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

Abstract

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.