캐스린 비글로우의 ‘자기self’ 반영적 여성 프로타고니스트 분석 -<블루 스틸>, <웨이트 오브 워터>, <제로 다크 서티>를 중심으로-

Abstract

The cinematic character is the bridge to connect audiences and stories as well as the messenger to represent the visions by a creator. In this reason, the character inevitably represents author’s present ‘ego’ or unconscious ‘self’. Kathryn Bigelow has created female protagonists who try to overcome social prejudices and hardships from their sexual identities, to follow the oedipal trajectory in action, war, crime thriller, and spy movies. In Blue Steel(1989), The Weight of Water(2000), and Zero Dark Thirty(2013), female protagonists have developed with the Bigelow’s experience through her career. Therefore, the study on the change of female protagonists in Bigelow’s films might light on how Bigelow has established her identity as a woman director in Hollywood considered as a typically male-dominated industry. Kathryn Bigelow started with ‘Megan’ in Blue Steel to feature defiant attitudes against a patriarchal society. Megan even refuses to accept her sexual identity and longs for the masculine power symbolized by a gun, a ‘blue steel’. In The Weight of Water, ‘Jean’ appear as a woman who witnesses her ‘self-image’ through another female protagonist, ‘Maren’ through a murder case a hundred years ago. In stead of showing the resistant desire toward an androcentric system, Jean suffers from conflicts between the distorted femininity with men’s view points and her conscious denial of it. And ‘Maya’ in Zero Dark Thirty seems to ignore her sexual identity without any motive and just performs her duty with strong responsibility as an intelligence agent. Like Maya, Kathryn Bigelow had quit the predominant attitude of radical feminist, and had acknowledged her difference from other directors and tried to adopt stories and images in her own. Eventually, Bigelow’s female protagonists have reflected her developmentfrom the stage of a ‘woman’ director to the one of a woman ‘director’. After the murder, Maren in The Weight of Water speaks in the ending, “I also prayed for myself who did not understand the vision God had given me.”Maren’s pray has continued in Begelow’s film works. Begelow already found the given vision, and now she is in the process of searching for it. This is why we expect how she will tell her ‘self-narrative’ story through her characters in her next work.