Sway of the sea: Kathryn Bigelow’s imperial eco-eschatology

ABSTRACT

This article expands on the condemnatory Leni Riefenstahl/Kathryn Bigelow association made by Naomi Wolf in 2013, through a consideration of aesthetics, landscapes and ecology, and potential parallels between Bigelow‘s work and Riefenstahl‘s earlier ‘Mountain Films’ period. Bigelow reaches for a feminised, New Age mysticism through which her characters are momentarily lifted out of their mundane earthly concerns to commune with the wider universe. This is considered particularly with respect to Point Break. In Last Days of Ivory, Bigelow advocates for military action in the name of conservation, on the disputed grounds that the illegal ivory trade funds Al-Shabaab. The blatantness of Bigelow’s propaganda in Last Days of Ivory, which chimed with Hillary Clinton’s position on the same (a greenwashed liberal interventionism), is lent the approval of elephants, and of the wider ecology, in Bigelow’s film. In the same way that Riefenstahl once repurposed German Romanticism for a sequence of Hitler descending in an aeroplane from the clouds, as though the saviour of Germany from its enemies, Bigelow now reworks such Romanticism in the name of the ‘white woman’s burden’: the Western imperial feminist speaks out on the part of the oppressed, and summons the ecosphere as her witness.

KEYWORDS:

• Propaganda
• torture
• ecology
• Last Days of Ivory

Notes

1. See Walsh (2013a, 2013b, 2015), Hersh (2013), Kennedy (2015). Zero Dark Thirty also appears in the Scott Z. Burns’s film The Report (2019). Bigelow’s film is seen, briefly, playing on a television in the background, as a detail presented as part of Burns’s illustration of the disinformation media fog of war. The Report, which concerns a CIA investigation into the destruction of videotapes of torture and interrogations, can be read as a pained attempt to recover the Democratic Party from their complicity and disgrace in the early years of the War on Terror, and maybe even self-exculpation on Burns’s part, since he has a screenplay credit on Bigelow’s Last Days.

2. The Retort collective expanded Eisenhower’s term: the ‘military-industrial complex’ (2005, 37). Retort is a community of writers, artists and activists based in the San Francisco Bay area and who are resistant to capital and empire.

3. Virilio here talks of the way in which naval defence systems include the projection of false ship images onto the sensors of incoming missiles ([1984] 2009, 62, 110).

4. One could add later Riefenstahl nature films too: Tiefland of 1954, the unreleased Allein unter den Nuba of 1965, and Impressionen unter Wasser of 2002. Riefenstahl (1902–2003) sporadically directed films across 70 years.

5. The hymn exists in various versions, but for the original see (Anon 1871, hymn 92).

6. Frings was later Archbishop of Cologne and then, as Cardinal, closely collaborated with the future Pope, Josef Ratzinger, at the point of and throughout Vatican II, including in respect to formulating the position on divine revelation briefly engaged above (see Ratzinger 1998, 128–129).

7. Point Break was written by W. Peter Iliff.

8. It is a jarring starting point – and recalls the firing range sequence in the second Dirty Harry film, Magnum Force (Post 1974), which also involves the undercover penetration of a criminal fraternity, and was also accused of fascist tendencies. But here the high score is used quite otherwise: as a matter of suspicion (against Dirty Harry’s competition opponent – a ruthless vigilante), and as a matter of misused ability on the part of Harry himself (known for his liberal use of his .44 Magnum handgun). Thus marksmanship is not a matter of personal excellence enhancing law enforcement, but a kind of weakness – identifying those too adept at killing, so undermining law enforcement more generally.

9. In the Buddhist tradition, the Bodhisattva is a figure who delays entering the nirvana that they could access in order to mentor those still with worldly attachments.

10. During an open-air ‘Screenfields’ screening, on 23 June 2011, in Spinningfields, Manchester, the defiance of this moment, as the ne plus ultra of action, proved too much, eliciting a joyous and loud whoop from an audience member. He may have been performing such a reaction for his friends, and with a touch of irony in this performance, but the identification of this climactic moment for his outburst nevertheless stands.

11. Peters here cites (Bryld and Lykke 2000, 19–21, passim).

12. On grunge as a soulful authenticity (for the white male), as germinating in the late 1980s in punk-influenced cultures outside the mainstream, see Bell (1998). But Utah here now recalls, in his dress and long hair, another figure who is sometimes cited as exerting an early influence on grunge: the disaffected John Bender (Judd Nelson) of The Breakfast Club (Hughes 1985).

13. Wolf had been an advisor in the mid-1990s to Chelsea’s father, Bill Clinton, during his time in office – apparently particularly with reference to reaching female voters; see Seelye (1999). I present the two letters in this article then as communications from the Democratic Party – albeit the former (from Wolf) for public consumption, the latter (from Chelsea’s office) for private consumption – in respect to internecine tensions between Democrat and Republican parties, probably only really in respect to the brazenness and management of human rights abuses.

14. So apparent was the ideological paucity of such an idea that a full critique even seemed possible via meme: the short-lived Instagram adventures of Barbie Savior. See The Race Card, White (2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Benjamin Halligan

Benjamin Halligan is Director of the Doctoral College at the University of Wolverhampton and has authored two monographs and co-edited six books, covering visual media, music and critical theory. His next monograph, Hotbeds of Licentiousness: The British Glamour Film and the Permissive Society is forthcoming from Berghahn Books.