Play and Performance, Perfection and Pessimism: A Reassessment of (the Politics of) Point Break

Abstract

This essay reassesses Kathryn Bigelow’s film, Point Break. Supplementing readings of this film as a “perfect” action film that both embodies and subverts the gender politics of the genre, this essay focusses on its embodiment and performance of play. Drawing on Caillois’s categorizations of different modes of play and games, I argue that what is at stake in the film is the conflict between different characters’ enactment of these modes: Utah’s, the detective, commitment to the agonistic game of pursuit of his criminal prey, on the one hand; and Bodhi’s, the bank-robbing surfer, commitment to the auto-telic mode of play that is surfing. I conclude that Bigelow’s film contains a meta-cinematic and pessimistic commentary on the winning and losing of games—whether these be the ones that the film represents intra-diegetically, or the extra-diegetic game of making a commercially successful film in the action genre.