Big(elow) News

Okay, so I was all ready to go forth with a light-hearted post about men and their relationship with facial hair, but the news over the past week made this seem extra ridiculous and irrelevant (rest assured, it will make it into a future post). Of course I’m talking about the DGA win last Sunday by Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow, making her the first female director to win the Best Director DGA award and putting her now in top contention for the Best Director Oscar.



Now there’s a lot of commentary going on about this, and my guess is that if she wins there will be a lot of broo ha ha about how she positions herself. According to some sources, she has never seen herself as a “woman” director, i.e. she eschews the limitation of positioning herself in a way that is associated rightly or wrong with “female films” (melodramas, films focusing on “female” subjects, etc.) or “female” direction. So before the Oscars even air, can’t we just all let’s all agree on a few things ? If she wins:

1. Bigelow has the right to define her own role vis-a-vis  gender identity politics. I.e. if she wants to make an acceptance speech which acknowledges the historic signifance of her win and the symbolism of that win (essentially breaking a glass ceiling in a male dominated field), great. If not, that’s fine too. It is up to her to articulate her own relationship to a greater community that she is a part of.


2. Even if she doesn’t make mention of the historical significance, that doesn’t mean the win is not significant for our culture as a whole - it is . It’s all well and good to think that the gender of award winners doesn’t or shouldn’t matter (and I personally believe that the mainstreaming of diverse groups so that we don’t give them special props when they win is an admirable cultural goal), but it is significant now.  A win communicates that gender is not per se a barrier to the upper echelons of critical success. It also potentially ignites a paradigm shift towards such mainstreaming, so that women directors are just thought of as directors –it’s hard to shed a marginal label without mainstream critical success and professional accomplishment.

I’m trying to anticipate the folks who will be annoyed by any media frenzy over the win of a female director. If you’re one of them, let me ask, where were you on the night of November 4, 2008? Were you saying “first Black president, big f*cking deal”? Before you get all riled up, let me say that I’m not suggesting with that comparison that the cultural significance of those two events is comparable: I’m saying that identity politics, at this time and this cultural moment, do matter. AND I’m saying that they matter precisely because the more we see members of marginal “other” groups achieve whatever benchmarks of success, the more we move to eventually not making a big deal of it.

Ultimately, I think most of us have the same goal here: that gender, like race or ethnicity or sexuality, shouldn’t matter. But right now, it does. When the “first” (president, film director, senate majority leader, etc) is achieved by a member of a marginal group, it IS a big deal (have I sad that enough yet?). It’s a big deal because that achievement does not come without that person having overcoming a lot of overt and covert assumptions and generalizations about what s/he is or is not capable of. It comes because that person has likely had to consistently assert his/her right to be in that field, to be taken seriously, to assume a position of authority. And really it’s a big deal because “the first”  is the first step to the second, the third, the fourth, and so on.

So indulge us if we want to talk about it. Maybe we won’t – we won’t have to – in twenty, thirty, fifty years.