ABSTRACT
Contemporary films that feature fatal women adopt various attitudes, although almost all of these works are deeply self-conscious about a legacy of stylistic traits and character types associated with classic film noir. Some of these more recent films exemplify a feminist affirmation of female power; others apply the femme fatale, as sexual badass, to a neo-liberal individualist agenda; still others offer a politicized critique of the construction of gender and power relations in the social world. This essay explores the abiding relevance of the figure of the femme fatale, not as a static object of vision, but as a dynamic critical tool for understanding the workings of gender in popular culture and society. Like other fictional icons-dominant televisual characters such as Walter White in Breaking Bad and Joan Holloway Harris and Peggy Olson in Mad Men-the figure of the femme fatale exemplifies the power of popular cultural representations to inform our notions of gender and social rules and, sometimes, to challenge them. Erotic thrillers of the 1980s sought more to titillate, entertain, and resonate with classic
film noir than, in most cases, to challenge gender roles. A spate of movies beginning with “B” for “blood,” “body,” “black”—such as Blood Simple (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1984), Body Double (De Palma, 1984), Black Widow (Rafelson, 1987) (also Blue Steel [Bigelow, 1989], Blue Velvet [Lynch, 1986], and Blade Runner [Scott, 1982]), their titles speaking the language of noir-adapted familiar narrative and character patterns to a new post-postwar era. Neonoir films introduced a new strain of fatal female characters, beginning with Matty Walker in Body Heat (Kasdan, 1981). A pastiche of tropes most closely identified with Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944), the film initiated a trend of exaggerating the noir male protagonist’s dull-wittedness, presenting him as no match for the fatal woman who seduces then seeks to destroy him. In classic film noir, the destruction of the male protagonist and the fatal woman
constituted a critique of the American Dream-its failed promise of success and happiness seen through the perspective of marginalized figures. By virtue of their gender, women were always already such outsiders, an insight feminist readings of film noir brought to the table beginning with the publication of E. Ann Kaplan’s Women in Film Noir in 1978. Amidst second-wave feminisms, and interestingly on the eve of the 1980s rebirth of the fatal woman in neo-noir, this landmark collection analyzed the so-called bad women in classic film noir as a symbolic expression of shifting power roles and a destabilized family
in wartime and postwar America. The essays in the volume, such as Janey Place’s “Women in Film Noir” (1978), opened up space for reading noir women in more positive terms, rather than simply as misogynist projections of male desire. The volume not only illuminated film noir’s relevance to feminist discourse and theory, demonstrated in Christine Gledhill’s book-end essays, but also found in psychoanalytic feminist theory a particularly resonant means of exploring different forms of agency, scopic regimes, and representation in film noir. Pam Cook’s and Claire Johnston’s essays, for example, paved the way for subsequent feminist psychoanalytic work on film noir, such as Mary Ann Doane’s Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (1991)—which saw in the femme fatale’s masking and unknowability a powerful expression of male fears about female power-and also Joan Copjec’s collection Shades of Noir (1993). Shifting critical attention from men’s to women’s stories, Elizabeth Cowie argued in her essay in Shades of Noir against a traditional reading of film noir’s “mean streets” as a male “sphere,” refocusing feminist film criticism on noir “women[’s] roles which are active, adventurous and driven by sexual desire” (1993, 135). Elisabeth Bronfen’s later essay (2004) lent the classic femme fatale a tragic dimension, boldly taking as her example Phyllis Dietrichson of Double Indemnity (1944), considered by many to be the quintessential opaque femme fatale. In their monographs, Helen Hanson (2007) and Philippa Gates (2011) “detected” and pursued the centrality of the female investigative role in film noir, Gates more recently averring that the “female detective brings with her an idealism” (2014, 33) that questions the centrality of cynicism in film noir. And Hanson and Catherine O’Rawe’s 2010 collection explored the global, trans-historical, and feminist contexts that perennially shift the meaning of the femme fatale. As against this rich mining of the women’s stories in noir, the excessive portrayal of the pathological fatal woman in neo-noir seems in many ways to flatten the critical terrain. From its metaphorical side streets, classic film noir explored the dark underbelly of the
American Dream. Neo-noir catapulted the deadly femme into the main streets and the mainstream of American culture in blockbuster thrillers such as Fatal Attraction (Lyne, 1987) and Basic Instinct (Verhoeven, 1992). However, a major change can be seen in that these films focus less on a flawed system (claustrophobic social settings for men and women, including domestic prisons and oppressive office life, and cops and war vets traumatized and corrupted by their proximity to violence) than on the weak men and powerful women who exploit their weaknesses. Body Heat demonstrated that women should not be underestimated. As many have noted,
Matty Walker “gets away with” her crimes, a major revision to the production-codedominated films that saw women paying for their transgressions in classic film noir. More striking, however, is the film’s cynical representation of women vying with men to cash in on their criminal endeavors for individual gain and pleasure, inaugurating the neo-liberal version of the femme fatale based on the assumption, as Samantha Lindop has argued about neo-noir, that “[I]ndividuals are constructed as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life, and are seen as rational, calculating, and self-regulating; with a life story that is the outcome of deliberate choices” (2015, 14). Despite Body Heat’s focus on Reagan-era acquisitiveness, the film may offer a feminist
through-line in Kathleen Turner’s dynamic performance as Matty Walker-in moments, for example, when she mocks her husband’s belittling of her, in much the way Gloria Grahame’s dynamic Debby Marsh in The Big Heat (Lang, 1953) made fun of the men surrounding her, their domination eliciting her parody of them all as circus figures, “Now jump, Debby.” In the restaurant scene inBodyHeat, Matty says, “I’m too dumb.Woman, you
know …,” then, “I’ll be right back. Then maybe we can talk about pantyhose or something interesting.” Following Fatal Attraction, in the 90s, movies such as Basic Instinct, Body of Evidence (Edel,
1993), and The Temp (Holland, 1993) featured men beleaguered by sexy pathological women. Yvonne Tasker aptly notes the following about Alex Forrest from Fatal Attraction: “Expressing the manifold contradictions of postfeminism, this attack on conventional femininity via the persona of the deranged noir woman is of a tangibly different quality than the examples featured in classic noir” (2013, 366). “[E]xhilarating and exasperating” for female spectators (Stables, 1998, 179), sexually alluring figures of horror in neo-noir (see Pidduck, 1995, 69) may be essentialized as opaque and pathological but they also enact a gender reversal that is, for many, pleasurable (see Cohan, 1998, 273). Because “the postmodern fatal woman is a creature of excess and spectacle” (Stables, 1998, 167), she has excited some viewers, while others may find these fatal women less interesting than the cultural debates-occasioned by these films’ release-about the feminist, postfeminist, and/ or reactionary portraits of gender, sexual orientation, work life, and the nuclear family reflected in society and the media generally (see Williams, 2009). I want to suggest that the most interesting postmodern story of film noir and the femme fatale will address questions beyond basic ones we associate with neo-noir and erotic thrillers that feature fatal women: Will the fatal femme kill (wield the iconic icepick beneath the bed)? Will she get away with her crimes and betrayals? These two questions may tantalize viewers, but they remain insular, plot-driven, and only really culturally resonant to the extent that they spike discussions in the media and academia about representations of bad, powerful, and/or sexualized women. For commercial gain, erotic thrillers exploit the spectacle of sex converging with murderousness; these films sell. There is another sequence of films beginning in the 90s, however, that posits dangerous
women as neither supernaturally violent nor pastiches of classic film noir femmes fatales. This includes Carl Frankin’s neo-noir filmsOne False Move (1992) and Devil in a Blue Dress (1995); Patty Jenkins’s Monster (2003); David Slade’s Hard Candy (2006); and David Fincher’sGirl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) and, to a lesser extent, Gone Girl (2014); and a number of David Lynch’s films, notably Blue Velvet, Lost Highway (1997), and Mulholland Drive (2001): These films are critically oriented in exploring the femme fatale as a hierarchically gendered construction of men and women in an image-obsessed world: a mediacreated, media-driven projection. Since the 1990s, these more critically minded films use these characters to question
the source of the fatality they pose, analyzing the forms of cultural objectification that produce the femme fatale in the first place. This is a niche market of films, featuring so-called bad women lashing out against or struggling to survive within a culture that denies their subjectivity. These films often refer back to earlier noir films to suggest the continuities in gender representation, while employing a postmodern style or open-endedness to provoke thought and to suggest how unanswered many of the questions remain. Carl Franklin’s neo-noir films, for example, invoke generic features of film noir to see
how their meaning changes when played out in the context of racial prejudice and complicated racial identities in America. In Devil in a Blue Dress, Daphne Monet’s (Jennifer Beals) “untrustworthiness” has, in the end, to do with the fact that she is “passing” as a white woman to survive being of mixed race and in love with a prominent white man. Three years earlier, Franklin made the affecting One False Move, in which doubleness is similarly critique-oriented and about victimization based on racism. Once False Move’s dopey Sheriff Dale “Hurricane” Dixon (Bill Paxton) appears to be an ambitious Arkansas bumpkin, but it
turns out that he sexually exploited the vulnerable Lila Walker (Cynda Williams) in the past, when she was seventeen and he was a married cop. In One False Move, the name Lila has adopted, “Fantasia,” symbolizes her function as a screen onto which Dale projects his desires-and as a receptacle of men’s fantasies in general. If Lila spirals toward crime and is separated from her son Byron, Dale represses his past into a psychologically jury-rigged fantasy of normalcy with a wife and daughter, Bonnie. In both of Franklin’s neo-noir films, the so-called femme fatale’s duplicity is not part of a scheme to steal money or the expression of an opaque villain hell-bent on wielding power in any abstract sense. Her character is instead linked unambiguously to the particulars of racism. Unlike many of the women in neo-noir thrillers, these female characters do not fit neatly into categories. They exemplify the political legacy of film noir, carrying its critique into postmodernity. Female vengeance has also played a central role in contemporary film noir represen-
tations of powerful women. The role of the avenging woman takes noir criminality beyond the representation of individual fictional characters to explore issues of exploitation and the victimization of women keyed to social realities. One of the most popular of these stories has been Gone Girl. As problematic as some elements of the book by Gillian Flynn and Fincher’s film are-the film claims a feminist sensibility and yet exploits a fan base derived from wildly popular films like Basic Instinct, wanting it both ways-there are moments of clarity in the story regarding the nature of female rebellion against the oppressive roles women are led to play in order to succeed and sustain relationships. If classic film noir featured women defying sexist prescriptions for acceptable roles and behavior, Gone Girl explains a “new sexism” that leads “Amazing Amy” to feign the role of “Cool Girl.” “Cool Girl” is “hot and understanding,” illustrating the postfeminist expectation that women “[pretend] to be the woman a man wants them to be” (Flynn, 2012, 300). The critique of female role-playing inGoneGirl exemplifies Yvonne Tasker’s insight into why discussions of film noir and the femme fatale remain important:
The noir woman is snagged in what we might today term a sort of reputation management; her actions, illicit or otherwise, are explicitly framed by the need to appear a certain way. Thus, while noir is undoubtedly organized around male desires and male point of view, in its concern with appearance and perception, with the centrality of women’s image for their being in the world, noir films articulate concerns that are hugely important for women and for feminism.
