipice. Laurie can overcome the robot only because she is strapped into a huge mechanized exoskeleton that she controls with her own movements. It’s a clear prototype of the powered cargo-loader suit that Sigourney Weaver uses to fight the extraterrestrial Queen in Cameron’s Aliens, and of the exo-skeletal weapons system that Colonel Quaritch uses in Avatar against the technologically disadvantaged Na’vi.

In The Terminator Cameron shifts the machine inside the skin of Arnold Schwarzenegger - a cyborg on a mission to destroy the human race. And in Avatar Cameron takes the idea further, with his hero Jake – a crippled marine – first plugging into the body of another creature to become resurrected, and then – as this dual mind/body combination – plugging into the most powerful flying beast on the planet Pandora, so he has the ability to become saviour of his newly adopted people. For Cameron, technology - whether mechanical or biological - enables the mythic to occur.

By stark comparison, Kathryn Bigelow has preferred to stay at the level of the psychological. If Cameron’s thrill in Strange Days is in the idea that it is possible to become another person and go on their wild journeys, Bigelow’s focus is to bring the full impact of the ride to the viewer, and she transforms Cameron’s less than average screenplay with her highly energetic approach to directing. Frequently on record for stating that she likes high-impact films that get the adrenaline going, Bigelow commented in 1990 after making Blue Steel (about an obsessive female cop hunting down a psychopath): “I respond to movies that get in your face.” And hers certainly do.

After formal training as a painter, Bigelow went to film school and in the same year Cameron created his naïve Xenogenesis, she made a 20-minute short called The Set-Up. It is a strangely academic deconstruction of the seductive power of cinematic violence, and her films frequently combine this understanding with a painterly approach to composition and colour. Before Strange Days, Bigelow had made films about bored and violent bikers (The Loveless), bloodthirsty hillbilly vampires (Near Dark), and vindictive criminal surfers (Point Break), steadfastly refusing to follow other female directors in the direction of romance or relationship drama. Although many commentators label her as an action/sci-fi director, she has always been less interested in genre than cinema’s effect on the heart-rate, and as her career has progressed she has become more skilled at knowing how to use the aesthetic at the service of provoking a response. The Hurt Locker (which opened last year’s Canberra International Film Festival) is the most refined and exquisite example of this. It is 133 minutes of beautifully shot, nail-biting tension as we, the viewer, become the central character in a bomb-disposal unit in Iraq, walking slowly towards a bomb with all the knowledge that - at any moment - life might end.

Bigelow’s single-minded intention with The Hurt Locker is spelled out in a quote at the start of the film:
“The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”
Using a carefully constructed combination of multi-camera cinematography, forceful editing and intense sound design she controls everything on screen to bring us the rush. There’s no technology here, and no grand attempt at the mythic or even the political – despite the setting of contemporary war-torn Baghdad. Bigelow – more than any other director working at the moment – knows how to make you feel. It’s not her characters that get plugged into an immersive world – it’s her viewers. And with The Hurt Locker she makes the world you’re in as realistic as possible.

Cameron’s films are often accused of being visual masterpieces with shallow stories, and Avatar with its narrative pitched at the level of a young teenager, is no exception. Yet, like one of his own characters, Cameron has used the latest technologies – especially 3D image capture – to produce something extraordinary. It will be a long time before anyone matches Jake’s sublime nighttime walk through the rainforests of Pandora for a cinematic experience. Audiences around the world agree: costing close to US$300 million to make, the film has taken more than US$2 billion at the worldwide box-office. Even with the Best Film category expanded to ten films, it’s unlikely that any other can compete with Avatar for this prize. The Hurt Locker has been nominated in this category, but made for a mere US$15 million, and having taken only US$16 million around the world after a stuttering distribution strategy, it’s hardly a producer’s celebration. But when it comes to Best Director, there’s only one clear choice. Kathryn Bigelow deserves to become the first female director ever to take home that little golden statue.

Filed Under: Essays by Simon