You know
her the moment she’s on screen: she’s got the best lines and the best wardrobe.
She’s having more fun than anyone else around her—which usually means she’ll
have to be punished by film’s end. The femme fatale isn’t a trope that
originated with film noir—you can make strong arguments for shades of the femme
fatale in biblical Eve, Ishtar, the Sirens, Medusa, and Circe. Anywhere a hero
needs a test or a scapegoat, you’ll find her. But film noir is where she’s best
embodied and remembered.
In the
1940s and 50s, she was a projection of misogynistic inadequacy: the dangerous
woman who lures a good man to his doom or moral compromise for her own gain.
While you were unlikely to find this exact iteration of the femme fatale at the
local watering hole, she did have (less lurid) real-life roots: off the screen,
women had entered the workforce en masse during WWII, and the 1950s image of
the “New Woman,” meant to celebrate women’s post-war return to the home, was
more a male fantasy than an actuality. In her second filmic heydey, the
neo-noir films of the 1980s and 1990s, sexual mores shifted, the 80s brought
reactions against women’s liberation, and third wave feminists fought for
workplace equality and freedom from sexual assault. Her embodiment remains much
the same—she’s still largely a borderline cartoonish Black Widow, sexually
insatiable and out for blood—but with one crucial difference: the film doesn’t
have to end with her downfall. In the midst of the #MeToo movement and the
Trump presidency, the femmes fatales is once again revitalized. With such
straightforward crime movies as Hustlers, as well as cross-genre forays such as
Midsommar (not strictly either a crime film or a film noir), the 2019 film
slate shows that while the perception of the femme fatale has changed, she’s
not yet dead.
The
trope of the femme fatale in film is most problematic (and the clearest
embodiment of the anxieties of the day) when she’s in a contemporary film.
Femme fatales rendered in throwback films or literature (for example, Faye
Dunaway in Chinatown or Daphne in Devil in a Blue Dress) fare comparatively
well to their contemporary counterparts, in terms of motivation, backstory, and
humanization. Historicizing her seems to give enough distance to use the trope
as a critique; in contemporary film, she’s more commonly used as an expression
of current anxiety.
There’s
an embarrassment of great femme fatales to point to in the heydey of film noir.
Using her sizzle, she pulled our everyman hero into a pit of vipers or danger
or enticed him into murder. In her golden era of the film noirs of the 1940s
and 50s, she’s defined by her sex appeal, her obvious dangerousness (a stark
contrast to the not-so-distant Victorian ideal of pliant femininity), and her
refusal to play by society’s rules. She was fun, she was sexy, and she was
going to get you killed. She might’ve been born from a reductive stereotype but
she also offered actresses the chance to play someone fun, someone evil—right
up until she’s apprehended or killed, setting the world of the film back to
moral rights.
Barbara
Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson of Double Indemnity wore a blonde wig (described
by Billy Wilder as “obviously phony”), an anklet, and an attitude of such
blatant trouble that she’s barely five minutes into her meet-deadly with Fred
McMurray’s Walter Neff before she’s flirtatiously floating the idea of murder.
Neff should know better, and does, but can’t help himself. By the film’s end,
Phyllis is killed byr Neff, a moment cinematically held up as the hero (rather,
anti-hero) conquering the villain despite the fact that they plotted and
orchestrated a murder together. Neff gets his, but he also gets to kill the
woman who lured him to his doom along the way. He restores order to his world
by taking her out of it before expiring himself.
At the
end of the 1941 film The Maltese Falcon, Brigid O’Shaugnessy, arguably the
prototype for the on-screen femme fatale, is revealed to be the true evil
behind the mystery of the Maltese Falcon detective Sam Spade is tasked with
unraveling (as well as the murderer of his partner). Brigid will eventually
find herself in jail, but it’s not enough for her to simply receive punishment
for her crimes; first, her charms must be actively rejected by our hero so that
order can be restored. It’s not sufficient that Brigid is caught: she has to be
handed over to the authorities by Spade.
It’s not
fair to blame the demise of the femme fatale in the majority of her movies
simply upon cinematic misogyny: Hollywood was still ruled by the Hays Code,
which allowed for immoral hijinks to take place on screen as long as the moral
universe was restored at the end. The femme fatale could only be fun, sexual,
and deadly so long as she died or went to jail in the end. One major exception
to this is Rita Hayworth’s Gilda, the bizarre ending of which underwrites
literally all of the character and plot development that came before it and
which, I am nearly positive, makes for one of the most fascinating, bizarre,
and upsetting closing scenes in all of film noir: a happily unearned romantic
ending. It’s still a neutering via the Hays Code—Gilda is not, despite all
prior evidence, a spurned woman taking out her rage and heartbreak on her
husband and former lover by sleeping her way through Argentina. Instead, she’s
just been pretending to do so—she’s been loyal this whole time, didn’t ya know!
Cue credits. It’s almost more upsetting than the death of Phyllis Dieterichson.
The
femme fatale reappears in the erotic thrillers of the 80s and 90s (although
perhaps she never really left) although she had evolved in more ways than one.
Kathleen Turner’s Matty Walker from the 1981 neo-noir film Body Heat was a
femme whose fatality stemmed as much from her shrewd intellect as it did from
her rapacious (and overtly on-screen) sexuality. Perhaps the movie is best
remembered as a remake of Double Indemnity where the implicit sexual
undercurrent that shimmed through both Cain’s original novel and Raymond
Chandler’s screenplay of the film is made overt and onscreen, but I see it as a
different sort of shift. Unlike her screen sisters of old, whose downfall was a
way of returning order to the hero’s world, Matty Walker (nee Mary Ann Simpson)
waltzes away scot-free, the cash from her dead husband funding her new exotic
lifestyle while her lover rots in jail for a murder they both planned (and
which he executed).
Or, take
one of the most famous of all modern screen femmes fatale, Sharon Stone’s
labia-flashing Catherine Trammell in Basic Instinct. The leg cross that
launched a thousand parodies is by-far the most remembered image from the
film—an image, it should be noted, that Sharon Stone claims she did not
authorize and that she was not aware of it being included in the final film
until a screening with a test audience. But I’m struck by its close: Catherine
atop Michael Douglas, an ice pick stashed under the bed for the moment she
decides to use it. The film judges her and sexualizes her, but she comes out
literally on top, at least for the moment.
She
might not have gained much more interiority, dimensionality, or perspective of
her own—both Matty Walker and Catherine Trammell are compelling but secondary
characters in their respective films—but film started to do better by its film
fatales than positing a world in which they had to be killed, arrested, or
neutered for audiences to feel secure.
A
century after Theda Bara’s “baby vamp” silverscreen routine created a blueprint
for the aesthetic of the femme fatale onscreen, her cinematic status
endures—with a few key shifts. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn was a masterful
resurrection and flipping of the femme fatale trope. By 2012, when the book was
published, readers were used to the real-life proliferation of news stories
about pretty white women who go missing only to find out, whoops, their
philandering husband killed them. New millenium femme fatale Amy Dunne was the
perfect antidote to this, setting her husband up to be accused of murder in
order to right the wrongs she’s suffered at his hands. You might not want to
cross her in real life, but she wasn’t unsympathetic: her infamous “cool girl”
speech remains a sort of rallying cry for plenty of women. And while Catherine
Trammell’s story closed with the ice pick under the bed, Amy Dunne has another
smoking gun in her arsenal: wielding her unborn child as a weapon against her
husband to keep him exactly where she wants him. She’s a crazy bitch, the
progenitor of a million questions about “likeability” in female characters, and
the antiheroine of our century.
The
late-summer crime film Hustlers debuted in September 2019 and as of the end of
October 2019, had grossed more than $110 million worldwide. Featuring Jennifer
Lopez and Constance Wu, the star-studded ensemble cast bilks unsuspecting Wall
Street doofs out of thousands of dollars via a team of talented female scammers
(and the aid of some party drugs and booze). The film, directed by Lorene
Scafaria and based on real events written up in an article by Jessica Pressler,
undoubtedly plays into the tropes of the femme fatales (none of the marks end
up dead but their wallets sure are made lighter by this entrepreneurial
sisterhood).
But the
biggest difference is the way in which these femmes fatales are viewed and not
viewed: Lopez’s Ramona and Wu’s Destiny/Dorothy are given fully realized
backstories, interior lives, and motivations. Despite the salacious
possibilities of a movie with strippers as main characters, and featuring
plenty of female (and male!) nudity, these women’s bodies are never offered up
as consumption for the male gaze (undoubtedly due in no small part to the
female-helmed direction and the reported intimacy coach always on set). And the
movie makes sure to hammer the point home that these women are enacting, in
their own way, a version of the American Dream that their male
countertops/marks on Wall Street are chasing, no less unethically. These femme
fatales are closer to less altruistic Robin Hood figures: robbing the rich to
even the playing field. These femmes fatale aren’t just sympathetic; they’re
actually human.
Another
2019 film makes use of shades of the femme fatale trope, albeit in a more
roundabout way. By the end of Ari Aster’s Midsommar (not strictly a noir, and
not just because it takes place in virtually zero actual darkness), its much
put-upon heroine Dani (played by Florence Pugh) ultimately frees herself from a
bad relationship, a bad man, and a bad life by…literally lighting it on fire.
But because the audience has been on Dani’s side from the beginning—it’s more
or less her story—it’s framed as a happy ending, with Pugh’s face creasing into
a slight smile as she watches her former lover burn in the closing image of the
film. It’s chilling and perfect and uplifting and it turns Dani into a literal
femme fatale, as well as being our hero.
The
study of the femme fatale traditionally focuses on the way she becomes a locus
for male anxiety. While I don’t disagree with that, it’s still another way of
studying her by placing her in service to men. She’s not just dangerous to men,
she exists only because of men. But is it so hard to believe that the most
vibrant, witty, wise-cracking and ambitious character on screen has motivations
of her own? Alice Munro once said: “To be a femme fatale, you don’t have to be
slinky and sensuous and disastrously beautiful, you just have to have the will to
disturb.” In every iteration over the years, the kernel of danger at the femme
fatales core is that she’s out for herself: she doesn’t exist in service to or
for men. There’s something individual and hungry driving her and it makes her
dangerous. But maybe one day, that’ll just be how we see women on screen all
the time. Separate from the danger they pose to men, separate from the anger
they feel towards men. A dame in search of her own destiny.
The Evolution of the Femme Fatale in Film
Noir. By Halley Sutton. Crimereads , December 5, 2019.
In
response to the kinds of female characters that tend to appear in fiction,
author Gillian Flynn once proclaimed, “We’ve left no room to acknowledge our
dark side. Dark sides are important. They should be nurtured like nasty black
orchids.” She rightly points out that
characters built on shallow “girl power” ideals lack the complexity and
messiness that make women and women’s experiences interesting and emotionally
resonant. One solution to the problem Flynn has posed lies in the femme fatale,
one of the few fictional archetypes that allow women to be mean, scary,
conflicted, lustful, and greedy — in short, to be villains.
Certainly,
cinema has seen its fair share of female villains. Yet genres such as horror,
fantasy, and science fiction tend toward villains that are psychopathic
caricatures, and while they are terrifying and alluring in their own ways, they
typically stand in stark contrast to the seductive complexity of the femme
fatale, an archetype that has morphed and changed throughout history but has
never disappeared from the silver screen. As is befitting for such a complex
character, depictions of the femme fatale have not always been perfect. Still,
they remain fascinating and indicative of larger societal and cultural trends
and are therefore worthy of critical attention.
The
cinematic femme fatale is most commonly understood to originate in the films
noir of the 1940s and 1950s, dark and shadowy crime films borne out of postwar
national anxieties that were influenced by German Expressionism and French
Poetic Realism. However, fictional “bad girl” tropes such as the vamp and the
flapper scandalized and titillated audiences long before the original film noir
era, and these mystical and freewheeling characterizations inevitably
influenced what would eventually be known as the femme fatale.
The
femme fatale combines the flapper’s bold demonstrations of autonomy and
debauchery with the vamp’s almost supernatural power over everyone around her,
but she brings these qualities down to earth in a way that makes her feel
human. Angelica Bastién argues that what makes the femme fatale deeply
interesting is her emotional realism, the way in which she knows what she wants
and how to get it, refuses to compromise, yet visibly struggles with her
conflicting emotions and motivations the entire time. She is not afraid to get
her hands dirty and may even revel in it, yet she possesses an underlying
combination of rage and sadness stemming from the fact that she has to resort
to deception and crime to gain any kind of power in this world. What makes the
femme fatale so intriguing is that she is not just a villain but is also a
complex and vulnerable human being whose less-than-perfect actions can often be
traced back to the hardships she has endured.
The
femme fatale often appears in a slinky black dress, nervously smoking a
cigarette in one hand and, with the other hand, steadily pointing a gun at her
lover. Think of Mary Astor‘s Brigid O’Shaughnessy in John Huston’s The Maltese
Falcon (1941), often cited as one of the first American films noir. She slowly
unravels her complex personality and motivations, originally entering Detective
Sam Spade’s office as an innocent woman concerned about her wayward sister, yet
as the labyrinthine plot unfolds, different parts of her stories are revealed
to be lies, and it turns out she is just as motivated by greed and lust as her
co-conspirators are.
At one
point, Brigid pleads Spade for his help, to which he responds: “You’re good.
It’s chiefly your eyes, I think… and the throb you get in your voice when you
say things like, ‘Be generous, Mr. Spade.'” That perfectly encapsulates the
cruel and cynical world of film noir. Spade calls her out on her manipulative
dramatics, yet she plays every side of her character with such desperate
emotion that it seems plausible she truly believes in everything she says,
however contradictory. In the end, as she is being arrested for murder, she
looks up at Spade with tears in her eyes as he towers over her, and she
confesses her love for him. Despite all of her lies, violence, seduction, and
manipulation, Spade says he loves her too, and in the same breath he coldly sends
her off to jail and potentially to her death. Such is life and love for the
femme fatale, where romance is found in the darkest of places only when it is
too late.
As
Bastién writes, no discussion of the femme fatale is complete without looking
to Barbara Stanwyck. Her performance as Phyllis Dietrichson in Billy Wilder’s
Double Indemnity (1944) truly embodies Flynn’s “nasty black orchid,” taking the
femme fatale to an entirely new level of menace, lust, rage, and masterful
manipulation. Phyllis’ first appearance on screen is dictated by protagonist
Walter Neff, who controls the camera’s gaze as it moves up her body, starting
with her ruffled shoes and her “honey of an anklet” until it reaches her garish
blonde wig and flirtatious expression as she buttons up her dress, having just
returned from sunbathing.
Neff
fetishistically zeroes in on different parts of her body and her clothing, and
admits in voiceover that all he could think about at that moment was getting
close to “that dame upstairs.” Phyllis immediately becomes the object of Neff’s
sexual obsession, and her gratuitous come-ons and sly references to her
husband’s insurance policies demonstrate that she understands the power she has
over him before they have even had a full conversation. Whatever genuine
attraction Phyllis feels for Walter, more exciting to her is the fact that he
is her key to financial independence and freedom from her stifling marriage. By
the time they enact their violent plan to do away with her husband, all of
Phyllis’ complex emotions have bubbled to the surface, epitomized in her
terrified, excited, and satisfied expression as she drives toward the train
station, her husband and Walter struggling beside her.
The
femme fatale never truly went away, but by the 1970s American filmmakers found
a renewed interest in the thematics and stylistics of film noir, bringing the
sexuality and violence that was once subtext directly into the text. The 1960s
and 1970s in Hollywood saw the relaxation of the production code and an influx
of filmmakers indebted to both European art cinema and the classic Hollywood
era. This lead to updated reworkings of well-worn genres (for lack of a better
word) such as noir in films such as Klute (1971), Across 110th Street (1972),
and Taxi Driver (1976). Echoes of Mary Astor, Barbara Stanwyck, and Gene
Tierney (best known for her ice-cold femmes fatales in films such as Laura and
Leave Her to Heaven) can be found in Faye Dunaway‘s chilly performance as
Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown (1974), a seedy neo-noir full of greed, lies,
violence, and horrific family secrets.
Yet by
the time the 1980s rolled around, neo-noir filmmakers seemed less interested in
exploring the psychological damage of their characters or reimagining aesthetic
traditions than titillating audiences with garish violence and sexuality that
often borders on softcore pornography. This is an era in which the femme fatale
becomes a ridiculous caricature of her former self, seemingly trapped by
leering male filmmakers who do not care to explore her inner life. Certainly,
the erotic thrillers popularized in the 1980s and 1990s are sexy, stylish,
entertaining, and occasionally brilliant (see: Eyes Wide Shut, Bound), but the
femmes fatales therein seem diminished by a reductive male gaze that punishes
them for being bold and aggressive.
Glenn
Close as Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction (1987) starts out as a knowledgeable
and successful businesswoman whose bold confidence allows her to breezily
seduce colleague Dan Gallagher (played by the wonderfully sleazy Michael
Douglas) yet later becomes vengeful and violent after he scorns her by trying
to keep their brief affair a secret. Her rage is justified to an extent, yet
the film brings her anger to a fever pitch, at which point Dan and his wife
have no choice but to kill her in self-defense. Alex is punished for pursuing a
man she wants, and Dan gets away with his infidelity.
As
Bastién writes, if every generation gets the femme fatale it deserves, then
characters such as Alex in Fatal Attraction and Catherine Tramell (Sharon
Stone) in Basic Instinct (1992) are a response to the rise of feminism and
women’s advancement in the workplace. Where the femmes fatales of the 1940s and
1950s played out their complex emotions in shadowy city streets and stuffy
office buildings that reflect and contain their fraught emotional states, the
women of the erotic thriller inhabit lushly furnished apartments and breeze
through shiny corporate settings in their six-inch stilettos, seemingly all
style and no substance.
Now in
the 2010s, it seems the femme fatale has become an amalgam of all of her
earlier incarnations, perhaps losing even more of her complexity along the way.
There seems to be a dark void inside of her where there used to be a bleeding
heart full of conflicting desires. Recent neo-noirs and spy thrillers such as
Gone Girl (2014), Atomic Blonde (2017), and Red Sparrow (2018) revel in
depicting beautiful women performing brutal acts of violence and masterful
seductions, either for personal gain or in the interest of larger political
contexts (or in the case of Gone Girl, for no good reason), but they rarely
delve into their potentially rich emotional lives. These characters have the
chilly sense of style, wit, and master manipulation skills of their
predecessors but lack the psychological complexity of the original noir
heroines.
More
recently, the femme fatale has sunk her claws into television with characters
such as the brilliantly volatile and obsessive Villanelle (Jodie Comer) of
Killing Eve (2018-19) and even the fiery ice-queen Cersei Lannister (Lena
Headey) on Game of Thrones (2011-19). Such long-form series allow for a
sustained engagement with these women, and it is a testament to performers such
as Comer and Headey that their interpretations of the femme fatale are
terrifying and layered in entirely new ways. Pop stars also engage with the
trope. Rihanna builds her public persona as a dangerous and deadly femme through
fashion choices, lyrics, and music videos where she commits violence against
men who have wronged her.
Film
theorists and journalists alike have pondered the seductive and mysterious
power of the femme fatale since the days of original films noir such as The
Maltese Falcon and Out of the Past (1947). Is she subversively feminist or a
response to male fear about female sexuality? Do we love to hate her or hate to
love her? Is she entirely beholden to the male gaze, or is she more complex than
that? While none of these questions have straightforward answers, it seems
unlikely that the archetype of the beautiful, greedy, murderous woman is going
anywhere anytime soon. As long as people are making movies, there will always
be those who understand just how important our dark sides really are.
The
Seductive Power of the Femme Fatale. By Angela Morrison. Film School Rejects
, October 4, 2019.
No woman
ever looked more conscious of her fatal power than Ava Gardner in her first
scene from The Killers (1946). Posing herself artfully at a piano, near a lamp
that makes her dark locks and black satin dress shimmer like an oil slick, she
has her back to the smitten boxer Swede (Burt Lancaster) but knows exactly the
effect she is having on him. His dazed fixation makes the scene funny, and her
knowing performance as Kitty Collins gives it a darker comic edge. In a sweet,
girlish voice—polished by Hollywood speech lessons that expunged Gardner’s
southern accent—she talks about how she hates brutality and could never bear to
see a man she cared about being hurt. Nothing could be further from the truth:
she likes to see men suffer, and her selfishness leaves deeper bruises than a
fighter’s fists. She’s fully revealed in her last scene, when she crouches over
a man who’s just been shot and demands that he use his last breaths to falsely
exonerate her—prompting a great, sorrowful rebuke from Sam Levene’s police
lieutenant: “Don’t ask a dying man to lie his soul into hell.”
What is
the defining characteristic of the femme fatale, that film noir archetype of
the scheming woman who preys on men? Even more than greed or coldheartedness,
it might be deceit: a virtuosic ability to manipulate men with lies and
playacting. The femme fatale is spawned by male anxiety—not prompted by women’s
wartime emancipation, as many have argued, but arising from the age-old fear of
being fooled by women, and the misogynistic belief that they are inherently
duplicitous and inscrutable. This shapes the way actresses play femme fatales:
they are often giving a performance of a performance, enacting a charade of
feminine sweetness and frailty that satisfies the expectations and desires of
their marks. In Eddie Muller’s Dark City Dames, Jane Greer recalls that when
she played the enchanting thief, liar, and killer Kathie Moffat in Out of the
Past (1947), director Jacques Tourneur wasted no time on the character’s
psychology, simply instructing her: “First half—good girl. Second half—bad.” He
told her to play it “impassive,” conveying the depths of her evil through a
shocking depthlessness. A woman like Kathie or Kitty almost doesn’t seem to
have a real self beneath the layers of lies: she is, as a disgusted Jeff Bailey
(Robert Mitchum) tells Kathie, “like a leaf the wind blows from one gutter to
another.”
Such
women play the damsel in distress to appeal to men’s chivalry—as Kitty turns on
the tears, getting Swede to take the rap for her when she’s caught with stolen
jewelry. She morphs in an instant from a laughing sophisticate to a frightened
little girl; she is a different person in every scene, seductive or sullen or
demure, adopting the guise that will suit her purposes. In the end, when she
comes face to face with Edmond O’Brien’s insurance detective Riordan, who has
been excavating her past, she launches into yet another whopper, starting off
shamelessly: “I want you to believe something . . .” But some truth slips out
amid the lies. In this account, she describes how easily she tricked Swede, and
when Riordan confronts her with this double cross, she gives a carefree little
shrug and gloating smile. This tiny moment of pleasure may be Kitty at her
worst, and her most sincere.
Some
actresses could precisely calibrate degrees of duplicity, like Barbara Stanwyck
in Double Indemnity (1944). One of cinema’s great slayers of hypocrisy,
Stanwyck crafts an act that’s as false as her character’s platinum wig, as
transparent as her white sweater, yet convincingly deadly, all while letting us
glimpse the dark pit of corruption beneath her glossy allure.
Now and
then, noir gave actresses a chance to play something rarer than sweet-voiced,
two-faced sirens: women who don’t even try to hide their rottenness. Honesty
gives these misogynistic caricatures an exhilarating, liberating charge; they
earn shock laughs with their brazen awfulness. Ann Savage’s Vera in Detour
(1945), a relentless harpy who is endless fun to watch, set the standard
followed by dames like Hazel Brooks in Sleep, My Love (1948), a sexy pinup with
the personality of an ice pick. Perhaps the most unabashedly venal woman in
film noir is Lorraine Minosa (Jan Sterling) in Billy Wilder’s corrosive
masterpiece Ace in the Hole (1951). Lorraine refuses to play the role expected
of her as the wife of a man trapped in a collapsed cave. When the flamboyantly
cynical reporter Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) wants to photograph her at church
praying for her husband’s safety, she sets him straight: “I don’t go to church.
Kneeling bags my nylons.” (Wilder credited this line to his wife, pointing out
that he wouldn’t know from nylons.)
Jan
Sterling was a classically trained actress from a patrician background who
perfected a nasty sneer, a grating whine, and a look of voracious vacancy that
made her the definitive “what’s in it for me?” girl. Even in the tawdriest
guises, Sterling retained an astringent hauteur, suggesting a lifetime of
resentments steeped into a venom as harsh as the bleach she used on her hair.
She never flinches from Lorraine’s ugliness, but she doesn’t play it up as
campy villainy, either: she gets into the skin of this coarse, sullen, grasping
bitch and makes her the most real person on-screen. She’s very funny, nailing
Lorraine’s cheap sarcasm and ingenuous vanity, slinging her lines in a voice
that could strip paint off a wall. But it’s far from a one-note performance:
her eyes shine with pure, childlike joy as she contemplates the money piling up
in the cash register, then glisten with tears of shock and humiliation when
Tatum slaps her.
Lorraine
is not very bright—she never quite understands the brilliant, morally
conflicted Tatum, or why it’s a bad idea to show how happy she is at cashing in
on her husband’s misfortune—but in a world of people who lie to themselves and
everyone else, her inability to dissemble feels radical. It’s why Tatum hates
her so much. She reflects back at him the worst of himself, and despite his
cynicism he can’t face the truth, so he takes out his own mounting guilt on
her. Their mutual hatred is mingled with attraction, open on her side and
channeled into violence on his. Alone in a dusty, bleak dawn soon after his
arrival, they take each other’s measure. Watch how the dynamic between them
suddenly shifts at the end of this scene: after carelessly airing her own greed
and rattlebrained solipsism, she triumphantly reveals that she sees right
through him, and knows his heart is as arid and rocky as hers. Poor Leo Minosa,
buried in a cave, is in a warmer, softer place than he was in his marriage to
Lorraine.
Phyllis
Thaxter had the wholesome, freshly scrubbed prettiness typical of postwar
Hollywood housewives, but here she takes that template and stays within the
lines—Lucy is supportive, virtuous, always in the kitchen—while ridding it of
any false notes. Her performance is plain and clear like water, as honest about
the strain of poverty and domestic bickering as it is about how physically
excited this woman still is by her husband. Lucy has plenty of spine, but she’s
also insecure enough to dye her hair platinum when she fears Harry is falling
for the sexy Leona. The scene where she comes home with her new hairdo, nervous
and embarrassed, to face her daughters’ disapproval and her husband’s
bewilderment, cuts you to the quick.
When she
finally confronts Harry, who has been sucked into crime, she pierces his
self-justifying, tough-guy façade with scathing insight: “You’ve got that
stubborn, stupid look you always get when you know something’s wrong but you’re
going to do it anyway.” This is a film that decisively rejects the myth of
heroic self-reliance (“A man alone ain’t got no chance,” Harry finally
realizes), and it is Lucy who breaks through the wall of male pride to make him
acknowledge his need for her.
With her
sardonic, drawling voice and lushly knowing smile, Patricia Neal brings a more
common noir sound and sensibility into the film’s workaday setting; she
represents the easy way out. But when Harry finally succumbs to her persistent
come-ons, their long-awaited tryst turns out to be an awkward fizzle. Her
reaction allows a glimpse into her bitterness and regret (“I don’t like to
think I’m not exciting, I haven’t got much else”), the way she gets through the
“other woman” racket by letting everything roll off her, only to find that
perhaps she’s incapable of feeling or inspiring real feeling. She’s as proud of
her irresistibility as Harry is of his toughness, and in this moment of
unexpected candor they both face the limits of their power.
Honesty
is the one thing Lucy and Leona have in common; in this scene, the only time
they meet, they spar cattily but find a small common ground of respect. They
both see more clearly than Harry, who has crawled into the comfort of a bottle.
Women in
the postwar era faced shrinking options and stifling constraints; film noir
lets us see them pacing their cells and calculating how to make the most of
their slender leverage. But in noir, everyone’s power, however fatal it may
first appear, is dwarfed by the force of bad choices and indifferent fate. The
real dichotomy is, perhaps, not between good and bad women—or tough and
not-so-tough guys—but between those who know this and those who haven’t found
it out yet.
Recorded
on location in Manhattan, screen siren Kathleen Turner celebrates the enduring
mystique of the femme fatale.
Turner,
who famously played the husky-voiced femme fatale Matty walker in the steamy
thriller Body Heat, traces the history of the Femme Fatale in cinema and in
film noir where she was so often a central character.
Film
noir always come to the fore during moments of deep cultural anxiety. And the
character of the femme fatale shines a revealing light on the role of women in
society and the relationship between the sexes.
It was
towards the end of the Second World War that noir first emerged as a style of
filmmaking. These were gritty thrillers that exposed the dark underbelly of the
American Dream. In films such as Double Indemnity, Out Of The Past and The
Postman Always Rings Twice, the femme fatale was the intelligent but heartless
seductress who entrapped the male protagonist, for her own murderous and
financial gain.
In the
late 70s and early 80s, America experienced another moment of deep cynicism
following the Vietnam war and filmmakers returned to film noir, with Kathleen
Turner's Matty Walker as the ultimate neo noir femme fatale character in Body
Heat. These films, not content with the racy innuendo of 1940s noir, shocked
and thrilled audiences with explicit sex scenes. But through her typical tough
dame talk, Matty Walker also draws attention to the underestimation of women by
men.
With
contributions from Eddie Muller (President of the Film Noir Foundation),
Professor Ellis Cashmore and Nick James (Editor of the BFI's Sight and Sound
magazine), Kathleen introduces standout performances from Lauren Bacall,
Barbara Stanwyck, Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford and Lana Turner.
The film
noir femme fatale was a wonderfully meaty role for an up-and-coming Hollywood
actress, such as British star Peggy Cummins. Now 91, she reflects on her role
as the femme fatale in Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy about an ambitious fairground
sharp-shooter who goes on a bank robbing spree with her trigger-happy husband.
Julie
Grossman (author of Rethinking The Femme Fatale in Film Noir) argues that we
make blithe and easy reference to femmes fatales without considering their
social and psychological context. Many 1940s femmes fatales in film noir were
deeply interesting characters who felt trapped, bored or led deeply
unfulfilling lives.
Kathleen
argues that, despite great advances in gender equality since the 1940s, the
femme fatale will always be relevant "because men will always be terrified
of women."
Femmes Fatales. BBC 4 ,
May 27, 2017
Preface
I am
grateful for the opportunity to update my introduction to Rethinking the Femme
Fatale: Ready for Her Close-Up. The book
was originally written to question the assumptions surrounding film noir’s
character patterns and, in particular, to explore why we rely so heavily on a
narrow construction of the “femme fatale” as malevolent seductress. Its aim has been to reexamine the ways in
which we interpret and respond to what I regard, rather, as the fabulously
unfatal women in noir. My hope has been
to show how the ways women are filmed and written about (in academic and
popular venues) profoundly influence our views of gender and society. In film
noir, how women’s behavior is “drawn,” how women’s motives are represented and
left un-represented, remains a critical crux.
The representation of women in noir and the often-contradictory readings
of them in critical and popular discourse, I believe, have much to tell us
about the persistence of problematic ways of thinking about gender in society.
Getting
Darker: Noir Since 2009
While
film noir was certainly a going concern in 2009, when this book was first
published, now, a few years later, it’s noir generally—noir as text and
sensibility–that seems to be transgeneric, transmedial, transhistorical, and
global. Noir has become a way of understanding global political, aesthetic,
psycho-social, and historical phenomena and productions that seem to share a
sensibility, set of values, or substantive focus. Indeed, Jennifer Fay and Justus Nieland refer
in their Film Noir: Hard-Boiled
Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization (Routledge, 2009) to the “Fragments of One International Noir History”
(236) that combine global history, local culture, film history, and noir
culture. Dennis Broe’s work on labor and
international noir similarly locates noir in an expanded materialist history,
not just within America but, in a forthcoming book, Globalizing America’s Dark
Art: International Film Noir, across the
globe. These engaged cultural-studies film critics and theorists make choices
to foreground critical ideas and ideological points that generalize the
politics, thematic concerns, and narrative patterns of noir out of its
traditional association with America between the years of 1941 (The Maltese
Falcon) and 1958 (Touch of Evil), and this internationalization has added another
level to the study of noir.
If noir
has been adapted to new geographical spaces, it has also crossed cultural
boundaries and blurred generic definitions.
The range of noir material that has been produced–across media, from
academic, popular, artistic, and journalistic spheres—is striking. Noir’s pervasiveness can be seen in the
myriad websites and organizations devoted to the topic, including the
not-for-profit Film Noir Foundation, which seeks to restore and preserve
classic film noir movies, and “Feministfatale.com,” an online feminist magazine
that adapts the concerns of film noir into a forum for discussing gender and
popular culture. In 2011, a video game
called L.A. Noire was released and also
shown at the Tribeca Film Festival.
In its
most creative aspects, this boundary-crossing proliferation of noir has
continued to generate compelling and potentially critically productive
texts. The millennial Memento, for
example, is, like the best noir films of the classic period, paradoxically
chilling and poignant. Megan Abbott’s
recent noir novels, including Die a Little
(2005) and The Song is You (2009), replay and interpret the conventions
of noir with a subtle awareness of the theme of the victimization of women that
is so central, I maintain in this book, to our fully appreciating
original-cycle film noir. AMC’s The
Killing similarly adapts familiar character patterns. This cable television series combines the
femme fatale with the hard-boiled detective in the character of Sarah Linden, a
Seattle homicide detective obsessed with solving the murder of Rosie Larson,
who is herself a projection of noir gender fantasies.
In
addition to these revisions of noir types and texts, Alain Silver and James
Ursini have updated their Film Noir Encyclopedia (2010) and continue to publish
widely marketed edited collections of essays (the Film Noir Readers, as well as
the 2012 edited collection Film Noir:
The Directors, featuring short essays written by twenty-four writers and
eminent film scholars) that reflect, as Robert Miklitsch’s admirable
exploration of music in classic film noir does too, a healthy convergence of
academic study and popular fascination with film noir.[1]
While
the widened scope of film noir may expand its power to critique socio-historical
phenomena, in the area of gender, there may be a cost to such global
redirection and pervasiveness when many assume in post-feminist fashion that
the work of gender analysis in studies of film noir has already been done. Some of the unquestioned gender roles in noir
may not be helped by global noir, not to mention the continued proliferation of
glamour coffee-table books on “film noir and the femme fatale”[2] or Garrison
Keillor’s “Guy Noir,” a popular character on public radio’s Prairie Home Companion,
who evokes the cadences of noir with an unreflective repetition of sexist
clichés like leggy, dangerous dames. In
Robert Coover’s 2010 novel Noir, which features Philip M. Noir as the main
protagonist, the critical impulses of noir are subsumed utterly by a postmodern
execution of the noir style. Even in the
best works, there is reason to be a little anxious about the hyper-availability
of these character patterns and motifs.
In 2011, the Punchdrunk Theater Company brought its intriguing
“immersive theater” mash-up of Macbeth and film noir to Chelsea warehouses in
NYC. In the program book for Sleep No
More, artistic director Felix Barrett said of the production, “It was an easy
leap from film noir to Macbeth, as Shakespeare’s play has all the classic noir
motifs: passion, a femme fatale, and a
paranoid, power-obsessed man who’ll do anything to get what he desires.” Having
seen Sleep No More multiple times, I am
enthralled by its stunning creativity and originality. I am nonetheless made anxious by the ways in
which the production so comfortably adopts these noir motifs, especially the
“femme fatale.”
Indeed,
Rethinking the Femme Fatale is preoccupied with the stubborn resilience of an
idea of the “femme fatale,” the fact that, as Helen Hanson recently observed,
“the formation of the femme fatale . . . has remained uncontested”
(217).[3] This book is also mainly
interested in the tension between the figure of the “femme fatale”–which some
see as chic and powerful and which others see as sexist or misogynist–and
stories about women that are primarily about their ambitions. The noir narrative is often also about the
men who are threatened by the desire of women to have agency in the world. As Jess Sully writes in 2010,
The
threat posed by the fatal woman lies ultimately not in her feminine beauty or
eroticism but rather in the way in which she establishes rule over men by
utilizing the apparently ‘masculine’ qualities of power and authority. The femme fatale, popularly perceived as a
fundamentally feminine archetype, should more accurately be regarded as a
figure in which feminine beauty and masculine power combines. (Hanson, O’Rawe, 57)
Such
combination of traits ignites cultural anxieties about women and power that can
keep viewers from appreciating the complicated representations of women and
gender in film noir.
“Righting”
Noir
In 2012,
David Brooks joins this ever-expanding cultural conversation about film noir[4]
in a New York Times editorial that, again, reflects the easiness with which we
latch on to noir character types. For
Brooks, we need more Sam Spade “tough” guys in Washington who can “take it” and
maintain, at bottom, a kernel of respect for order and the law:
[The hard-boiled detective] assumes that
everybody is dappled with virtue and vice, especially himself. He makes no
social-class distinction and only provisional moral distinctions between the
private eyes like himself and the criminals he pursues. The assumption in a
Hammett book is that the good guy has a spotty past, does spotty things and
that the private eye and the criminal are two sides to the same personality. He
(or she — the women in these stories follow the same code) adopts a layered
personality. He hardens himself on the outside in order to protect whatever is left
of the finer self within.
Brooks
finds the noir sensibility especially appropriate for negotiating the muck of
Washington politics while maintaining a set of principles that provide a stable
moral compass. While I am suspicious of
the formulaic pitting of noir’s “moral
realism” against a social idealism and service mentality that Brooks implies
are naive, he very interestingly
observes in a sort-of aside that the women in noir are also embattled as a
result of their experiences in a shoddy world; they too carry an inner
strength. Brooks’s point about women and
the noir “code” speaks to a growing awareness of the centrality of women as
subjects in noir—a recognition I hope this book helps to extend— while still relegating
the idea of their hard-boiled demeanor to secondary status in the argument.
Like
Brooks, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has “made a case for” noir,
having written a “hard-boiled dissent” in a narcotics case in 2008. Chief Justice Roberts dissented from the
Court’s denial of a writ of certiorari from a lower Pennsylvania court asking
for review of a drug case involving probable cause: Officer “Devlin” is on his beat and observes
what looks like a drug deal; the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that the
police did not have probable cause to arrest the defendant. Roberts’s opening statement in his dissent
establishes the terms of his argument:
North Philly, May 4th, 2001. Officer
Sean Devlin, Narcotics Strike Force, was working the morning shift. Undercover surveillance. The neighborhood?
Tough as a three-dollar steak. Devlin knew. Five years on the beat, nine months
with the strike force. He’d made fifteen, twenty drug busts in the
neighborhood.
Devlin spotted him: a lone man on the corner. Another approached. Quick exchange of words. Cash handed over; small objects handed back.
Each man then quickly on his own way.
Devlin knew the guy wasn’t buying bus tokens. He radioed a description
and Officer Stein picked up the buyer. Sure enough: three bags of crack in the
guy’s pocket. Head downtown and book him.
Just another day at the office.
The
stylized prose of the dissent signals not only an internalized noir tone and
content but also a sense of the relevance Roberts sees of noir suspicion to the
workings of society and the law.
Roberts does seem to miss the irony of a Supreme Court Justice adapting
a genre that takes as a given a corrupt and/or impotent legal system. Nevertheless, his attraction to the language
of noir clearly has to do with its evocation of a cynical worldview: Officer Devlin, felicitously sharing Cary
Grant’s noir protagonist’s name in Notorious (1946), carries a resigned
understanding—“Devlin knew”—of the workings of the streets (“just another day
at the office”) and the character patterns and stories that inhabit these “mean
streets.” That the legal system doesn’t
trust Devlin’s noir insight is, as Roberts suggests later in his dissent, a
failure of the courts to recognize the hard-boiled habits of the city: “the core fact pattern is the same: experienced police officers observing
hand-to-hand exchanges of cash for small, unknown objects in high-crime
neighborhoods” (4).
Brooks’s
editorial and Roberts’s dissent certainly reflect the embeddedness of noir
character types and narrative patterns in the cultural psyche, but they also
point to a strange habit of perceiving real life through these literary
character types, a conflation of noir themes with “the real” that I address in
particular in Chapter Two. Things may
not always be as bad as the “mean streets” theme suggests, but because of our
attraction to noir stories, to the noir sensibility, these ways of thinking
about how we exist in society can permeate attitudes and decisions that have a
real impact on society, culture, and politics.
How strange that Judge Roberts dissolves the distinctions we typically
make between the actual and the fantastic, fact and fiction, reality and
ideation, as the Chief Justice transposes a legal document within the workings
of the Supreme Court into a piece of writing best understood in terms of its
literary themes and fictional narrative patterns. Although reading literature and viewing film
has, one would hope, a real-world effect, these examples suggest the importance
of attending carefully to what those effects are. The cynicism of Brooks and Roberts is
influenced by, or at least exemplified in, noir, and such a perspective is,
like the reading of gender and the “femme fatale” in film noir, a stance, not a
truth or reality.
While
the cynicism of judges and politicians and journalists may draw them to noir,
in film, literary, and cultural criticism, noir’s extended purview of late may
have something to do with a desire on the part of cultural critics to find new
lenses through which to read the history and culture of perceived hard-boiled
20th and 21st-century realities. The
pervasive intellectual attraction to noir speaks certainly in part to the
contemporary draw of cultural pastiche, but also to the strange comforts of an
intermittently nihilist tone, as it denotes despair and a cynicism that may
prepare us for the dire global challenges that face us. Such is the force of Wheeler Winston Dixon’s
writing in his Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia (2009) that “This is the
true message of noir; that today is horrible, and tomorrow will be worse; that
hope is an illusion.” (4). The “message” here recalls the really dark
moments in film noir: the opening
exchange in The Killers (1946)—“What’s the idea? There isn’t any idea”—or Uncle Charlie’s
chilling speech in another 1946 noir film, Shadow of a Doubt : “Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know, if you rip off the fronts of
houses, you’d find swine? The world’s a
hell.” As we survey the pervading
appeal of film noir’s pessimism, one thinks of Satan’s claim for the
universality of evil in Book Four of Milton’s Paradise Lost, “Which way I flie
is Hell; my self am Hell” (line 75).
Like Milton’s Satan, noir seems to generate its own darkness, becoming
an all-encompassing perspective.
And yet,
the darkness of noir is indeed a perspective, whose meaning changes based on
context. In the nineteenth century,
William Blake took Satan’s evil and “drew” him differently, as a romantic hero
who questioned the authority of God and who saw a Manichean view of the world
as destructive to human creativity and individual desire. Noir, too, while sometimes seen as reflecting
hopelessness and despair, can also be read as making a bid for freedom,
democracy, and human expression. Critics
and viewers have long recognized noir’s social critique, its unameliorative
consideration of the underbelly of psycho-social experience, especially as this
rough side of social life affects those on the margins because of their race,
class, or gender. Noir lends itself to a
global perspective that affirms social justice.
For this reason, it appeals to the idealistic left, as well as the
cynical right: The latter bases its
readings of the contemporary world on an assumption of human weakness and
venality, while the former focuses on the inequities that rig the social
system.
What
these examples show is that film and fictional narratives establish and then
appeal to certain ideological perspectives.
Narrative, film, and the discourses surrounding these texts, “draw” us and our habits in ways we should be
attentive to—as cynical, for example; as hard-boiled; as, in the case
stereotypically of the “femme fatale,” evil seductress. My hope is that the analysis in this study
helps to alert us to the extent to which men, women, and society are “drawn” in
ways that reinscribe and don’t question certain assumptions about gender and
culture. In the Introduction that follows, I outline some of the ramifications
of our cultural obsessions with the figure of the “bad woman.” Assuming important continuities among art,
popular film, views of gender roles, and social politics throughout eras, I
spend some time here talking about Hillary Clinton because she has been in
recent decades such a touchstone for cultural ambivalence about female
agency. While Hillary Clinton’s
popularity as Secretary of State has repressed early misogynist vitriol
unleashed by her candidacy in the presidential primary in 2008, the sexism
surrounding her bid for the presidency revealed the stubborn remnants of
cultural resistance to female leadership, anxiety about female power, and an
abiding commitment to gendered labels.
The stereotypes that continue to stoke anxiety surrounding female
leadership are trotted out as a means of conserving the status quo—for example,
in the case of “stay-at-home moms,”
whose defense many on the right and left ran to after Hilary Rosen’s 2012
comments about the wife of Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. According to Rosen, Ann Romney was in a weak
position to speak about the concerns of American working women since she “never
worked a day in her life.” Sensitivity
about women and work, the “mom-culture wars,” pervade the culture during times
of change, as I discuss throughout this book.
At the
same time, a more sympathetic view of the women familiarly labeled “femmes
fatales,” an approach this book argues for, can also be related to
representations of feminist upstarts—energetic and smart women portrayed as
wanting independence and creative, meaningful lives. The following examples, from contemporary
fiction, film, television, and media coverage of an international crime story,
show the abiding appeal of the “femme fatale” in portrayals of female
power. These examples also show the
extent to which representations of female experience in society often fall prey
to bad-faith readings. As is revealed in
the most interesting noir texts, this is where Satan perhaps really “flies,” in
simplistic readings of women and their actions and choices that are so often
closely linked to themes of entrapment, violence, and thwarted ambition. One thinks, for example, of Clash By Night’s
Mae Doyle (Barbara Stanwyck), who describes her “life history . . . . in four
words: big ideas, small results.” Opting for the “bad woman” interpretation
of the “femme fatale” is, like the least generous analogies drawn between
Hillary Clinton and Rasputin (see Introduction), deeply at odds with the spirit
of the best film noir movies.
Powerful
Victims
Steig
Larsson’s portrait of Lizbeth Salander in his noir series that begins with The
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo adapts noir’s portrayal of female energy and
ingenuity. This dangerous woman refuses
to remain in a state of victimization that is keyed to the real experience of
girls and women in society. As Maureen
Corrigan said in an NPR piece called “Super-Smart Noir with a Feminist Jolt”
(September 23, 2008),
Larsson’s
multi-pieced plot snaps together as neatly as an Ikea bookcase, but even more
satisfying is the anti-social character of Salander, whose movements are
described as “quick and spidery.” Certainly the utopian allure of traditional
detective fiction had something to do with the omnipotent Sam Spades and
Phillip Marlowes who made criminals quake and femme fatales swoon. The
liberating fantasy of Salander, at least for this female reader, has something
to do with watching a woman operate who doesn’t give a darn whether she pleases
people or not.
Such is
the legacy of film noir’s “femme fatale,” who creates different terms for
agency—some dangerous, all ambitious—than the limited ones on offer in and by
society. Further, Lizbeth’s past and her
story in general suggest that the dangers of the “quick and spidery” “fatal
woman” are directly related to the threatened and violent men around her, a
noir preoccupation with psychotic men who scapegoat women that is forecast in
Larsson’s original title for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which translates
as “Men Who Hate Women.” This “homme
fatale,” or “deadly man,” theme is referenced in the third novel in the series
when Blomquist says to his sister, “When it comes down to it, this story is not
primarily about spies and secret government agencies; it’s about violence
against women, and the men who enable it” (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,
514). That Lizbeth’s response to misogyny and the assaults on her is a
“liberating fantasy” for women demonstrates continued fascination with
representing undaunted female agency.
These patterns of representation have evolved out of a very often
sympathetic portrayal of powerful yet victimized women in film noir.[5]
While
discussion of Marilyn Monroe may seem far afield of the study of the femme
fatale figure (though Monroe appeared in a number of film noir movies), there
are striking similarities in the cultural processes at play in the construction
of “Marilyn” as idea and the “femme fatale” as idea. In the film My Week with Marilyn (2011),
Michelle Williams’s performance of Marilyn Monroe shows a broken self peeking
through the cast-iron commodification of the female image. The film’s portrayal of Monroe recalls Sunset
Blvd, another film that presents a “difficult” woman, whose danger is linked to
her response to having been victimized by Hollywood. Both films show women eviscerated by an
industry seeing them only in terms of their marketability as physical
icons. In My Week, desperate measures
are taken to buoy up the star, who, it turns out, is not “ageless.” In Sunset Blvd, Max Von Mayerling (Erich Von
Stroheim) insists to Norma (Gloria Swanson), “Madame is the greatest star,”
just as Paula Strasberg (Zoe Wanamaker) implores Marilyn—“You are a great
star!” It is no coincidence that, as I
mention in my final chapter, David Lynch considered making a film about Marilyn
Monroe, whose story, like Diane Selwyn’s in Mulholland Drive (2001) and Norma
Desmond’s (which fascinated Lynch), captures a psycho-social case of obsession
and neuroses. The energy, charisma, and
power of these women—Marilyn, Norma, Diane—make them stunning to watch, but the
films under discussion here establish a narrative of women struggling to makes
sense of their psycho-social lives:
Diane (Naomi Watts), Norma, Marilyn, finding out the cost of their
success; women dying or becoming mad or schizophrenic as a result of their
incarceration in the commodified female image.
One of
the most telling moments in My Week With Marilyn occurs when Monroe is
approached by adoring fans at Windsor Castle.
She turns to Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), her companion, and whispers,
“I’ll be her now” and proceeds to posture erotically for her fans in the
familiar Marilyn Monroe poses. The film
provides a fascinating portrait of the psycho-social process by which women are
split off from their selves, lured into a world of celebrity and appearance in
which agency and self-respect are limited to, trumped by, giving an audience
the visual pleasures it craves. Monroe
is shown to be self-aware in her control of “being her,” a poignant reference
to psychological dissociation as a by-product of female celebrity (“Marilyn’s
like a veil I wear over Norma Jean,” Monroe once said to photographer Lawrence
Schiller), but also to Monroe’s high intelligence in reading her gendered place
in society. In the June 2012 issue of
Vanity Fair, the above-mentioned Lawrence Schiller recalls some of his
exchanges with Monroe as he photographed her on the set of Let’s Make Love in
1960. During their initial meeting,
Monroe tells Schiller that she “always [has] a full-length mirror next to the
camera when I’m doing publicity stills.
That way,” she said, “I know how I look.” Schiller continues, “Her remark came out of
nowhere, and I found myself asking, “So do you pose for the photographer or for
the mirror?” “The mirror,” she replied
without hesitating. “I can always find
Marilyn in the mirror” (135). This
stunning remark reflects the power of the image of woman, whether it be
“Marilyn” (see network television’s hit show Smash about making “Marilyn: The Musical”) or the “femme fatale.” In the case of Marilyn Monroe’s image in the
mirror, the idea of “Marilyn” has been utterly internalized by and has in some
ways taken over the woman who “plays” her.
Such “possession” reflects the scary potential of ideation stoked by
celebrity culture to infect our way of being in the world. “Playing” “Marilyn,”
or the “femme fatale,” and “being” her, become indistinguishable.
I’m Just
Drawn That Way
In an
immediately famous episode in Season Five of AMC’s Mad Men, Megan Draper
(Jessica Pare) performs “Zou bizou bizou” as a 40th birthday present for her
now mythically mad-manly husband Don Draper (Jon Hamm). The multiple perspectives on offer here make
the scene a jumping off point for discussions of the show and a provocation
similar to film noir. We ask parallel
and still-relevant questions about gender in each: Are Megan and film noir’s “femme fatales”
sexist renderings of a woman performing for a man? Does the scene, like many in noir films,
provide a case study of the homosocial environment that appropriates, here,
Megan’s “red meat” performance:
first, as an invitation to male
desire (perversely postscripted on the following day when Megan seduces Don as
she cleans the apartment in her underwear); second, in Don’s uncomfortable
awareness of the future implications of Megan’s performance, his anxiety about
playing “the dumb lug” to his wife’s Gilda-esque performance, making a spectacle of herself and – worse—him
as a potential “patsy”? (How, for example, would Don feel if he had seen [the
following work day] his co-worker/employee Harry Crane [Rich Sommer]
lasciviously making fun of Megan’s performance in the office coffee enclave as
Megan stood unseen behind him, much as Evelyn Mulwray [Faye Dunaway] stands
behind Jake Gittes [Jack Nicholson] as he tells his vulgar “Chinaman” joke to
his cohorts in Chinatown [1974])? Does
the scene, like film noir’s treatment of strong women, provide a chance to
reflect on Megan’s ambitions, singing and acting, in whatever forum her social
and familial role and environment allow?
Such questions, as I hope my Janus-faced exploration of classic film
noir establishes (looking back, for
instance, to Victorian fiction’s representation of gender and forward to David
Lynch’s darkly poetic reflection on film noir and women in Mulholland Drive),
remain important, as we consider the radical changes we observe in cultural
attitudes toward gender and the surprising moments in which such changes seem
illusory, when we recognize how doggedly gender stereotypes have taken hold on
the cultural imaginary.
Then,
finally, there is Jessica Rabbit (Kathleen Turner) in Who Framed Roger Rabbit
(1988), who became a character in the story of Amanda Knox, whom I refer to in
the Introduction that follows. As Knox
appealed her conviction in the 2007 murder of
Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy,
her attorney, Giulia Bongiorno, claimed in the fall of 2011 that Knox is
not a bad woman, a she-devil (read, “femme fatale”); she is, “like Jessica
Rabbit,” “just drawn that way” (Sept. 27, 2011). The sentiment reflects what I say in my
Introduction about media representations of women in the public eye whose lives
become part of the fictions we like to construct about dangerous women that
seem to derive from a perception of their power:
Jessica
Rabbit: You don’t know how hard it is
being a woman looking the way I do.
Eddie
Valiant (Bob Hoskins): You don’t know
how hard it is being a man looking at a woman looking the way you do.
Jessica
Rabbit: I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that
way.
The
exchange reflects a familiar noir story of men’s fear of losing control,
specifically by falling prey to their own desire, and also evokes an equally
familiar convention of gendered readings that revert to type, which prey
instead on women who desire power and women who express sexual desire. My hope is that this book will continue to
play a role in conversations about gender representations—how women and men are
“drawn”—in film, literature, media, and popular culture–and what insights that
gleans for us.
Summer,
2012
[1]
Siren City: Sound and Source Music in
Classic American Noir (Rutgers University Press, 2011).
[2]See
Dana Polan’s excellent commentary in his review of Fox Film Noir: Laura, Call Northside 777, Panic in the
Streets; House of Bamboo, Nightmare Alley, The Street with No Name:
“Noir
suddenly can seem to be everywhere, inherent in everything, and this means it
loses its critical edge as either a cinematic or sociological concept. Think,
for instance, of that vast and ever-growing array of coffee table books on film
noir that treat it as little more than a fascinating look, a compelling style,
a mere ambience, a fashion. Noir becomes noir-chic, one more retro commodity
disconnected from everything the genre meant—and fundamentally continues to
mean—as part of our contemporaneity”
(The Moving Image: 7: 1 [Spring, 2007]:
110-114).
[3] The
Femme Fatale: Images, Histories,
Contexts, ed. Helen Hanson and Catherine O’Rawe (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010).
[4] “Sam
Spade at Starbucks, “ The New York Times (April 13, 2012): A31.
[5]
Steve Neale takes this approach in his excellent essay in Hanson’s and O’Rawe’s
The Femme Fatale, “’I Can’t Tell Anymore Whether You’re Lying’: Double Indemnity, Human Desire, and the
Narratology of Femmes Fatales” (187-98).
Neale makes the point that a “possible reading” of Vicki (Gloria
Grahame) in Human Desire (1954) as a “femme fatale” “is qualified by the emphasis placed on the
behavior of the men with whom Vicki is involved” (193) and Neale observes,
further, “[Vicki’s] status as a powerless victim of powerful men” (194).
From
: Rethinking The Femme Fatale : ready
for her close-up. By Julie Grossman.
Desistfilm,
March
20, 2013.
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