Blue Steel

Released 1990, directed by Kathryn Bigelow.

Blue Steel is a film about real problems, problems that can’t be solved via climax. It is also pulp. Pulp is fiction in which the primary goal is to create a strong reaction in the audience; moreover it’s fiction in which that urge significantly disfigures other elements of the narrative (sometimes this can come about ontologically, when the motivation to get a reaction is so strong – often for commercial reasons – that it brings into being works that have no other motive, that are produced carelessly because the reaction they seek requires little care to provoke). This disfigurement can have its own fascination, its own beauty; although in almost all cases in the truest pulp this beauty is purely potential. Pulp’s promising descriptive and narrative grotesqueries need to be first recognized – requiring a self-awareness that in true pulp is superfluous, and thus dangerous to the overall structure which must serve, again, to relentlessly provoke – and then extracted, cleaned, and polished. In high pulp an inversion is accomplished, and tropes that previously served plot-based, manipulative purposes are rendered purely aesthetic. Thus to be more precise Blue Steel is mid-pulp: pulp’s base elements are beautified, but they are not isolated, put on pedestals to be admired; they remain functional.

Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis) is a young cop, unsure of herself, brave and physical, perhaps wishing she was less reliant on the opinions of others. Eugene Hunt is a trader, wealthy, a bit older, sporting Hans Gruber stubble – in short a psychopath. Their paths cross shortly after Megan graduates from the academy. She breaks up a supermarket robbery, shooting and killing the perpetrator. Eugene, who had been caught up in the robbery, makes off with the dead man’s gun. This has immediate consequences for Megan – no gun means she killed an unarmed man, and she is suspended.

But her entanglement with Eugene is only beginning. He is not particularly a character, a person – Silver plays him as a man who is quite clearly hearing voices, but no one seems to notice because again, this is not a character – he is rather symptomatic of the larger network of systems that treat women primarily as means not ends. Megan begins the film operating very much under the aegis of these systems. In fact in the world of the film, in the mirror it holds up to this world, it would be unthinkable that she would not. In the very first scene we see her intervene in what seems to be a case of extreme domestic violence, a man holding his wife at gunpoint. Megan shoots the man; once he’s down she relaxes her guard, only for the wife to pick up the husband’s gun and fire on her. It’s quickly revealed that this is all only a training exercise, but the message is nonetheless real, and clear: killing the bad guy does not equate to safety; the poisonous system on whose behalf he acts can act through others, through anyone. Later in the film Megan will be paired off with a detective, Nick Mann (Clancy Brown at his most ogreish), a grotesque of machismo who at first treats her with contempt; later he warms towards her, and eventually they sleep together. This is a common trope, but Blue Steel is sharp in teasing out its treacherous underpinnings: Megan is accepting of Nick because she has no place else to turn – he is the least bad option, but that shouldn’t mitigate what he is.

The situation with Eugene is less complex (not that the situation with Nick was very complex), and handled primarily as an instrument. Now armed, he begins carving Megan’s name into bullets and shooting them into random strangers. He also contrives to meet her and seduce her. The seduction is not done as realism – Eugene is anti-seductive, and when he and Megan kiss it is anti-erotic – but works as an excavation of Megan’s character. She is overawed by Eugene’s wealth and confidence, she is flattered by his attentions and feels unworthy of them. Megan’s parents are in an abusive relationship, her father beats her mother, and we have hints during the film that she can’t fully reject that configuration, the woman as a dependent and the man as an enforcer of his will on the woman and on the outer world. Her status as a police officer is meant as a rejection of all that, but it lies uneasily on her. In any case, the Eugene courtship could, in a different movie, have functioned as a prelude to an unbalanced relationship, but here we’re quickly crowbarred through it. Eugene asks Megan to shoot him, she won’t, he’s very weird, she gets that he’s the one killing people in her name.

The foundational element of pulp is coincidence, because with coincidence everything else becomes permissible, and pulp needs things to be permissible so that it can easily do what it wishes to do (difficulty is the enemy of pulp). But pulp also cannot go too far with coincidence. Coincidence is like a relaxation of narrative gravity – everything becomes easier, but there is eventually a weakening of the joints. A narrative to which too great a degree of coincidence has been applied becomes a sort of amorphous jelly. This is not a bad thing, but it’s a different thing, and for pulp-qua-pulp it’s a step too far into art. Bigelow is herself quite comfortable with the ideas of high art, and thus it’s interesting to speculate as to how much of Blue Steel’s eventual softening, its unreality, is intentional. Once Megan and Eugene are square with one another the film becomes a cat and mouse game, Eugene targeting not Megan but those around her, again trying to provoke a longed-for apotheosis of death at her hands. This is accomplished in the film by having their paths continue to cross in increasingly unlikely ways, to the extent that New York begins to feel a bit like a toy-set city, a place with one block, one subway station, one apartment building.

Or it could be a dream. This is a film in which the light is quite solid, or conversely, solids are quite abstracted. Windows jut crystalline bars, desk lamps are fused lumps of gold. There are two scenes that take place in a car during a rainstorm, and in each the intervening and backing glass fields are utterly mottled, intricately textured with light-catching, light-twisting runnels and beads and smears; the texture is so inviting it leaves a sense-impression on one’s tongue. In these moments the film’s ambience is angelic, the heavenly fuzz of a synth pad; you can imagine the immanence of the light simply growing and growing until the screen is white with morning and the dream is dispelled. Yet it ends with an opposite image: Megan, having finally gunned Eugene down, collapses in exhaustion, her eyes shut. She’s not fully asleep, but she wants to collapse into sleep. She wants to leave, in some deep sense, where she is – to be safe, knowing it is not safe.