Pursuing Emptiness: Obsession and (Im) Potence in Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel (US 1990)

In her very first assignment as a newly sworn police officer, Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis) hunts down an occasional thief and fires the entire magazine of her Smith & Wesson at the already defenceless man. The fascination with the blue steel of the gun is like a symptom of the impending onset of a negativity. Its contours are formed in Kathryn Bigelow’s film Blue Steel (1990), which converts the genre of the detective film usually determined by the story of male heroes, not so much in a dynamic of power and competition as that they follow a deeper layer of the indissoluble interweaving of perpetrator and victim and point to a crack in the texture of the connection to the world. In it lies a threat that Turner seeks out again and again, as if in a scenic compulsion to repeat.