In 2010, Katherine Bigalow was the first of only 3 women who have won an Academy Award (Oscar) in the Best Director category for her action thriller film, The Hurt Locker (Voltage Pictures, 2008). The film tells a war story in which all of the major characters are men. Bigelow has always made action films including Point Break (20th Century Fox, 1991), and Zero-Dark-Thirty (Sony Pictures, 2012).

Bigalow, a white woman, makes movies about white people. BIPOC and LGBTQIA characters are nearly invisible in her cinematic world. Her representation of women does not stray far from the masculine dominated norm of action films, and her three most popular films score poorly on the Bechdel-Wallace Test. There are only 2 female roles in The Hurt Locker, the protagonist’s wife and daughter, who are unnamed. Point Break features one female lead, a feisty surfer named Tyler (Lori Petty), who teaches the protagonist, Johnny (Keanu Reeves), to surf, becomes romantically entangled with both Johnny, and the villian, Bodhi (Patrick Swayze), and is eventually kidnapped and threatened with mutilation at the hands of Bodhi’s sadistic henchman unless Johnny complies with Bodhi’s demands. She is eventually rescued by Johnny.

In Zero-Dark Thirty, Bigalow offers a more fully realized feminine lead with Jessica Chastain in the role of Maya, a CIA analyst, and part of an otherwise hyper-masculine team who are hunting Osama Bin Laden. With the exception of Maya’s friend Jessica (Jennifer Ehle), who dies in a suicide bombing, Maya is the only significant feminine characther. The film ends with Maya who played a major role in the capture and killing of Bin-Laden, returning to the USA on a transport in tears.

Bigelow has publicly stated that, while she looks forward to seeing more women directing, she doesn’t want to be considered as a woman director. Her stated interest is not in challenging controlling images or even in telling stories about women’s lives, but rather to make the movies she wants to make. She further states that she simply chooses to ignore resistance to her gender in the film world. This individualistic approach to her career has worked for Bigelow, in terms of her success and the power she has attained in her field. Her success has been hard-earned to be sure, but by choosing to ignore, rather than critically engaging the dominant systems of power within the film industry she has carved out a place of privilege within an oppressive system. She is also an example of how, without deliberately cultivating a critical, or oppositional perspective in their storytelling, people who benefit from existing systems of power will generally continue to reproduce those systems.

10.4.1 Controlling Images

Figure 10.6. In this short video “Patricia Hill Collins explains BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT | #1 Controling images [Youtube Video]” (8:23) Sociologist Patricia Hill-Collins describes how controlling images of Black femininity can reproduce systems of power.

As we learned in the previous section, tropes are narrative short-hand to make storytelling easier. Most stories rely on tropes and it is up to a storyteller to use them in fresh ways that makes a story understandable and pleasurable. Stereotypes, which often show up within tropes, are commonly understood generalizations about a group. Stereotypes follow the pattern, “all (categories of people) are (characteristic).” Stereotypes can be negative, ascribing undesirable qualities, motives or character defects to an entire group of people, or they can be positive. Either way, we can all agree that stereotypes can’t possibly be true, because people are unique individuals, even when they share a common language, culture, gender, sexuality or ancestry. We also know that when storytellers rely on stereotypes, they miss the opportunity to portray characters as fully realized persons, and in so doing, can harm the groups they are misrepresenting.

Controlling Images are also socially constructed generalizations about categories of people deeply embedded in our shared culture that justify and normalize intersecting racist, heteropatriarchal, class-based domination (Collins, 2022). Think of them as stereotypes with teeth. The video in figure 10.6 features sociologist Patricia Hill-Collins describing how controlling images about black women have been used to justify their continuing oppression. Controlling images of Black femininity are constructed against a white feminine ideal, and also have a controlling influence on white women, black men and people who are LGBTQIA, because they send powerful social messages about how not to be, as black women are made others, or the “not me”, that many white women and black men differentiate themselves from.

Controlling images are not based on the lived experience of the people they describe. Rather, they have emerged from the biased and bigoted stories people in power tell themselves and each other in order to justify their domination of people designated as “other”. Controlling images get folded into tropes that show up in film, movies, songs and stories, where they present distorted representations of otherness, and reproduce ideas that uphold racist, sexist, transphobic and heteronormative systems of power. So then when we talk about representation in the stories we tell and consume we are not only talking about who is represented, but how they are represented. Additionally, it is important to consider who is creating those representations. Stuart Hall.

10.4.2 An Oppositional Gaze

Chapter 5 introduced Laura Mulvey’s conceptualization of the male gaze. The male gaze refers to a process of objectification, in which films use genre, narrative, discourse and content to enable the spectator to identify with the empowered perspective of the masculine protagonist and to partake of the pleasure of viewing the feminine as an objectified other. In this process masculine people become the makers of meaning, feminine people become the bearers of meaning, and non-binary people are often invisible or unrecognizable.

The filmmaker who reproduces the male gaze, and spectator who adopts the male gaze can be masculine, feminine or non-binary. For example, Bigelow focuses the male gaze on Tyler in Point Break, who, in spite of exercising some agency and independence, exists within the objectified masculine gaze, both in terms of the way the camera frames her in erotic surf and sex scenes and in her loss of power and agency as the story progresses.

Recall from the previous section how controlling images do not reflect actual lived experience of their subjects. The development and reproduction of the male gaze are processes for constructing and reproducing controlling images based on the empowered subject’s ideas and fantasies about the objectified other. The harm done to those who are categorized as objectified others was well described by the Black lesbian poet, Audre Lorde, who said, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive”(1982).

Here again, we can turn to the Black feminist scholarship to help us understand the intersectional dimensions of the controlling white male gaze, which routinely reproduces a matrix of domination (hooks, Collins), and to suggest strategies for resistance. Recall Patricia Hill Collins’ challenge in the video above (figure 10.6) to recognize the “constellation of controlling images” that apply to our own identities and “decide how we are going to work with them, surprise people with how we use them, or challenge them.”

In Black Looks (Watkins 2015), bell hooks, also known as Gloria Watkins, describe both the pleasures of looking at film and the pain of having to negotiate the white male gaze. Speaking from the perspective of a Black feminine spectator, she describes critical inquiry and analysis make it possible for an audience to cultivate an oppositional gaze in order to recognize how white supremacist control over representations of race, gender and other markers of difference, serve to embed racist, heteropatriarchal ideas, and to resist harmful representations.

Many contemporary filmmakers and other makers of culture recognize that “the field of representation [is] a place of struggle” (Watkins, 2015). Rather than accepting and replicating the male gaze, BIPOC and LGBTQIA writers and directors are claiming the right of self representation. New ethics of representation are also emerging, as expressed by the disability rights demand, “Nothing about us without us.”

Consider Danial Kwan, one of the creators of Everything Everywhere All at Once, a cisgender Chinese man who identifies as straight. In crafting his representation of a young asian lesbian and her struggle to be fully accepted by her family, Kwan did not reproduce a heteronormative white male gaze with controlling images of queerness or asian families, but drew fresh inspiration for his characters from the experience and perspective of queer asian young people he grew up with who struggled to come out to their families. The result is an affirming representation of queerness and Asian families that is at once culturally and generationally specific, and also universally recognizable to any child who has struggled with a parent for full acceptance (Nunn, 2022).