The Femme Fatale 9780813598284

Citation preview

THE FEMME FATALE

QU I C K TA K E S: M O V IE S A N D P O P U L A R CU LT U RE Quick Takes: Movies and Popular Culture is a series offering succinct overviews and high quality writing on cutting edge themes and issues in film studies. Authors offer both fresh perspectives on new areas of inquiry and original takes on established topics. SERIES EDITORS:

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is Willa Cather Professor of English and teaches film studies in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies and professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Rebecca Bell-Metereau, Transgender Cinema Blair Davis, Comic Book Movies Jonna Eagle, War Games Lester D. Freidman, Sports Movies Steven Gerrard, The Modern British Horror Film Barry Keith Grant, Monster Cinema Julie Grossman, The Femme Fatale Daniel Herbert, Film Remakes and Franchises Ian Olney, Zombie Cinema Valérie K. Orlando, New African Cinema Stephen Prince, Digital Cinema Dahlia Schweitzer, L.A. Private Eyes Steven Shaviro, Digital Music Videos David Sterritt, Rock ’n’ Roll Movies John Wills, Disney Culture

JULIE GROSSMAN

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Grossman, Julie, 1962– author. Title: The femme fatale / Julie Grossman. Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2020. | Series: Quick takes: movies and popular culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019052763 | ISBN 9780813598246 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813598253 (hardback) | ISBN 9780813598260 (epub) | ISBN 9780813598277 (mobi) | ISBN 9780813598284 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Femmes fatales in motion pictures. | Femmes fatales. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.F44 G65 2020 | DDC 791.43/6522—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052763 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2020 by Julie Grossman All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www.rutgersuniversitypress.org Manufactured in the United States of America

AS ALWAYS, FOR PHIL AND SOPHIE

CONTENTS

Introduction 1

2

3

1

Theda Bara and Barbara Stanwyck’s “Baby Face”: Exoticism and the Street-Smart Vamp

18

Wartime and Postwar Film Noir, Neo-Noir, and the Femme Fatale

41

Tracy Flick and Television’s Unruly Women

91

Acknowledgments133 Further Reading

135

Works Cited

139

Selected Filmography

151

Index153

vii

THE FEMME FATALE

INTRODUCTION Intelligent, witty, able to role-play and perform, deceptive, enraged, frustrated, mercenary, seductive, overtly sexual, fearless and tough as nails, physically self-­confident with a striking appearance: these are the qualities we associate with the femme fatale. The figure is commonly understood as a beautiful woman who seduces a male protagonist into criminality and a web of deceit, causing his demise and, when film-industry production codes required, her own death too. The femme fatale has always been perceived as a staple of classic film noir (generally thought to date from The Maltese Falcon [1941] to Touch of Evil [1958]), the dangerous dame seen as a counterpart to the slick and cynical male detective. As many people are aware, classic film noir refers to the series of brooding post–World War II films characterized by low-key lighting, an emphasis on urban anonymity and alienation, the seductions of criminality, and coolcat highly metaphorical language drawn in part from the hardboiled fiction of James Cain, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway 1

2 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

penned a quintessentially dark exchange in his short story “The Killers”: “‘What’s the idea?’ Nick asked. ‘There isn’t any idea,’” returns one of the hired killers (217). This kind of playful riff on nothingness becomes endemic in film noir, which sleekly adapts a literary vernacular and melds it to compelling character patterns. In Out of the Past (1947), Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) tells a cabbie, “I think I’m in a frame. . . . I don’t know. All I can see is the frame”; in Sweet Smell of Success (1957), J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) says to Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), “You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried.” While the focus in film noir has habitually been on the beleaguered tough guy, for whom the irony in such language becomes a defense against the fear of living meaninglessly, women in noir share this world-weariness, despite viewers’ and critics’ conventional focus on the hardboiled male and the women’s part in adding to the troubles of men. Indeed, a close look at film noir’s ingrained character patterns reveals the classic femme fatale brandishing many of the qualities we associate with the male noir protagonist. In The Big Heat, Debby Marsh (Gloria Grahame) comments as she enters the barren hotel room of the detective Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford), “I like it. Early nothing.” Debby’s line alludes to the visible boundaries of nothingness, and that angst-ridden insight, while traditionally associated with men in noir, is crucially important for understanding

I ntroduction  

• 3

noir’s modern women as they strive to find meaning outside of oppressive social roles. The hardboiled women in noir show their rage or malaise differently from how postwar fraught masculinity is expressed, where tough leading men are more able to sublimate their unease and disappointments into a workable cynicism and an appealing “cool” demeanor that complements their masculine competence. For women, displaying such cynicism breaks the conventional gender mold, threatening the cultural idolatry of mothers and virgins. Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) tells Sherry (Marie Windsor) in The Killing (1956), “You like money. You’ve got a great big dollar sign there where most women have a heart.” Bad boys have always been more easily adapted into accepted social types; bad girls, however, are demonized and often punished for their resistance to social norms. One of the main ways that film noir’s classic femme fatale has rebelled against social conventions and pushed against boundaries is by role-playing. There is, as I suggest throughout this volume, an abiding relevance in the practice and notions of performance embedded in the idea of the classic femme fatale, not only because cinema’s fatal women are so often portrayed by strikingly charismatic actors but also because the theme of performance captures the double bind that active and rebellious or

4 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

transgressive female characters find themselves in: they perform roles sometimes to escape objectification or the rigid or socially sanctioned positions that oppress them, but then when they assume or “perform” unconventional or unprescribed roles, their ambition to find fulfillment outside of convention constitutes them as “bad actors,” as deceptive, inauthentic, or “spider women.” Putting on “a show,” performing femininity while charting the damage done to women because of predatory men and institutional biases, is trademark femme fatale. A serious rejoinder to institutional sexism, the most compelling femmes fatales show two paths taken by women as a result of their privation and sense of loss, violation, or unfulfillment: desperate grabs for power or happiness, or a mocking vengeance against those who have contributed to their desolation. Both avenues usually involve criminality. This book attends to the stories of femmes fatales, delineating their words and behavior as insurgencies against conventional gender categories that are insidious. The figures addressed in this book are dangerous women whose sly rebellions against the status quo offer images and portraits of strong, defiant women. Viewers’ obsession with the femme fatale replicates the noir men’s fascination with and dread of the powerful woman. Indeed, female badness is ripe for exploitation as a theme with a ready audience. We find over the centuries

I ntroduction  

• 5

a deeply rooted cultural habit of glomming onto the titillating icon of the bad woman, the Eve or Lilith figure that threatens patriarchy and individual men whose loss of control can then be blamed on the woman: as Rita Hayworth sings in Gilda (1946), first rebelliously, then plaintively, “Put the Blame on Mame.” With its sex and glitter, the icon can blind us from evaluating nuanced representation that is crucially inflected with vibrant female performance. For example, none of Lauren Bacall’s roles in classic film noir included a “badness” associated with the idea of the deadly female. When Bacall first exploded onto the Hollywood scene in 1944, the Motion Picture Daily Review captured this powerful and misleading dynamic by associating Bacall’s seductiveness with villainy: “Her deportment has a decided ‘come-hither’ look and her brand of acting is purring and tintillating [sic] in the slow-cooking manner: She is the bad girl” (Kann, review of To Have and Have Not). A pickpocket in To Have and Have Not (1944), Marie Browning (Bacall) lives on the edge to survive, but the focus here on the threat she poses is part and parcel of the cultural dynamics that determine and continually reinscribe the role of the femme fatale. Further, there is a moment in To Have and Have Not when Bogart comments on Marie’s manipulation, “You’re good. You’re awful good,” a judgment that speaks to the woman’s powers of artifice.

6 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

This is a theme that recurs in this study: female characters branded as femmes fatales perform roles in order to survive, to seduce, or to manipulate others in order to get what they want, yet any “pretense” to better their position is received as immoral and invites male scorn. Female dissimulation means that Marie is a “good” performer, but that makes her untrustworthy. Because Marie’s role as femme fatale is subordinate in her noir films to Bacall’s partnership with Bogart, her characters are rewarded with romance and happy endings. But the exchange about how awfully “good” she is exposes an ideology of mistrusting women that sends a message that women are bad even when they are “good,” and this is because they are not in these cases “good” as a gendered ideal—angel in the house, domestic savior—but good at something, such as performance or work in general. It is then when they are often perceived as threatening. Marie’s sarcastic comment to Steve later in this conversation is thus fitting: “Who was the girl . . . the one who left you with such a high opinion of women?” Marie’s exchange with Steve offers a kinder version of Devlin’s (Cary Grant) disdain for Alicia’s (Ingrid Bergman) performance as Alex Sebastian’s (Claude Rains) wife in Notorious (1946)—“Dry your eyes, baby; it’s out of character”—or Jeff Markam’s cynical repetition to Kathie Moffatt that she is “good” in Out of the Past: “Oh, you’re good, Kathie.” Kathie is

I ntroduction  

• 7

murderous, like Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, but these two female characters become the benchmark for other women in noir, particularly in the way they perform and dissemble. In The Maltese Falcon, Spade also says “You’re good” to Brigid, followed by “It’s chiefly your eyes . . . and that throb you get in your voice.” Brigid responds, “It’s my own fault if you can’t believe me now,” and Spade confirms that it is female performance that is most threatening: “Now you are dangerous.” Men within these films and often the viewers cathecting on the role of the femme fatale are especially alert to female dissimulation, when there are important distinctions to be drawn among these many energetic modern women whose motives vary. In classic film noir, the destruction of the male protagonist and the fatal woman constitute a critique of the American Dream—its failed promise of success and happiness seen through the perspective of marginalized figures. Women, by virtue of their gender, were always already such outsiders, an insight that feminist readings of film noir introduced beginning with the publication of E. Ann Kaplan’s edited collection Women in Film Noir in 1978 (reprinted with additional essays in 1998). Amid second-­wave feminisms and, interestingly, on the eve of the 1980s rebirth of the fatal woman in neo-noir, this landmark volume analyzed the so-called bad women in classic

8 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

film noir as a symbolic expression of shifting power roles and a destabilized family in 1940s America. The essays in the collection, such as Janey Place’s “Women in Film Noir,” 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 Copjec’s volume 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” (135). A later essay by Elisabeth Bronfen, published in New Literary History in 2004, lent the classic femme fatale a tragic dimension, Bronfen boldly taking

I ntroduction  

• 9

as her example Phyllis Dietrichson of Double Indemnity, considered by many people to be the opaque femme fatale par excellence. My own volume Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up (2009) argued that film noir’s femme fatale is a phantom, that when viewers examine closely many noir films, they find so-called femmes fatales to be three-dimensional women who have their own stories to tell: difficult backgrounds and feelings of privation based on class and gender and the vitality to push against the limits of their experience in clever ways; their criminality is often a means of rejecting or rebelling against the constricting roles ascribed to or projected onto them. Helen Hanson and Philippa Gates, in their respective monographs, “detected” and pursued the centrality of the female investigative role in film noir, Gates further averring in 2014 that the “female detective brings with her an idealism” that questions the centrality of cynicism in film noir (“Independence” 33). And Hanson and Catherine O’Rawe’s 2010 collection The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts explored the global, transhistorical, and feminist contexts that perennially shift the meaning of the femme fatale. Shelley Stamp additionally amends our understanding of gender and classic film noir by focusing recently on how the work done by noir’s women producers, Joan Harrison, Harriet Parsons, and Virginia Van Upp, expanded and promoted

10 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

female viewership; Stamp also demonstrates the significance of women’s interest in crime stories during this period, further revising a traditional emphasis on film noir and masculinity. 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, as I discuss in chapter 2. At the same time, contemporary femmes fatales since the 1980s reinforce the continuing appeal of representations of bad women. As censorship has ceased to provide “cover” for depictions of women intended to be relentlessly bad, female villains compel viewers to confront many assumptions about gender that remain in force despite important shifts in power since the nineteenth century and film noir’s renaissance in the 1940s and ’50s. Representations of bad women must be evaluated with regard to context, and while some of these figures may be simply sensationalist, others provoke consideration of traumatizing institutional and psycho-social biases. The year 1895 inaugurated both the use of the phrase “femme fatale” in English (by George Bernard Shaw) and the birth of the cinema. Like the photographic and filmic image, the icon of the femme fatale marks an illusion but also documents a reality; it is there and not there. For this reason, insofar as critics and scholars locate the femme

I ntroduction  

• 11

fatale within cinema, it is possible to find traces of her long before the innovation of film, not only in the figures of Eve, Lilith, and Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci” but also in contemporary performance spaces and media as well, as the latter part of this book demonstrates. The femme fatale prods discussion and conversation about social roles and power dynamics that remain—pre- and post-#MeToo—important contexts informing depictions of “bad” women. This is not to say that all appearances of “bad” women throughout the history of media are critique oriented, only to suggest that there are often countercurrents in these representations; sexism may sometimes be bound up in the operations of the femme fatale while this figure also manages to deconstruct patriarchy. This is why careful readings of this figure are so crucial. At the end of a BBC radio program on film noir’s femme fatale in 2018, the narrator, Kathleen Turner (who played Matty Walker in Body Heat [1981]), shares her insight that when women are fully on an equal footing with men in society, there will no longer be a need for the femme fatale (Ferran). Until then, Turner suggests, her presence and her potential are subversive. As attractive as this reading might be, the construction of the fatal woman as a necessary evil in a fallen world belies the pleasures the femme fatale affords and the creative forms

12 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

of self-expression she pursues. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the author of the hit television shows Fleabag (2016–19) and Killing Eve (2018–), hosted Saturday Night Live (1975–) on October 5, 2019. In her opening monologue, she mused about continuities between herself and the character she plays, Fleabag, who is “sexually depraved, foul-mouthed, dangerous.” The obvious pleasure Waller-Bridge takes in owning this persona speaks to the feminist defiance often emerging from the figure of the femme fatale. The femme fatale is an ongoing pattern and creative tool of gender critique and redefinition. As central a feature of classic noir and neo-noir as fatal women have been, this figure has also exceeded the genre or series as a cultural icon and popular representation. The femme fatale recurs throughout culture as a provocative figure of disruption, a means of questioning gender norms and cultural hierarchies. This short book describes the femme fatale’s enchanting machinations from the exploits of the silent-movie vamp to the striking words, actions, and demeanors of contemporary film’s and television’s fatal women. On the one hand, I take a long view of the femme fatale from her figuration in early film all the way to contemporary versions of the archetype, some of which are created by women for television, by creative artists such as Waller-Bridge, Mary Harron, Sarah Polley, and Margaret Atwood. On the other hand, in some

I ntroduction  

• 13

sense, chronologies of the femme fatale across media won’t account for the importance of this figure’s iconicity. The femme fatale is a persistent feature of the American landscape, like the recurrent idea of the Wild West, that goes beyond the boundaries of a chronological history by serving as a benchmark for attitudes toward women and social roles. The legacy of the femme fatale strongly marks contemporary television and satire. Game of Thrones (2011–19) challenges viewers with the unrelenting cruelty of Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey). But Cersei’s nearly nihilist insistence on protecting her rule and her children is continually tied to her awareness of the culture’s contempt for women and disregard for their lives and desires. Thus we recognize the importance of the figure of the femme fatale, the fatal woman, in helping us to see the constraints placed on women and their insistence on breaking the chains of their confinement. Saturday Night Live has repeatedly shown creative women using humor to ridicule sexist norms and blast the exploitation of women. In “Welcome to Hell,” a December 2017 Saturday Night Live music-video skit, Aidy Bryant, Kate MacKinnon, Leslie Jones, Cecily Strong, Melissa Villaseñor, and guest Saoirse Ronan dress in pastels, long hair and headbands, go-go boots, and miniskirts, licking candy canes and singing about a

14 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

history of sexual harassment. Attired in sexy outfits and surrounded by pink lollipops, rainbows, zebras, stars, icecream cones, and balloons, the women coo seductively in valley-girl accents, “All these big cool powerful guys are turning out to be—what’s the word—habitual predators? Cat’s out of the bag, women get harassed all the time . . . and it’s like, dang, is this the world now? Here’s a little secret that every girl knows. (Shhhh.) This been the damned world.” Then, the sung refrain follows: “It’s freaky, it’s narsty, it’s fun under the dust bag. But this is our hometown. We’ll show you around. Welcome to hell. Now we’re all in here.” In other words, “me too.” The skit underscores how miserable it is to live in a patriarchal society, where normal experience is hell. But the #MeToo movement has brought the femme fatale out of “the dark” and transformed the irony we associate with the smarttalking “dame” into conscious satire. Contemporary female comedians have appropriated the figure of the aggressive female upstart; consider Mrs. Maisel’s raunchy stand-up comedy or the title of Samantha Bee’s comedy-news show, Full Frontal, which casts Bee at the helm turning the gender tables as broadcaster of “the naked truth.” Bee’s remorselessness—from making the case on her television show in the fall of 2016 that Donald Trump can’t read to vulgar yet thrilling name-calling—shows us how important humor is

I ntroduction  

• 15

to the workings of the femme fatale, where we laugh at the incongruities she brings to light. The femme fatale isn’t an object or merely a projection but a pattern of representation that can reveal or expose the absurdities of gender exploitation and the traumas associated with gender bias. Comedians such as Samantha Bee are to some extent emulating the tough-talking noir dame who resists, critiques, or lambastes the status quo. Contesting the power of smug men, Bee’s parodies could be likened to the celebrated moment in Road House (1948) when Lily Stevens (Ida Lupino) slaps the face of the presumptuous and controlling Pete Morgan (Cornel Wilde), saying dismissively, “Silly boy.” In Pitfall (1948), Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott) tells John Forbes (Dick Powell) that he’s “a little man with a briefcase.” As played by dynamic and charismatic performers such as Lupino and Scott, whose embodiment of the femme fatale emphasizes her agency and intelligence, the fatal woman calls out the arrogance of men; she is a foil to the hardboiled male protagonist and subverts the power of those around her and the social systems that preserve gender inequality. The femme fatale critiques social structures and resets power relations. In that spirit, she is a critical force to be reckoned with, meriting an expansion of our interrogation beyond film noir, neo-noir, and even film texts. This

16 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

is why chapter 3 looks at Alexander Payne’s millennial satire Election (1999) and examples of golden-age network and “quality” television shows (Twin Peaks, 1990–91, 2017), as well a contemporary British series (Killing Eve) and a miniseries adaptation of a historical novel (Alias Grace, 2017) on a streaming service. These texts provide opportunities to explore gendered power relations and cultural assumptions undergirding the femme fatale that reflect and may sometimes also provoke cultural anxieties. My methodology in this volume includes close reading of film and television texts and intertexts, paying particular attention to the magnetic performances by women such as Theda Bara and Barbara Stanwyck or Reese Witherspoon and Jodie Comer and focusing on the moments of expressivity that help us to discern the resistance and power of the femme fatale, even as we observe her often complex and fraught subjectivity or her militant opacity. I also bring in contextual material—reviews and studio pressbooks, for example—that helps us to see how images of the fatal woman have been promoted by Holly­ wood and society at large. No doubt readers will miss seeing detailed consideration of their own favorite films and characters, and although the briefness of this study precludes discussing many major and classic noir movies, I try at least to refer to a lot of them and discuss texts and figures that are less extensively covered elsewhere and

I ntroduction  

• 17

films I didn’t address at length in my earlier book on the femme fatale. Sustained and repeated analysis of representations of “bad women” in popular and mainstream culture counter­acts the cliché (often repeated in internet rankings of the “hottest” femmes fatales) that these female characters are simply seductive and malevolent. The case studies that follow are designed to show off the femme fatale’s style and language and to suggest not only the apparitional qualities of the haunting (and haunted) fatal woman but also her power to illuminate important and pervasive social-psychological dynamics in the way gender operates in our lives and the texts we are drawn to.

1 THEDA BARA AND BARBARA STANWYCK’S “BABY FACE” Exoticism and the Street-Smart Vamp A FOOL THERE WAS: “NOTORIOUS WOMAN OF THE VAMPIRE SPECIES”

In 1897, the same year Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published, Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem called “A Fool There Was” about a vampire woman who sucks the life blood from her male victims. The poem was inspired by a painting by Philip Burne-Jones (son of the Pre-­R aphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones), and it became one source for the development of the fatal woman motif in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Kipling’s poem was adapted for the stage by Porter Emerson Browne, following which Fox Studios produced a film adaptation of the play in 1915. The film was a hit, featuring Theda Bara as the 18

T heda B ara and B arbara S tanwyck ’ s “ B aby F ace ” 

• 19

vampire and spawning the popular figure of “The Vamp” in popular culture. When Theda Bara first appears in A Fool There Was, she is dressed in a long skirt with dramatic vertical lines, a long black coat, and hat with a black feather at its top. Wearing dark lipstick and heavy goth eye makeup, she is closely followed by a man she has tamed into submission; however, Bara’s character is more interested in the mother and daughter who play beside her at a wealthy club in Larchmont, New York. The Vamp is snubbed by the maternal Kate (Mabel Frenyear), whose clothes and that of her young daughter (Runa Hodges) are markedly light-colored in contrast with The Vamp’s visage and general appearance. As The Vamp greets the child, the mother intervenes, throws away the tainted rose her daughter has picked up beside The Vamp, and literally turns her back on the woman whose reputation obviously precedes her. The Vamp’s response? “Someday you will regret that.” That our first scenes of The Vamp depict her taking umbrage at the condemnation of a mother, whose child The Vamp had shown kindness to, reveals an important element of the fatal woman: her actions are, at least in part, a rebuff to normative society, her “badness” an answer to moral denunciation. The smugness of conventional morality is most apparent in A Fool There Was late in the film when Kate, whose husband (predictably

20 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

enough) has been seduced by The Vamp, asks a male family friend what she should do (i.e., should she divorce her husband?). The answer, because of her marriage vows (he says), is “Stick, Kate, stick.” This, indeed, is the stuck and sticky Victorian ideology that Virginia Woolf wrote about in “Professions for Women”: the bodiless self-sacrificing domestic goddess, or “angel in the house,” who privileges suffering over justice or pursuit of happiness. In Victorian literature and culture, “the angel in the house,” a phrase coined by the poet Coventry Patmore, had its opposing female stereotype in “the fallen woman” or, to quote John Keats’s 1819 poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” the beautiful woman without mercy, both nineteenth-century conventions in representations of women where given contexts can shift the meaning of this female figure. Grant F. Scott traces the visual representation of adaptations of Keats’s poem, observing that paintings and sketches preoccupied with “la belle dame sans merci” throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries toggled between emphasis on the “deceptive femme fatale” and the “trapped and apprehensive victim” (505). The rise of the “New Woman” in the 1880s and the feminist suffragette movement that followed produced representations of “la belle dame” emphasizing her power. Frank Cadogan Cowper’s 1926 painting La Belle Dame sans Merci signaled “a new order”; “there is no denying the figure’s authority”

T heda B ara and B arbara S tanwyck ’ s “ B aby F ace ” 

• 21

(Scott 530). Cowper’s painting features “la belle dame” with her arms raised above her head with the prostrate armored knight below her, rehearsing an image that viewers would have seen in Theda Bara’s posture as The Vamp in 1915. Indeed, Hollywood adapted these roles—The Vamp on the one side and Mary Pickford’s confectionary Hollywood persona as “America’s Sweetheart” on the other—to make use of these deeply ingrained character patterns. In so doing, Hollywood reflected the culture’s equivocal obsession with binary views of female power. In A Fool There Was, the suffering wife, Kate, listens to her sister say that she has “sorrowed in silence,” but it is worth noting that conceived as fantasy, her role as angel in the house is as much a phantom as the fatal woman, the femme fatale. Both haunt the men and women who are prone to adopt entrenched gender roles rather than live freely or subject these categories to critique. In one iconic scene, The Vamp lies on a settee, with Kate’s husband, “The Honorable John Schuyler” (Edward José) below her, leaning on the couch. Visually reminiscent of the painting that inspired Kipling’s poem, the scene depicts a compliant man in thrall to The Vamp, both of them sipping liqueurs, luxuriating among palm trees on the Italian Riviera. Theda Bara’s arms rise up in a melodramatic yawn, predicting the Cowper painting and making Bara look like she is conjuring up powers to continue her hold

22 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

on the passive man. Indeed, he has joined the realm of the lotus-eaters, yielding to unleashed sensual pleasures fully governed by the siren-woman. An article in the newspaper alerts Kate and her friends to her husband’s submission to a “notorious woman of the vampire species.” Meanwhile, John and The Vamp become pariahs within society, and notably, Bara’s character reacts to being further ostracized by lifting her head high, while John seems to react with a self-concerned “You? What about me?” and slumps over. Society’s judgment depresses him but enrages her and makes her double down. B. Ruby Rich has observed that neo-noir (film noir movies from the 1970s and later) relies more on the “dumb-lug” type of male protagonist, who is no intellectual match for the fatal woman. This quality is most recognizable in Ned Racine (William Hurt) in Body Heat and Mike Swale (Peter Berg) in The Last Seduction (1994) (to Ned Racine, Turner’s Maddy says, “You’re not very smart. I like that in a man”). However, Theda Bara’s lovers predict this dumb-lug role. As Kipling’s poem describes, “The Fool was stripped to his foolish hide” (line 23). These men have none of the savvy that 1940s and 1950s noir detectives had, in part because the sources for classic film noir male protagonists were hardboiled fiction written by Hemingway, Cain, Hammett, and Chandler,

T heda B ara and B arbara S tanwyck ’ s “ B aby F ace ” 

• 23

who were geared toward idealizing forms of conventional masculine power. The male leads in film noir are generally discerning and cool. They may die alongside the femmes fatales, as Jeff Markham does beside Kathie Moffatt in Out of the Past, or be left bereft alongside their lovers à la Dix Steele in In a Lonely Place (1950), but they don’t merely submit to the power of The Vamp (Bara), as in A Fool There Was, or find themselves out of their league, as is the case for men in many neo-noir films and contemporary thrillers, such as Body Heat, The Last Seduction, and Fatal Attraction (1987). Before the classic period of film noir, in The Blue Angel (released in Germany and the United States in 1930), Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings) abandons his professorial credentials and authority, rendered a “dumb lug” under the influence of Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) and her performance of “Falling in Love” in a German cabaret, lines from the song telegraphing the gender politics of the femme fatale: “Men clutter around me like moths around a flame. If they get their wings burned, I am not to blame” (qtd. in Kael 85). My interest in Theda Bara’s earlier instantiation of The Vamp in A Fool There Was lies not only in its historical significance as a source for the femme fatale in popular culture and the arts but also in the extent to which it models gender expectations that are powerful and deeply embedded within society. Rudyard Kipling’s chorus in

24 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

the source poem—“So some of him lived but the most of him died—  / (Even as you and I)” (lines 27–28)— underscores the universal victimhood surrounding the femme fatale and the gothic reach of gender phantoms from literature, painting, and film. Stories of mythic women luring naïve men into corruption often exhort audiences alongside the characters not to be duped or to follow in the footsteps of hapless men. A Fool There Was punctuates its scenes with intertitles that quote Kipling: “Even as you and I.” Such reinforcement of the moral of the story registers the didactic aim of these works to “save” men from venomous women, since contact with powerful women may begin a naturalistic slide toward alcoholism and death. This gender messaging has helped to canonize the character type of the femme fatale, since in the case of Kipling’s poem and A Fool There Was, a direct appeal is made to readers and viewers, “Even as you and I.” In this case of seriality and adaptation—painting, poem, film, cultural icon—we see The Vamp’s relevance in understanding the power of media representation in cultivating and reinforcing gender stereotypes. In a New Yorker article written in 1952, the humorist and screenwriter S. J. Perelman muses about the “wickedest woman in Larchmont,” Theda Bara’s role in A Fool There Was, which Perelman had been obsessed with during the winter months of 1915 after seeing the film. Perelmen

T heda B ara and B arbara S tanwyck ’ s “ B aby F ace ” 

• 25

may have had James Thurber’s most famous 1939 story on his mind when he wrote his essay because he describes himself as a kind of Walter Mitty: “I gave myself up to fantasies in which I lay with my head pillowed in the seductress’s lap, intoxicated by coal-black eyes smouldering with belladonna. At her bidding, I eschewed family, social position, my brilliant career—a rather hazy combination of African explorer and private sleuth—to follow her to the ends of the earth” (34). Perelman continues his masochistic idyll before turning to the film itself and Bara’s legacy. At the end of his essay, Perelman reflects on the lessons of Theda Bara for unassuming male spectators, occasioned by his being approached by a woman in a bar looking at him “with a wanton gaze” (36). I quote Perelman’s comments because, written in 1952, smack in the middle of the period of classic film noir (1941–58), they exemplify the effect of certain gender roles on how real individuals perceive others. Perelman notices a woman he thinks is “after him”: “Mademoiselle,” I said, “the flirtation you propose, while ostensibly harmless, could develop unless checked into a dangerous liaison. I am a full-blooded man, and one who does not do things by halves. . . . No, my dear young lady,” I said, draining my glass and rising, “succulent morsel though you are, I have no desire to end my days like John Schuyler

26 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

[from A Fool There Was], crawling through balustrades and being sprinkled with blooms.” As luck would have it, her escort, whose existence I had somehow neglected to allow for, materialized behind me at this juncture and, pinioning me, questioned my motives. I gave him a brief resume of “A Fool There Was” to amplify my position, but acted as though I had invented the whole thing. Maybe I have. Still, who could have made up Theda Bara? (36)

While Perelman is of course making fun of his own misperception, the anecdote is telling in its reinscription of the notion of male submission to female power, even as it adumbrates the picture of an untrustworthy and “wonton” adversary. Bara herself well understood the popular force of The Vamp. She wrote of the public’s reaction to her, “I was fully expected to appear in a modish little creation composed principally of a leopard skin, a dagger, and two or three blood-red roses. The public was actually annoyed that I hadn’t lived up to the legends they had woven about me.” In a piece she wrote in 1919 for Vanity Fair, Bara said, “I was classified as a vampire and doomed forevermore to play vampire roles. . . . The vampire’s curse lay heavy upon me. . . . No matter what heroine I played on the screen, it was taken for granted that, just because I played her, she was one of those women. . . . Even [Shakespeare’s]

T heda B ara and B arbara S tanwyck ’ s “ B aby F ace ” 

• 27

Juliet wasn’t safe from the tongue of gossip when I played the role.” The phenomenon of Theda Bara from 1915 to 1919 includes multiple examples of how audiences were captivated by an exoticized version of celebrity, enhanced by the gender stereotype of the fatal woman. Bara observed the silliness of her publicity. In 1918, one reporter quoted her, “‘People write me letters,’ she said smilingly; ‘and they ask me if I am as wicked as I seem on the screen. I look at my little canary, and I say, ‘Dicky, am I so wicked?’ And Dicky says, ‘Tweet, tweet.’ That may mean ‘yes, yes,’ or ‘no, no,’ may it not?’” (D. Evans). The mythology of the wicked temptress is as nonsensical as “tweet, tweet,” onto which friends of the canary can project whatever they like. Sensationalist tales in the media surrounded Bara’s Vamp. One reported in Photoplay involved a woman confined in an elevator alongside Bara: “She ordered the elevator to stop at the next floor, seized her husband and gave him a terrified shove, out of the elevator and harm’s way” (A. Smith 110). Asked about vamping a man in an elevator, Bara responded, “I would have had to work fast” (A. Smith 110). Another anecdote recounted by Charles Lockwood has Bara talking to a child on the Upper West Side in New York City. The child’s mother calls the police, screaming, “Save him! Save him! The vampire has my

28 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

child!” (69). Other stories include Bara being chased out of a department store by women who simultaneously wanted her ejected and wanted to steal articles of her clothing, such as her hat, the wearing of which they thought might give them equal power over men. The conflicted affect of such women nicely exemplifies not only the contradictory forces of identification and judgment that characterize the dissemination of the femme fatale but also the “mechanisms of commodification” that Adrienne McClean observes in Being Rita Hayworth is central to Hollywood media—how “promotion, publicity, and performance also produced conflicted and variable models of subjectivity” (6). Theda Bara burst onto the scene in 1915 after the premiere of A Fool There Was. She was discovered the year before onstage as Theodosia de Coppet (taking her mother’s name before marrying Bara’s father, a Jewish tailor). The film was released to fanfare, the New York Dramatic Mirror writing that it was “bold and relentless; it is filled with passion and tragedy; it is right in harmony with the poem. . . . The Vampire is a neurotic woman gone mad” (Macdonald). Two studio publicists named Johnny Goldfrap and Al Selig, discovered by Fox, went to work on developing an outrageous persona for Theodora, who was now Theda Bara. Press reports seized on associations between Theda Bara and anagrams for her

T heda B ara and B arbara S tanwyck ’ s “ B aby F ace ” 

• 29

first and last names: “Death” and “Arab.” Bara’s mother was said to be a French performer, her father an Italian sculptor-painter, and Bara herself, it was told, was born “on an oasis in the Sahara where her father was engaged in painting desert pictures” (Macdonald). In April 1917, Goldfrap and Selig published a story in Motion Picture Magazine brandishing the discovery of an ancient Egyptian tomb on which hieroglyphics were inscribed: “I, Thames, priest of Set, tell you this: She shall seem a snake to most men; she shall lead them to sin, and to their destruction. Yet she shall not be so. She shall be good and virtuous and kind of heart; but she shall not seem so to most men. For she shall not be that which she appears! She shall be called Theta” (Lockwood 67). Months later, in the summer of 1917, Bara was interviewed in a hotel in Chicago during a heat wave. Bara’s press agent called out to reporters, “Miss Bara will be a moment longer. She is not yet acclimated to this northern weather” (Lockwood 68). A dramatic scene unfolded with double doors opened and Bara appearing on a settee covered in furs. The press agent continued that Bara “was born in the shadow of the pyramids, you know. It is very, very hot there, and she is cold!” (Lockwood 69). The smell of roses and incense added a complementary setting to the performance, whose culmination was Bara “[jumping] up from her throne, [throwing] off the furs, and

30 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

[running] to open one of the windows, gasping, ‘Give me air!’” (Lockwood 69). As Diane Negra argues, the 1920s reinvented this hyperbolically exoticized figure of The Vamp in the roles and persona of another silent-film fatal woman, the Polish immigrant Pola Negri. Negri’s Hollywood roles were accompanied by publicity focused on languorous excess, as in one magazine portrait quoted by Negra: “La Negri—A tiger woman with a strange slow smile and a world-old lure in her heavy-lidded eyes. Mysterious, fascinating, an enigma” (384). Emphasizing Negri’s ethnicity, press reports complicated the typology of the femme fatale in silent film by grounding cultural anxieties about “the exotic other” in domestic concerns about immigration, stoking popular imagination about “the threat of female immigrant sexuality” (Negra 379). Regarding Bara, whose earlier incarnation of the femme fatale lacked the authenticity of Negri’s actual eastern European roots, it is unclear the extent to which audiences believed the outrageous stories energetically promoted by Hollywood; Bara said in 1955, “To understand those days, you must consider that people believed what they saw on the screen. Nobody had destroyed the grand illusion” (qtd. in Lockwood 69). At the same time, certainly the studios, performers, and audiences participated in a mutually rewarding process of suspending

T heda B ara and B arbara S tanwyck ’ s “ B aby F ace ” 

• 31

disbelief and engaging in what Neil Gabler has since called “Life the Movie,” the blurred line in Hollywoodized American culture between entertainment and real life. Furthermore, as a writer for Photoplay Magazine said in September 1915, Bara’s “exotic personality was such that if she wasn’t born in the shadow of the pyramids, she ought to have been” (qtd. in Macdonald). To be sure, there is a skepticism about media now that was not in force in the nineteen-teens. Less concerned about authenticity today, students in 2020 wonder why critics object to the staged happenings on reality TV, since everyone knows that it’s all performance anyway. But early on in Hollywood’s dream factory, there was a different kind of symbiosis between Hollywood press agents and the public. And yet, cutting through the sensationalist chatter surrounding Theda Bara, the performer herself showed an awareness of the potential for a politically charged rebellion in the role of the bad girl. This was registered most memorably in her comment, “The vampire I play is the vengeance of my sex upon its exploiters. You see, I have the face of a vampire, perhaps, but the heart of a feministe” (qtd. in Golden 105). Scholars have debated whether the comment reflects an association of the vampire’s evil with the suffragette movement of the 1910s or a burgeoning feminist position, but surely it is the case, as Janet Staiger has argued, that Bara’s power reflected at least in

32 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

part “the value of a new, independent, intelligent, and aggressive woman, even a desiring woman” (xvi). Echoing the significance of independence as a defining feature of silent-movie vamps, Mariusz Kotowski has dubbed the other silent-film siren Pola Negri “Hollywood’s First Femme Fatale,” saying that “Negri—through her screen portrayals—practically shouted, ‘I can take care of myself!’ ” (67).

BABY FACE: CLIMBING THE LADDER OF SUCCESS, “WRONG BY WRONG”

If Theda Bara established the femme fatale whose exoticism would beguile and ensnare men, Barbara Stanwyck’s “Baby Face” in the 1933 film by the same name solidified another aspect of the figure of the vamp, a woman whose wit and intelligence allowed her to feign female subservience in order to appeal to and entice men to master them and gain some sort of fulfillment in the modern world. Ella Smith quotes the New York Evening Post’s review of Baby Face: “A cold, relentless creature, she plays her game with a cunning hand and reserves her heel to grind down her victims. You may not always believe in Lily’s felicitous fortune, but that is the fault of the story; you cannot escape the belief that Lily is a vixen of the lowest order and that the men who play with her are doomed

T heda B ara and B arbara S tanwyck ’ s “ B aby F ace ” 

• 33

to perish in the flames” (55). But Smith also quotes the New York Herald Tribune, which had a more nuanced reading of the character, the “originality in the characterization of Lily and strength and experience in her transfer to the screen. She is not a cheap, stupid girl. [And] it took insight and intelligence to realize the intrinsic idealism within her” (55). The film’s focus on sex and a woman who sleeps her way to the top of a corporate ladder ignited discussion about Hollywood film, censorship, and “sex pictures,” as one member of the Hays Office called films such as Baby Face, leading to enforcement of the Production Code in 1934, a year after the release of Baby Face. During the first half of 1933, censors negotiated with Warner Bros. continually, insisting that the film’s messages must be deleted or counteracted. The film subversively showed Lily climbing the ladder of success—as the pressbook had it, “wrong by wrong.” The Warner Archives DVD Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Volume 1, released in 2016, includes the pre-Code version of the film, restored by the Library of Congress. Baby Face begins with a shot of a depressed factory town. This introduction looks forward to a similar opening shot in The Hard Way (1943) ten years later, a film that also features a hardboiled woman (played by Ida Lupino) who becomes ruthless in her bid to escape poverty and

34 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

constraints. The beginning of Baby Face introduces Lily Powers, a smart and charismatic young woman trapped in a brutish setting and prostituted by her father, who runs a speakeasy where men come to drink and paw Lily. Her father promises her to a local politician in exchange for assurances that his bar will be free from “trouble,” but when the politician sits beside Lily and touches her, patting her leg, Lily spills coffee on his hand, explaining, “Oh, excuse me. My hand shakes so when I’m around you.” Taking on the role of a girl atwitter with a man’s attention, she rejects the politician, eliciting anger from her father, who then calls her a tramp. Lily lashes back at her father, blaming him for setting her up to fail in life: “A swell start you gave me.” Lily is surrounded, she shouts, by “nothin’ but men, dirty, rotten men!” (this was cut from the released version of the film). Lily’s outburst reminds one of a defense of the fatal woman Lulu (Louise Brooks) in Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929), where the femme fatale’s admirer Geschwitz (Alice Roberts) verbally pounces on the hypocritical judges who sanctimoniously judge Lulu. Their wives, Geschwitz yells, would have turned out just as Lulu has, if they had grown up with no money living in cafes and on the streets. Unlike Lulu, whose playfulness and luminous presence define her particular brand of femme fatale, Lily is worldweary, borrowing aspects of Marlene Dietrich’s bearing as

T heda B ara and B arbara S tanwyck ’ s “ B aby F ace ” 

• 35

femme fatale. The German-born Dietrich came by such “weltschmerz” honestly, her ennui on display the year before Baby Face was released in an article that claimed to reveal “the truth about herself ” (“Marlene Dietrich”), focusing on this very bearing of world-weariness. Dietrich had gained fame in 1930 in Germany when she played the “mercurial enchantress” Lola Lola (French) in The Blue Angel, a role that brought her to Paramount Studies in Hollywood to star in multiple films directed by Josef von Sternberg. Her persona emphasized a foreign reticence, mystery, and sexual power, though she was described two years later in 1932 as “lethargic. She is inert. She gazes ahead of her, dulled and unseeing. She is like a slumberous animal, roused to action only by the reach of her child, by warmth of contact, by food and drink and annoyance” (“Marlene Dietrich”). A review of The Blue Angel in 1930 wonders at “the definiteness with which her personality registers” (Kann, review of The Blue Angel); the portrait of Dietrich’s paradoxical emission of power, charisma (“definiteness”), and ennui foretells the dominance of Lily Powers. Stanwyck displays her character’s “weltschmerz” in body language. Lily sits sullenly in the bar, staring cynically into space, leaning back in a chair. She is psychologically done with the role assigned to her, and her ennui is clear from her grim stance. After her father dies unexpectedly in a fire, it is a continuing

36 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

friendship with a neighborhood cobbler that spurs Lily to make a change in her life. In Baby Face, one of the first gestures we see made by Lily is an aggressive defense of Chico (Theresa Harris), an African American server also working at the bar. Defining her character as ferociously protective of a minority woman mistreated because of race, gender, and class, the film establishes a context for Lily’s subsequent turn to exploitation herself to survive and escape the unhappiness and vulgarity of her youth. Lily hops a train for the city with Chico and has sex with the brakeman to ensure her and Chico’s passage to New York; this was also cut from the originally released version of the film. Lily lights on an urban bank, where the film charts her advance up the ladder of success by montage sequences in which the camera pans up the exterior of the building, where Lily eventually “lands” the head of the bank, Courtland Trenholm (George Brent). Ads for Baby Face drummed up interest in Lily’s role as lethal seducer: “you’ve never seen anything like this frank man-to-man story about this man-to-man girl!”; “the most dangerous man-menace alive”; “Barbara Stanwyck and thirteen men in Baby Face”; “she had a baby face but a heart of stone.” Promotion for the film emphasized Lily’s seeming innocence, her “baby face” that lured men into her trap: “Why do men want to be Daddies to baby

T heda B ara and B arbara S tanwyck ’ s “ B aby F ace ” 

• 37

face girls?” and “No use warning them. They’ll have to find out for themselves that Baby Face is about as ‘innocent’ as Cleopatra and as ‘helpless’ as a tiger cat!” (Baby Face pressbook). The title Baby Face refers to the popular 1926 song, with familiar lyrics, “you’ve got the sweetest little baby face.” Stanwyck’s Lily pretends to be a child-woman, drawing men into her life and exploiting them for money and power. Baby Face presents the femme fatale or fatal woman as a series of female performances of gendered stereotypes of femininity, which is only effective because of a long-standing tradition of infantilizing women. This cultural habit was remarked on as early as in 1792, when Mary Wollstonecraft commented in A Vindication of the Rights of Women how women are acculturated to become “dolls,” encouraged to remain in a state of arrested girlish development, “reduced to a mere cypher” (177). In Baby Face, Lily uses “baby talk” with Mr. Carter (calling him “fuzzy wuzzy”). She has already acceded to the nickname of “baby face” at the office where she works. She pretends to be in thrall to men and feigns vulnerability, even when she is caught seducing Mr. Brody (Douglass Dumbrille) in the women’s restroom. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” she purrs to Mr. Stevens (Donald Cook), her next project; “I’m so ashamed.” Lily performs the role of a girl needing male guidance.

38 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

Lily’s surname is Powers, and the film links Lily’s success to a Nietzschean “will to power,” as her cobbler friend Adolph Cragg (Alphonse Ethier) advises her that she must fasten onto men and use them to her advantage: “You don’t realize your potentialities.” Exchanges with Cragg give Lily confidence that she can escape her entrapment in a “zoo,” avoiding her seeming destiny, as she says, to “stay here like a dumb animal.” Cragg quotes Nietzsche and advises her to turn the tables, a process that notably defines the motives and operations of the femme fatale throughout the twentieth century: Lily employs her intelligence and her body to engineer a better life for herself, using stereotypically feminine roles to manipulate the men who would otherwise seek to constrain or victimize her. In a modern capitalist landscape, movies featuring femmes fatales often delineate strong women like Lily Powers who trade in their ennui for a better—less painful—existence. Cragg tells Lily, “You have power over men, but you must use men, not let them use you. You must be a master, not a slave!” As Gwendolyn Audrey Foster observes in her discussion of Baby Face, the film posits Lily’s only hope for an easier life in terms of radical capitalist competition—Lily must destroy men or be destroyed by them. The cobbler counsels her to internalize Nietzsche and eradicate feeling in her quest to dominate. Such harsh realism can be

T heda B ara and B arbara S tanwyck ’ s “ B aby F ace ” 

• 39

seen as a feminist rejoinder to the patriarchal relegation of putting “baby” in the corner; instead, Lily is taught to “face life as you find it [and to] crush out all sentiment.” We see here that appropriating capitalist exploitation to avoid being fully objectified and exploited herself causes its own trauma. In the end, Lily must renounce her jewels and money for “true love” or remain isolated and alone: a repeated existential trap for women wanting to buck a social system that cares little for their happiness or fulfillment. In a book called Sexy Thrills, Nina Martin makes a similar point about the pleasures on offer for women viewers of the erotic thriller, in which the femme fatale dominates and “‘lying, cheating bastards’ (i.e., men) get what they deserve: humiliation, harassment, and death” (108). Despite the “thrill” of watching a woman defeat the men aimed at subduing her, “beneath the utopian vision of a ‘bad girl’ who can have it all lie the conflicts present in wielding sexual power as a tool for autonomy” (108). In the censor-approved version of Baby Face, Lily and her husband, Trenholm, return to a steel town having given all their money back to the bank, reinforcing the idea that Lily’s machinations have done nothing to improve her lot. Further, it is worth noting that Cragg’s advice was revised from the initially released version of the film, omitting the cobbler’s insistence that Lily aggressively use her sexuality to gain power over men.

40 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

The censors wanted to use Cragg to “scold” Lily for her machinations in the city. Code negotiators wished for the cobbler to “tell her emphatically that she was entirely wrong, had been going not only against his advice but against all moral precepts, and that she would never find happiness unless she regenerated completely, mended her ways and made retribution of her ill-gotten gains” (Wingate). Censorship of Baby Face was thus directly concerned with the film’s positing of Lily’s sexual aggressiveness, her duping of men, and her success. The preCode version of Baby Face offers a subversive view of a woman using her wit and body to seek a better life. As it was in 1933, after considerable negotiation, Joseph Breen, head of the Production Code Administration, offered a warning to Warner Bros. that its success in releasing Baby Face “ought not to suggest any jubilation on our part. Its theme is still a questionable one and suggests the kind, or type, of picture which ought not to be encouraged.” Breen applauded censorship for having “set about to clean up a very bad picture,” reinforcing the idea that regulating female power would be an ongoing cultural battle and concern. Breen’s comments exemplify the limit to which Hollywood would (at least knowingly) represent women’s resistance to conventional and sorrow-filled social roles.

2 WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR, AND THE FEMME FATALE It is a critical commonplace that in the United States following World War II the femme fatale often reads as a projection of male anxiety about what the wives were doing when the men were in battle. The most compelling example of this dynamic appears in The Blue Dahlia (1946), which begins with Air Force hero Johnny Morrison (Alan Ladd) returning home after parting with his two war buddies to find his wife hosting a party. Helen Morrison (Doris Dowling) appears to be the femme fatale, whose villainy is marked, too, by her abnegation of the role of wife and mother; while Johnny was at war, their young son died, presumably as a result of Helen’s bad parenting. When Johnny arrives home, a drunken woman answers the door. Responding to his comment, “I’m looking for my wife,” the partygoer says, “The place is full of them!” 41

42 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

Following this awkward exchange, the woman gleefully announces to the people at the party, “Hey, everyone, Helen has a husband!” suggesting that Helen has behaved in such a way as to indicate that she’s single and also living the high life while her husband risked his life in battle. Johnny punches Eddie Harwood (Howard Da Silva), whom he sees furtively kissing his wife, then Helen sarcastically announces that her husband, “the war hero,” is just home and everyone should leave because, she says, he “probably wants to beat me up.” The anxiety here is not only that men and women must adapt to women’s independence during wartime but also that the violence of war can’t be cordoned off once the soldiers return and have to reacclimate to “normal” domestic life. This ideologically transparent opening sequence of The Blue Dahlia expresses acute postwar gender anxiety, including the stark contrast drawn between the loyal homosocial bonds created during the war among Johnny, Buzz (William Bendix), and George (Hugh Beaumont)—their community posing as alternate family unit—and the dangerous and untrustworthy heterosexual bonds between men and women. In the book Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir, Sheri Chinen Biesen contests assumptions that film noir mainly derives from the postwar social climate. Even the standard delineation of original-cycle film noir

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 43

as spanning from The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Touch of Evil (1958) belies this situating of film noir in the years following World War II, and it is clear that the multiple sources of film noir, including classic male detective and fatal woman archetypes, German expressionist film, and the hardboiled literary tradition, predate the postwar era and suggest that overemphasis on film noir as sprouting up after the war is misguided. As we saw in chapter 1, the female character patterns in film noir are part of a history of representation of fatal and fallen women, but as Biesen argues, film noir flourished during wartime, “emerging out of the austerity, populism, and social critique of the Depression era and responding to the immediate challenges, concerns, and anxieties of wartime” (3). Beginning chapter 2’s case studies with a wartime film about fatal and fated women, I want to outline some of the main ways in which women are represented in wartime and postwar film noir, focusing on the struggles of women to navigate conventional social roles while still expressing desire and agency.

CAT PEOPLE (1942): RATTLING THE CAGES

Cat People exposes some of the major contradictory forces embedded within the representation of the femme fatale. Marketed by RKO as part of the auteur-producer

44 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

Val Lewton’s new horror-film series for the studio meant to try to recoup some of the losses sustained after Citizen Kane (1941) nearly bankrupted the company, Cat People exemplifies film noir’s hybridity and generic elasticity, just as the femme fatale is not fixed but a series of fluid textual and cultural markers. Cat People stars the French performer Simone Simon as Irena Dubrovna, an émigré from Serbia working as a fashion designer in New York City. Irena meets Oliver Reed (Kent Smith), an “average-­ American” civil engineer, at the zoo. They fall in love and marry, although Irena warns Oliver that she fears a badness within her, linked to a Serbian legend that her town was once overtaken by lethal panthers who have possessed the denizens of the village. Irena fears that if her passions are ignited, she will turn into a deadly cat, so withholds sex from her husband, who patiently supports her until he realizes that his coworker Alice ( Jane Randolph) is in love with him and that he reciprocates her feelings. The two (Oliver and Alice) arrange for Irena to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Judd (Tom Conway), to help exorcise what they believe is a deep-seated psychological fear. Irena is increasingly trapped in three ways: within her terror that she will transform into a panther; struggling with her increasingly futile desire for her husband; and managing her anger and jealousy once she discovers that Oliver and Alice want to be together. Wishing for both the

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 45

freedom to express her desire and some normalcy with Oliver, Irena can have neither. Irena’s trauma has been read as symbolic of the conflicting expectations for women in 1940s America, where they are appreciated for doing their part in the labor force during wartime (both Irena and Alice are working women, the latter in the very war-resonant field of shipbuilding) yet contained within strict parameters that will ensure an easy transition back to Victorian gender roles when the war is over; additionally, as women’s spheres extended beyond the household during the war, their desires might have a wider platform for expression, leading to social anxieties about their work ambition and potential promiscuity. Tim Snelson’s book Phantom Ladies discusses the wartime discourse on femininity that explains Irena’s suffering as an “inability to synthesize and balance the multiple demands placed upon [women]” (24–25), where Alice represents the ideal amalgam of “independence, malleability, and even feminine sacrifice” (29). If Alice is a plucky working woman who never­ theless desires a “normal” marriage, Irena represents a rebellion against compromise and acceding to social convention—her domestic situation “is a site of frustration and containment” (29). Irena’s rage grows toward the coupling of the “a good plain Americano” Ollie with Alice—against which her

46 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

own mysterious old-Europeanness establishes her as Other. Echoing the star construction of Theda Bara discussed in chapter 1, Cat People’s fatal woman and her feline deadliness are symptomatic of Western culture’s repression of racial anxieties about an animalistic East. Cat People extends the sublimating work of Dracula at the turn of the twentieth century to imagine a vampire from the East coming to suck the lifeblood from an England figured as masculine. In Stoker’s novel, this link is made explicit in the killing of Lucy Westenra (her name evoking the “Westernness” contaminated by the Eastern vampire): “Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake” (Stoker 185). In presenting “Irena’s foreignness as monstrous” (Kaplan, “Dark” 187), Cat People similarly exemplifies the femme fatale as a conflation of fears about a powerful femininity allied with a racial and ethnic Other that threatens a stable nation of virile white men—as Kaplan observes, “white culture’s fears of what might happen if gender and racial boundaries were not managed and kept in place” (“Dark” 186). Indeed, as a means of taming the threat posed by the “dark continent of the female psyche,” Oliver and Alice seek to pathologize Irena’s unhappiness (Kaplan, “Dark” 185). As Oliver, Alice, and Dr. Judd are increasingly in

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 47

cahoots, they decide that instead of Oliver annulling his marriage to Irena (to marry Alice), he will do “the right thing” and stay married so that he is able to commit her to an asylum. Institutional rules proving doubly tyrannical to Irena (marriage, psychiatry), the idea of committing Irena establishes a larger theme of imprisonment in Cat People. Irena’s predicament resonates with the very panther at the zoo who paces unnervingly within her cage in Central Park and with whom Irena identifies. The film thus posits Irena’s danger and violence as a bid for freedom from cages and prisons sanctioned and regulated by social institutions (zoos, marriage, asylums), exemplifying a Foucauldian interrogation of how such social forms oppress individuals in their desires. The story also exemplifies Mary Ann Doane’s discussion of the suspicious representation of psychoanalysis in the 1940s (see also Snelson 31) and the intrusiveness of men in power: “I shall discover your secret,” says Dr. Judd to Irena. While these power dynamics are rightly understood by Snelson and others as indicative of contested views on gender and the role of women in society and the labor market in the 1940s, their messages are resonant over time. Irena’s troubles presage the concerns of Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), whose research and work in the late 1950s and early 1960s helped to usher in second-wave feminisms. Irena’s struggles

48 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

anticipate Friedan’s analysis of “the feminine mystique” (see Snelson): in representing female trauma rooted in the dissatisfying role of wife, the wartime Cat People foretells Friedan’s postwar identification of women’s unhappiness in conventional social positions, the “problem with no name.” “I’m drawn to her,” says Ollie about Irena’s “mystique.” The example reinforces the significance of representations of women’s ambition and desire as continuing problems within modern and postmodern society—from the anticipation in Victorian representations of proto–femmes fatales like Tess of the D’Urber­ villes (scapegoated for male violence and desire) to the continuing anxieties about female ambition represented in Hillary Clinton’s role as a lightning rod for gendered anxieties about her desire to have the “topdog” role in US and world politics. For Irena Dubrovna’s deviousness—her unknowability (is she a woman or a deadly panther?)—elicits a community of two men and a woman (Dr. Judd, Oliver, and Alice) to “lock her up.” As Snelson recounts, Irena may represent wartime society’s impossible standards for women, ensuring their failure “to synthesize and balance the multiple demands placed upon them” (24–25), the culture requiring an “irreconcilable synthesis of productivity and desirability” (27). However, these conflicting demands have stretched long beyond a postwar American setting to inflict con-

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 49

tinuing stress on women pressured to be alternately ethereal, maternal, or erotic and still fraught trying to find contentment within the public sphere. In Cat People, the efforts to cure Irena or to resolve her abnormal state mask the deviousness not of the femme fatale but of the forces aimed at controlling her within the culture. Dr. Judd surely fits this bill, with his smug insistence that Irena’s problem is merely one of ideation and his eventual attempt to seduce her, even as she is clear in her rejection of these advances: “I know I should not like it if you tried to kiss me.” The socially sanctioned psychiatrist called on to solve the problem aggravates it and is revealed to be himself lecherous. His hypocrisy is symbolized in the cane he uses, which hides a sword (ostensibly linking him with the legendary King John, who slayed the evil panthers in Irena’s Serbian village). This “device” of power allies Dr. Judd with Ballin Mundson, the Nazi disguised as Gilda’s lover in the film Gilda, released four years after Cat People. Both films feature controlling men whose own desire to control is itself deemed pathological or fascistic. On the surface, then, Cat People endorses the wartime patriotism and normal Americano men and hard-­ working yet feminine women—Alice, seemingly ready to capitulate to marriage when the war ends. The film seems accordingly to weaponize the fatal woman in tapping

50 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

viewers’ anxieties about Western vulnerability to an Eastern animalistic other. But Cat People also demonstrates a counternarrative in its subversive critique of domesticity and the idea that women will submit to discipline and male power. Given the frisson derived from rattling the cages of “normal” social forms, Cat People’s success at the box office shouldn’t surprise us.

DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944): “I WONDER IF YOU WONDER”

The character most often referenced as a means of identifying bad women in noir is Phyllis Dietrichson from Double Indemnity. My earlier book on film noir made use of this character, signaling the seeming opacity of Stanwyck’s character and icy gaze to contrast with other noir women whose stories are more accessible. However, Phyllis Dietrichson is herself more nuanced than I allowed in 2009, even as I noted Peter William Evans’s analysis of Neff ’s neuroses in “Bringing Up Baby.” Here, Evans notes Neff ’s “fundamentally patronizing attitude toward Phyllis,” marked by his appropriation of her as another “Baby Face”—“I’m crazy ’bout you, baby”— demonstrating his objectification and underestimation of her. Indeed, in delineating Phyllis’s rebellion against her role as Mrs. Dietrichson, scholars have observed the

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 51

hothouse environment of the household, one that, with its “Venetian blinds, photo frames and fish bowl, always expresses entrapment” (P. Evans 172), might well emphasize the brutish Mr. Dietrichson as a vulgar exemplar of modern patriarchal domination within the domestic space. Phyllis and Lola are trapped inside the alienated space of their living room, playing cards, talking of shopping, observing their husband and father drink, sitting among the homely details that define their imprisoned female desires. While such emphases make the film eminently available for feminist reading, further attention to Phyllis herself reveals an existential sorrow, especially of interest when focused on the acting of Barbara Stanwyck. Owing to Elisabeth Bronfen’s intriguing analysis in “Femme Fatale—Negotiations of Tragic Desire” and Andrew Klevan’s intricate reading of Stanwyck’s performance of Phyllis Dietrichson in his book Barbara Stanwyck, I see the limits of singling out Phyllis as a point of comparison with other, more sympathetic femme fatale figures. In attempting to call out an oversimplified objectification of women in noir as femmes fatales (to demonstrate how overstated the presence of the “evil” femme fatale is in film noir), in Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir, I used Stanwyck’s character to stand in for a type that may be more ephemeral even than I allowed in 2009. As film noir’s femmes fatales are portrayed by

52 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

some of the most dynamic performers in classic Holly­ wood film (including Stanwyck, Gene Tierney, Joan Crawford, Gloria Grahame, and Lizabeth Scott, among others), these portrayals—at the level of embodied experience—seem in most cases to register the multitude of traps mining the field for women in the modern world, thus belying the existence of any “quintessential” femme fatale. Moreover, the logic of deconstructing the femme fatale because the type is always already an objectification that usually precludes nuance must be carried through to all of the femmes fatales, even the sociopaths, from Gene Tierney’s Ellen Berent in Leave Her to Heaven (1945) to Linda Fiorentino’s Bridget Gregory in The Last Seduction (1994) nearly fifty years later. These characters are embodied by complex performances and do important feminist work by calling out the inauthenticity of maternal and domestic stereotypes that surround them. Phyllis herself, as performed by Stanwyck, may illuminate a tragic figure “who accepts her death as the logical [consequence] of her insistence on a radical pursuit of personal freedom—the money and death of her husband at all costs” (Bronfen 107). Bronfen notes the aggressive rejoinder here to “a strand of American optimism that sees individuals as masters of their own destiny, with a right to pursue happiness at all cost without paying the price” (107). The analysis refocuses attention to what I

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 53

may formerly have described as opacity but might instead be seen, pace Bronfen, as a kind of fatalist abstraction from the material world as Phyllis recognizes the inevitability of her death. Thus close-ups of a dazed or intent Phyllis—staring ahead when her husband is killed; uttering the words “straight down the line” to Neff—point to the woman’s detachment from a world that she has rejected (a world, being a woman, that she was already distanced from and critical of in the first place). If the film depicts Phyllis’s “tragic sensibility,” this underscores the femme fatale’s consciousness of her state—and her fate. Such tragic recognition—perhaps she does indeed “wonder” when Neff muses, “I wonder if you wonder”—helps us to understand a crucial element in the agency I’ve always wanted to see in the femme fatale figure, even if, as some critics have noted, the depiction of the femme fatale on the surface emphasizes a woman’s dependence (see Jancovich), even laziness—“Lazy Legs,” as Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea) calls Kitty ( Joan Bennett) in Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945). In these portraits, too, the presence of non-good-girls in film noir refers symbolically to a desire for self-determination. The force of Bronfen’s analysis lies in the recognition of Phyllis’s insistence that she has determined her own fate; she is thus “a prototypical instance of modern feminine subjectivity” (115). We may generalize Bronfen’s assignation of Phyllis as “an

54 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

authentic modern heroine” and, further, with Klevan’s lead, see such agency as a direct result of charismatic female performance. Klevan reviews scenes familiar to film noir enthusiasts and Double Indemnity fans, but he, like Bronfen, shifts focus to Stanwyck’s bearing in particular moments. For example, he includes a screen shot of the moment when Phyllis stands behind the door while Neff tries to get rid of Keyes in front of the elevator at his apartment. Ostensibly a moment of suspense, the scene has deeper significance. In the context of looking more thoroughly into Stan­ wyck’s “restrained” performance of Phyllis (the chapter in Klevan’s book is called “Restraint”), the view of a femme fatale hiding behind a door, hiding behind the men, jerking the knob to let Neff know she is there, takes on further meaning. Phyllis is repeatedly on the margins, using her intelligence and her captivating presence to make an impression. In her living room, Phyllis is described by Klevan not as a femme fatale but as “swamped” in the corner of an armchair, sitting as a “little girl all dressed up for daddy, willingly submissive, and yet in control. At the same time, her position evokes a way of life: a little overwhelmed, knocking about in a big house, on her own, out of place, backed into a corner, diminished” (94). Klevan’s portrait of “something more amorphous or nebulous” than a decided femme fatale encourages a

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 55

more imaginative reading of Stanwyck’s role in Double Indemnity. If scholars including Klevan and Bronfen see an instability in the femme fatale, I would further relate that notion to the postmodern application of the type to films such as Mulholland Drive (2001), where examination of the flexibility of identity—its sexual fluidity and possibility for transformation—suggests a sustained critique of fixed categories such as the femme fatale (see the final section of this chapter, on neo-noir). But a more thoughtful discussion of Stanwyck’s Phyllis might suggest that even in the most canonical of film noir movies, the dynamism and humanity of the thinking female lead reminds us of the insufficiency of gendered categories for understanding human individuals.

HEDY LAMARR: “THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD”

One of the most interesting figures allied with postwar film noir is Hedy Lamarr. Born in Austria, where she starred in 1933 in the infamous Czech film Ecstasy, in which she appears nude and feigns an orgasm, Lamarr was given the moniker “the most beautiful woman in the world” by her mentor, Max Reinhardt. This tagline became an advantage and a curse, with Lamarr once saying, “they expected me to be this esoteric goddess they

56 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

invented” (Edison 352). Said to be the visual source for “Snow White,” Lamarr has also been known since the 1990s as an inventor, having devised (with the avantgarde composer George Antheil) a frequency-hopping system in the 1940s, for which she earned a patent; the fascinating story of Lamarr’s scientific vocation and achievements is documented in Richard Rhodes’s book Hedy’s Folly. Lamarr had a lifelong interest in gadgets, her invention beginning with an effort to create a way for military ships to communicate uninterruptedly with their torpedoes. This secret communication system was intended to launch messages in eighty-eight different frequencies, flummoxing interception by the enemy and providing the foundation and laying the groundwork, historians now argue, for contemporary GPS and wireless technologies. Alexandra Dean’s 2017 documentary Bombshell also recounts this aspect of Lamarr’s biography, as well as the challenges facing an ambitious and imaginative woman wanting to exceed the possibilities on offer at every point in her life and career. In the film, the scholar Jeanine Basinger captures Lamarr’s struggle as an ingenious woman trapped by the Hollywood machinery that mainly works to process female images: “You don’t get to be Hedy Lamarr and smart.” Lamarr’s two postwar noir films, The Strange Woman (1946) and Dishonored Lady (1947), are intriguing case studies involving strong

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 57

and markedly sexual modern women whose reputation might blind viewers from seeing their stories of struggle and desire. In The Strange Woman, Jenny Hager (Lamarr) is the spirited daughter of a drunk, who brands her a “wonton,” “just like [her] mother,” who ran off years before. Jenny’s ambition is to have wealth, and she uses her beauty and wiles to seduce the logging town’s patriarch, Isaiah Poster (Gene Lockart), whose weak son, Ephraim (Louis Hayward), loves Jenny from when they were children. Lamarr’s Jenny manipulates everyone around her, but she’s also a leader in the town, for example, taking initiative at church to contribute money to the congregation. After the minister’s exhortation and an awkward pause, Jenny pledges $1,000, saying, “If the men of Bangor won’t give to the church, the women will,” at which point other women make their families’ pledges too. The town is in chaos, as loggers arrive in Bangor between jobs to drink and carouse. Jenny stands up to male exploiters, spending a lot of money taking care of people in the town. She protects her childhood friend the tavern barmaid Lena, who is accused of stealing money when a group of men threaten to throw her in the river. Jenny saves Lena and gives her the house she herself grew up in. The film, like Leave Her to Heaven, casts its female lead as “strangely” domineering, Lamarr’s slight Viennese accent

58 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

adding to our sense of Jenny’s mysteriousness, while both Ellen Berent (Gene Tierney) from Leave Her to Heaven and Jenny make use of nature and the landscape to cement their hold on others. Both films, based on novels by Ben Ames Williams, Leave Her to Heaven and The Strange Woman, feature Ellen and Jenny as exotic New Englanders, who marshal the powers of the rivers and lakes to achieve absolute control. When Jenny is a child, she moderates a swimming race, yelling to her teammate, “Faster, faster!” “I hate losing,” she says, paralleling Glen Robie’s comment in Leave Her to Heaven about Ellen’s swim-race prowess, “Ellen always wins.” Little Jenny exploits young Ephraim’s fear of the water, pushing the boy’s head under the water, then pretending to save him when adults come on the scene. This echoes Ellen’s murder of her young disabled brother-in-law in Leave Her to Heaven, when Ellen watches Danny (Darryl Hickman) drown in the lake and then feigns trying to rescue him when others become aware of the incident. Both Ellen and Jenny rage against domestic arrangements that stall or impede their desires. At the beginning of Leave Her to Heaven, Ellen Berent stares intensely at Richard Harlan (Cornel Wilde), in a seeming trance. Her will, determination, and “strangeness,” like Jenny’s, are symbols of female aggressiveness in the face of patriarchal and domestic rulings that limit and prescribe their activities and prospects.

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 59

Further, these performers’ striking attractiveness, aggressively promoted by the machinery of the Hollywood studio system, became institutionally grafted to the idea of the femme fatale. The fatal woman’s supernatural powers were embodied by an idolized yet threatening and unfathomable female beauty. Drinking the Kool-Aid, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art curated a viewing of the film, noting, “Never has one woman been so bad and looked so good” (Cohen). And yet, complicating this binary view of Ellen Berent, Ana Salzberg argues that the doubling of female beauty (Ellen/Tierney; Ruth/Jeanne Crain) in Leave Her to Heaven suggests “an interest in uncovering the fluidity between the poles of good and evil” (69) that further extends to blurring the boundaries between character and viewer. Such dissolution of categories in connection with fatal women embodied by “unsettling beauty” (as Salzberg describes Tierney; 62) may help to illuminate the intriguing mix to Lamarr’s character in The Strange Woman, where Jenny’s spiritedness and protectiveness over Lena and vulnerable families in the town are valued by the film at the same time as such aggressiveness must be keyed to classic associations between female seduction, manipulation, and wickedness. After Isaiah dies, his workers tell Jenny, their new boss, “It’s a man’s world we live in up in the woods, and we don’t rightly

60 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

see how a woman fits in.” The film’s insistence on society being a man’s world is perhaps most interestingly alluded to in an exchange between Jenny and her next lover, John Evered (George Sanders, lacking in this character the irony that viewers generally associate with his performances), when she learns that her new husband has many brothers. John’s mother “had nine sons,” to which Jenny responds, “what a lot of boys running about the house. Must have been very uncomfortable for her.” This scene cuts to another in which Jenny learns she is infertile, suggesting the two poles of experience for women: domestic nurturer or ruthless woman of the world, or, in similar binary fashion, either super fecund, dropping kids the way the Catholic mother does in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983) (and therefore swamped, beaten down), or barren (and therefore existentially unfulfilled). Because, it seems, Jenny thrives as a barren woman of the world, Ephraim tells John, “She’s so rotten . . . she’s not even a human being.” The contradictions in the film’s representation of Jenny resonate with cultural ambivalence about female power. Marlisa Santos, in her reading of the film, focuses mainly on Jenny’s “psychotic possession by evil forces” but also recognizes the film’s interest in showing a “psychologically complex woman who commits reprehensible acts of cruelty and violence to survive and achieve in a hostile world” (141).

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 61

Jenny suffers deeply when hearing a visiting preacher’s fundamentalist hate speech about the wickedness of “the strange woman,” a sermon she assumes is directed at her. The scene consummates the film’s exposure of the workings of a “disturbed and volatile personality” (Santos 138) by invoking the titular phrase’s biblical source (Proverbs 5:3–5). However, in highlighting Lamarr’s passion and anguish, the film points to the confused forces of social institutions (family and marriage, business hierarchies, and religion), aptly symbolized by the chaos of the town. The tone of the film is indeed tangled, if we are to see Jenny as “vampiric” (Santos 137) yet also recognize how “sexuality, money, and power are intertwined, especially for women” (138). So too, in a different setting and narrative, does Lamarr’s other postwar noir film, Dishonored Lady (1947), tell an intriguing story about a modern working woman, whose professional acumen is undercut by the character’s “dishonor” as a sexually active single female. An arts editor for a magazine on Madison Avenue, Madeleine Damien (Lamarr) holds her own at the office and is known as the “best arts editor [the magazine has] ever had.” Her exploitative colleague Garet (William Lundigan) tries to woo her, though he admits, “It’s awfully hard making love to a woman who makes more money than I do.”

62 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

Madeleine’s reputation marks her not only as “fatal” (a murder story ensues) but as having a mental disability—hence the appearance of a stock 1940s psychiatrist character, Dr. Richard Caleb (Morris Carnovsky), who counsels Madeleine to find her true self, “deep down underneath.” “I know the pattern, Miss Damien,” he says. “You’re suffering from a disease of the times.” The dialogue parallels comments by the doctors regarding the “case” of Louise Howell ( Joan Crawford), hospitalized following a fatal obsession with the bounder David Sutton (Van Heflin) in Possessed, released the same year, 1947. Louise is one of many women, the doctors in Possessed confirm, hospitalized because of a “diseased” civilization whose gender confusions contribute to the suffering of “beautiful women, . . . talented, . . . frustrated.” Passionate female characters in film noir during this period, such as Ellen Berent with her disproportionate love for a spouse (Leave Her to Heaven); Ann Sutton in Whirlpool (also played by Gene Tierney), the traumatized wife of a domineering psychiatrist; or Mildred Pierce ( Joan Crawford), with her excessive tending to a villainous daughter: these dynamic female performances signal gender trauma, representing women out of whack because their desires and ambitions are pushing against the confines of conventional domestic roles. In Dishonored Lady, Madeleine is told that she, like others

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 63

“of the times,” will “drug [herself] with the excitement of more excitement.” The “neurotic malady” of modern women outfits them for the role of femme fatale, even though these characters, nearly done in because of the suspiciousness of others, exhibit, like Laura Hunt in Laura (a role, interestingly, that Lamarr turned down), professional talent, wit, and savvy. Because Madeleine and Laura Hunt “perform” so well in their jobs, they are prey to exploitative men (Courtland and Garet in the Lamarr film, Waldo Lydecker in Laura). Because these working women are portrayed by glamorous Hollywood stars whose beauty was brandished with superlatives, they are also caught in “the performance of femininity,” as Will Scheibel explores regarding Tierney in an essay in Camera Obscura (“Working It”). Catalyzed in the case of Dishonored Lady by promotional materials focused on female promiscuity—“a creature of impulse, searching for new thrills and pulsating pleasures” (Dishonored Lady pressbook)—Madeleine/Lamarr’s and Laura/Tierney’s “labor of beauty” (Scheibel, “Working It”) further challenged viewers to identify a fraught subjectivity rather than seeing the performance of professional work and of sexualized or beguiling femininity as dangerous violations of social norms. In Dishonored Lady, intent on “growing a new soul” to escape the contamination of working in a corrupt social

64 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

world, Madeleine changes her name and escapes the brutal judgments of her colleagues, finding solace painting in an apartment, where she meets the young aspiring doctor and scientist David Cousins (Dennis O’Keefe). The good doctor commissions her to draw cell tissues for his research. Illustrating for David, “Miss Dixon” (Madeleine’s pseudonym) is thus for the first time involved in “meaningful” work, with David confirming, “I think [the research] may be important.” When David goes to a conference out of town, Madeleine is drawn back into her former business, affirming film noir’s insistence that a repressed past will return violently, though lending that theme to a woman instead of a man in this case. Madeleine lands at the home of a previous lover, the rich jewel magnate Courtland ( John Loder, whom Lamarr divorced in 1947), who is eventually killed and whose murder is pinned on Madeleine. It is worth noting that Madeleine’s intoxicated state when lured back to Courtland’s home leads to her falling asleep, perhaps a metaphor for Madeleine’s desire to let events occur that might allow her to be “discovered” as “dishonored.” When David learns that Madeleine is implicated in the killing of Courtland, it is not the prospect of her being a murderer that upsets him but her sexual past. “Who cares whether you killed him or not,” David says to her. “I thought you were something wonderful.”

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 65

Madeleine is on trial only ostensibly for murder; the court scenes derive their energy from the prosecutors’ institutionalized hard line on this complex woman: “too self-indulgent to be faithful to the man she wanted to marry; too weak and lacking in character to break with Courtland. Her twisted soul was bent on a heartless deceit—to make one man believe what all others knew to be a lie.” With David’s contempt confirming her low self-esteem, Madeleine gives up. “Fight,” she says, “what for?” The story exemplifies the Catch-22 for women, who are judged “dishonorable” or pretend to be “good” and bear the judgment of men for keeping truths to themselves. The prosecutor wonders, “And yet Miss Damien refused to confide in him.” Dr. Caleb provides a thoughtful rejoinder, however, that captures the failure of film noir’s men: “Dr. Cousins hasn’t the capacity either emotionally or intellectually to understand a problem like Miss Damien’s,” a gesture of empathy toward Madeleine that belies the film’s promotion materials that relied heavily on conservative ideas about postwar gender roles. Dishonored Lady is fascinating in the way it may ostensibly be read, as Ruth Barton observes, as a conservative film that endorses women going back to the home after the war. Pressbooks reveal United Artists’ conception of Madeleine’s role as a “brilliant editor . . . by day and glamorous

66 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

femme fatale by evening”; “the story of a brittle, sophisticated magazine editor whose after-office hours are filled with empty romances is a brilliant commentary on the postwar world and a strong plea for a return to sanity” (Dishonored Lady pressbook). And yet the film’s power lies in its revelation not of the “sterility” of Madeleine’s life before she leaves the magazine but of the cruelty of judgment on her when her experiences exceed conventional gender categories and reflect ambivalence about the return exclusively to prewar household duties. Despite the film’s surface narrative, Lamarr’s performance invites sympathy for a character whom the film’s pressbook confirms is among a number of roles female actors were drawn to during the period, in which they might play women who are “bold, brave and bad” (Dishonored Lady pressbook). Madeleine’s “badness” may be the focus of the prosecution in the court scenes, but the psychiatrist prods David Cousins to imagine a different perspective on the woman he claims to love. David relies on reports of Madeleine’s “dishonor” rather than his own experience of her, an analog to viewers branding women femmes fatales before fully taking in context, affect, and counterreadings of the “public” records. In these cases, viewers take their lead from men in noir, such as T. R. Devlin in Notorious, Johnny Farrell in Gilda, and Jake Gittes in Chinatown (1974), who prefer

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 67

to read Alicia, Gilda, and Evelyn Mulwray, respectively, as corrupt women. Dr. Caleb’s comment to David provides a gloss on misreading complex women as simple femmes fatales: “But isn’t it possible that you’ve picked up a few stray facts and added them up to a conclusion that’s entirely wrong?” The film offers a counternarrative that reveals the double bind that traps active, desirous, ambitious, and independent women. Dishonored Lady, read this way, anatomizes the mistrust and misreading of women because of reputation, because their desires cast them simply as “loose women.” David rises to the challenge, in the end, that the film poses. Asked if he had known the truth, if knowing of “Miss Dixon’s” real identity as Madeleine, would have changed his feelings about her, David, like Devlin at the end of Notorious, responds, “I made a mistake.”

CRIME OF PASSION: “DON’T CALL ME ‘ANGEL’”

Barbara Stanwyck’s many roles in classic Hollywood noir demonstrate the variety of the femme fatale in film noir. However, focusing on Baby Face, Double Indemnity, and now Crime of Passion, a 1957 postwar response to “the strangely twisted relations between the sexes” that E. Ann Kaplan sees as characterizing film noir (“Dark” 184), helps to clarify the transhistorical value of the

68 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

femme fatale to disrupt social conventions and bring to light women’s struggles to elude stifling gender expectations. Like The Blue Dahlia, Crime of Passion presents a transparent register of gender trauma but also illuminates one of the dominant ironies that should be noted about the fatal woman in film noir: it is her strength that the men are attracted to that then, following the rules of society, must be tamed. In an early shot of the film Crime of Passion, an ad for the newspaper column “Your Heart Not Mine,” by Kathy Ferguson (Barbara Stanwyck), in the San Francisco Post appears on the side of a truck. This introduction to the film echoes another film released the same year, Sweet Smell of Success (1957), which begins with the face of the media mogul J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) posted on the side of a truck. Both films interrogate issues of ambition, but while Hunsecker’s gender isn’t a source of distress for him, female desire and ambition are at the center of Stanwyck’s role as Kathy Ferguson. In no film noir is there a stronger indictment of the traps women fall into when they struggle with the desire to have more than society conventionally allows than in Crime of Passion. Kathy gives up her job at the newspaper, where her boss neglects and devalues her work, to marry the workaday cop Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden). Following her marriage, she is blindsided by her experience of

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 69

alienation in the suburbs, amid a wives’-club culture where the women talk only about cream cheese and olives and how successful their husbands are at work. Sublimating her own ambition into a desire to see her husband advance through the ranks of law enforcement, she becomes obsessed with her husband’s success, eventually having an affair with his boss, Inspector Pope (Raymond Burr), to ensure a promotion for him. When Pope goes back on his word that he will promote her husband, in effect punishing her for both of their infidelity, she panics and shoots him. The film thus deconstructs the becoming of a femme fatale in terms of female desire, frustration, alienation, and desperation. The film introduces Kathy as a talented reporter who bonds with female readers when she uses her column to reach out to a woman who has killed an adulterous husband. Parallel editing shows the many women responding to her empathic entreatment to Mary to turn herself in. “We are alone. Women tortured by fate, betrayed by all men” is Kathy’s appeal. The montage includes women reading the column while surrounding men are oblivious (for example, one attentive woman lies in bed with her husband sleeping beside her). Kathy telegraphs to the desperate wife that she understands he deserted her: “[In] a world made for men by men,” Kathy entreats, “Call me!” Of course, Kathy is successful in drawing in

70 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

the mariticidal Mary, but the columnist refuses to turn her in to the police or to tell the latter where she is. The two officers who insist that Kathy cooperate are Alidos (Royal Dano) and Bill Doyle, whom Kathy later marries. Kathy tries to explain to Alidos that her approach to bringing Mary in was based on sympathy for her plight and the possible abuse she endured that led her to kill her husband. The situation echoes Susan Glaspell’s 1917 feminist story “A Jury of Her Peers,” in which the wives in the kitchen solve the crime (Minnie Wright killed her cruel and cold husband) while the men bluster about insulting the women for their activities and abilities that are dismissed as “trifles,” the name of the play version of Glaspell’s story. A rationalist detective unconcerned with context, Alidos and the men in “A Jury of Her Peers” see no ambiguity in a murder case. In Crime of Passion, Kathy battles against men’s underestimation and contempt, expressed in Alidos chastising Kathy for her journalistic energy: “Your work should be raising a family and having dinner ready for your husband when he comes home.” Later, after Kathy and Bill are married, he calls her “angel,” which functions similarly to how men called women “baby,” as Neff does Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity. Such pet names for women place them in categories that are seen as lesser than those associated with male realms, whether domestic goddesses—angels

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 71

in the house—or children, “babes.” In Crime of Passion, Kathy recoils at such objectification: “Please. Don’t call me ‘angel.’ I loathe it!” The film is a powerful gender allegory that shows the fatal woman emerging out of an experience of being imprisoned in social roles that are unbearable. The story presents a naturalistic descent, from the moment that Kathy abandons her conviction that domesticity is not for her. Indeed, she insists to Doyle when they first are attracted to each other that marriage isn’t an option: “For marriage, I read: life sentence. For home life, I read: TV night, beer in the fridge, second mortgage. Uh-uh, not for me.” But Kathy falls in love with Bill, so leaves her job and moves to the suburbs. Here is the description of their neighborhood in the script: “A lower, middle-class tract development. A long and dreary line of identical bungalows. The cheaply constructed houses appear to push against each other, as though struggling for breathing space. Over all, there is a sense of flat-land sterility” (29). Also in the script, there is a repeated mention of Kathy’s “melancholy,” a sign of the film’s interest in female ennui, again, six years before the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique; Crime of Passion’s release was the same year in which Friedan sent her questionnaire to peers who graduated from Smith fifteen years earlier. The results of that survey, as alluded to earlier—that many of

72 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

the women were unhappy—was the source for Friedan’s groundbreaking feminist study. In Crime of Passion, Kathy refuses Bill’s enjoinder “What better ambition than to find a happy marriage, children, a home?” Instead, Stanwyck portrays Kathy’s melancholy, registering a state of dissatisfaction that the film ultimately shows is inevitable when women want both to love and to work. There is an intriguing exchange that takes place between Kathy and Inspector Pope earlier in the film, when they discuss the difficulty Kathy will find in “settling” for less than an independent life. “Maybe the answer might be found in a file I keep in my office,” Pope says: “strange offenses committed by seemingly normal people, . . . all of them searching for an answer” (Crime of Passion script 64). Kathy wants to see the file and observes that “most of them seem to be women” (65). Pope confirms the logic of women imprisoned by social roles that lead them to despair and criminality: “Frustration can lead them quickly to violence” (65). Crime of Passion was written by Jo Eisinger, who penned the script for Gilda, as well, another film about the construction of the femme fatale figure. Both films show women trapped by men who betray them (Pope; Johnny and Ballin); both films show women engaged in pretense and performing roles (Gilda, literally onstage)

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 73

in order to evade oppression or scheme for a better situation. But Crime of Passion was released in the decade following Gilda, in 1957, thus leaning toward the end of classic film noir, according to film historians. Paul Schrader’s influential essay “Notes on Film Noir,” first published in Film Comment in 1972, argues in fact that the classical period of film noir ends in 1953. This follows the earlier phases of wartime noir (1941–46) and postwar realistic noir (1945–49). The third phase of noir (1949–53) Schrader labels a period of “psychotic action and suicidal impulse” (12). Not only do films like Caught (1949), Gun Crazy (1950), Sunset Boulevard (1950), and In a Lonely Place (1950) demonstrate Schrader’s point that later classical film noir features desperate characters whose ambitions bring them despair, but many of these films, such as the ones just listed, also feature women allied with or occupying the position of femme fatale, such as Leonora, Annie Laurie Starr, Norma Desmond, and Laurel Gray, struggling with psychotic men and/or a desire to break out of their conventional lives. Crime of Passion is especially interesting because, coming several years later, it follows the logic of Schrader’s division of phases but demonstrates a notably high pitch of gender anxiety as perhaps a defining element of film noir’s representation of “psychotic action and suicidal impulse.”

74 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

NEO-NOIR AND POSTMODERN FEMMES FATALES

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 postfeminist individualist agenda; still others offer a politicized critique of the construction of gender and power relations in the social world. Many of the erotic thrillers from the 1980s were directly influenced by original-cycle film noir. A spate of movies beginning with B for “blood,” “body,” “black”—such as Blood Simple (1984), Body Double (1984), and Black Widow (1987) (also Blue Steel [1989] Blue Velvet [1986], and Blade Runner [1982]), their titles speaking the language of noir—adapted familiar narrative and character patterns to a new post-postwar era. Neo-noir films introduced a new strain of fatal female characters, beginning with Matty Walker in Lawrence Kasdan’s neo-noir Body Heat (1981). A pastiche of tropes most closely identified with Double Indemnity, 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 and then seeks to destroy him. From the weak-minded

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 75

Ned Racine (William Hurt) in Body Heat to Caesar ( Joe Pantoliano) in Bound, “a parody of masculinity” (Straayer 156), these doomed men would later be called “dumb lugs” by B. Ruby Rich. Unlike Robert Mitchum’s quintessentially masculine noir characters, in neo-noir, as Julianne Pidduck has observed, “the male protagonist loses considerable symbolic ground” (69). Classic film noir, from its metaphorical side streets, explored the dark underside of the American Dream. Neo-noir catapulted the deadly femme into the main streets and the mainstream of American culture in blockbuster erotic thrillers such as Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct (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 critics have noted, Matty Walker “gets away with” her crimes, a major revision to the Production Code–dominated 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

76 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

endeavors for individual gain and pleasure, inaugurating the neoliberal version of the femme fatale based on the assumption, as Samantha Lindop has argued about neonoir, that “individuals 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” (14). For Jack Boozer, the femme fatale becomes in neo-noir a symptom of the spectacle of acquisitiveness, seen in sexual and commercial terms. Basic Instinct’s Catherine Tramell, for example, “is such an engaging example of the vacuity of exploitative sexual forms of commercial energy which continue to lay claim to the American myth of self-initiative” (30). 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 (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 in Body Heat, Matty says, “I’m too dumb. Women, you know . . . ,” then, “I’ll be right back. Then maybe we can talk about pantyhose or something interesting” (qtd. in Ryan, 49). Alongside Turner’s charisma and Matty’s self-determination,

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 77

another factor contributing to the vexed issue of female agency in Body Heat and neo-noir generally is the influence of “porno-chic” films, such as Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door (both released in 1972), on the erotic thriller (see Palmer). Regarding Body Heat, R. Barton Palmer observes the striking resemblance between the porn star Marilyn Chambers and Turner herself. Following Fatal Attraction, in the 1990s, movies such as Basic Instinct, Body of Evidence (1993), and The Temp (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” (366). “Exhilarating and exasperating” for female spectators (Stables 179), these sexually alluring figures of horror (see Pidduck 69) may be essentialized as opaque and pathological, but they also enact a gender reversal that is, for many viewers, pleasurable: “she, not the male, is active, empowered to take charge of the narrative because of her intelligence, whereas he, not the female, is passive, victimized by her in the narrative because of his passion” (Cohan 273). Because, as Kate Stables has written, “the postmodern fatal woman is a creature of excess and spectacle”

78 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

(167), she has excited some viewers, while others may find these fatal women less interesting than the cultural debates—occasioned by these films’ releases—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. Linda Ruth Williams reflects insightfully on the hypersexual and/or excessive femme fatale in neo-noir: “feisty femme fatales, in all their sexualised contradictions, may be this form of feminism’s prime expression, emblematic figures for a moment focused on difference which cannot decide whether overt sexual expression is false consciousness or liberation” (183). The most interesting postmodern story of film noir and the femme fatale addresses questions beyond the basic ones associated with neo-noirs and erotic thrillers that feature fatal women: Will the fatal femme kill (wielding the iconic icepick beneath the bed)? Will she get away with her crimes and betrayals? These two questions may pique viewers’ interest and excitement, but they remain insular, plot driven, and only 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. Even in the millennial film Brick

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 79

(2005), the writer/director Rian Johnson transposes film noir style to a high-school setting while recasting the stock characters of noir, particularly The Maltese Falcon, whose icons and dialogue fill the set and pepper the script. A direct reference to John Huston’s 1941 film, Brendan ( Joseph Gordon-Levitt) responds at one point to Laura’s (Nora Zehetner) claim of vulnerability, “You really are dangerous,” an allusion to the line quoted earlier from The Maltese Falcon, “now you are dangerous.” Brendan is engaged in a classic cherchez la femme (his former girlfriend Emily [Emilie de Ravin]), getting deeply embroiled in a drug network led by The Pin (Lukas Haas). The film is clever and, with its hallucinatory recurrent imagery, visually interesting, but in its representation of the character types, particularly the femme fatale, it may remain simply a slick allusion to film noir (“Still picking your teeth on freshman?” Brendan asks the performing vamp Kara [Meagan Good]). Lindop reads the film, indeed, as “infused with nostalgia for classic noir and a time uncomplicated by second wave feminism” (10). One wonders if the film provides a starter kit for adolescents in bad gender ideology. There is another sequence of films beginning in the 1990s, however, that posits dangerous women neither as supernaturally violent nor as pastiches of classic film noir femmes fatales, as Laura Dannon is in Brick. These other

80 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

neo-noir films are critically oriented in exploring the femme fatale as a hierarchically gendered construction in an image-obsessed world: a media-created, media-driven projection. These films include Carl Franklin’s neo-noir films Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) and One False Move (1992); Patty Jenkins’s Monster (2003); David Slade’s Hard Candy (2006); David Fincher’s Girl with a 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). Since the 1990s, these more critically minded films have used their 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. In Memento (2000), for example, the femme fatale figure is both asserted and then self-consciously and critically deconstructed as the film literally undoes Natalie’s (Carrie-Anne Moss) role as antagonist by telling its story backward. An ingenious way to reorient us to the

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 81

assumptions undergirding the femme fatale, as Phillip Novak recounts, Memento reverses the trajectory of Natalie’s narrative, undoing her role as betrayer and challenging the viewer to be attentive to the film’s unraveling of familiar generic character patterns. Natalie begins, at the end of the film, as sympathetic, only becoming “untrustworthy” as she becomes increasingly motivated by concern for her boyfriend, Jimmy. As Novak observes, this crucial narrative fact about Natalie’s status in the film as the femme fatale manqué “has been . . . systematically elided from the critical commentary on the film.” In fact, Novak avers, “Natalie isn’t gradually revealed to be conniving, manipulative, and dangerous; over time, she in fact reveals herself to be surprisingly empathetic and, again given the circumstances, almost shockingly decent.” Memento’s mind-bending form invites viewers to read the story and characters with great care. If Memento “exploits viewer habits of response to genre conventions” (Novak), the film also dissolves the femme fatale label, asking us instead to look twice, or multiply, at the women in noir and what motivates or helps to explain their actions and attitudes. Analysis of the character of Natalie in reverse order counters her being cast blithely as a femme fatale, allowing us to recognize Memento’s deconstruction of conventional applications of gendered stereotypes to women in film noir.

82 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

A particularly important case of postmodern revisioning of the femme fatale figure, Carl Franklin’s neo-noir films 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 the United States. In Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), the “untrustworthiness” of Daphne Monet ( Jennifer Beals) 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. James Naremore observes that the film’s noir figures and mise-en-scène invoke nostalgia for film noir “to celebrate the resilience and tenacity of the postwar black community and to recover a lost or underrepresented culture” (252). Three years earlier, Franklin made the affecting One False Move (1992), in which doubleness is similarly critique oriented and based on racial victimization. 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. The extreme violence in Franklin’s One False Move has diminished its audience, though the film is powerful and highly underrated. In One False Move, the pseudonym that Lila has adopted, Fantasia, symbolizes her function as a screen

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 83

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 neither part of a scheme to steal money nor an 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, exemplifying Dave Kehr’s insight in a review of One False Move that “the film has a great deal to say about the artificial boundaries that contribute to define and distort American life.” These films illuminate the political legacy of film noir, carrying its critique into postmodernity. Female vengeance has also played a central role in contemporary film noir representations 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, which has, as Sue Short has recently noted, “forced some important questions for neo-noir criticism, attesting to the fact that

84 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

virtue and villainy cannot be simplistically projected onto one gender, or a certain type of woman” (136). As problematic as some elements of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 book and Fincher’s 2014 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 affect the “Cool Girl” role that mainly serves Nick’s interests: “The new sexism wants a woman who doesn’t care too much, a woman who gracefully bows out as soon as she’s no longer wanted, who makes no demands and puts up no resistance” (Rothfeld). The novel describes the “Cool Girl” as “hot and understanding.” The “Cool Girl” mantra illustrates the postfeminist expectation that women “[pretend] to be the woman a man wants them to be” (Flynn 300). Amy comments just before the “Cool Girl” passage that “Nick loved a girl who didn’t exist” (Flynn 299). More broadly, the theme of projection is familiar within feminist critiques of film noir: Imogen Sara Smith reminds us of the British noir Bedelia, “in which the

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 85

disillusioned husband declares ‘I loved a woman who doesn’t exist’” (59). Bedelia, I would further note, pre­ sents the fatal woman’s mental illness as symbolic rage against the confinements of marriage, a pattern exemplified in Gene Tierney’s noir roles in Leave Her to Heaven and Whirlpool. And in Tierney’s most famous film, Laura, the detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) trades in his fetishized handheld baseball game for an obsession with the painted image of Laura, a fixed ideal that simultaneously holds sway over him and over which he has complete control. Such ideation is brilliantly anatomized in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly when Gallimard explains his mistaking of Song, a gay male spy pretending to be a woman who has seduced the French diplomat (Gallimard himself): “I am a man who loved a woman created by a man” (90). Song’s femme fatale is like many others: a figure who deceives in order to navigate impossible (here, heteronormative) roles on offer in conventional society. That the play is based on a true story should underscore the entrenched nature of gender types that reinforce bewilderingly perverse power relations. What Gone Girl contributes to our understanding of the femme fatale figure is its revelation of the double bind women are in: they perform attitudes to try to take control of an incessant typing of them and navigate the social scripts they are expected to deliver or follow

86 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

but then are judged or vilified for being inauthentic or untrustworthy when they try to negotiate different roles for themselves. Gone Girl explores this process and problem through Amy’s creation of “Diary Amy,” the smart yet vulnerable figure who fronts for an enraged Amy intent on punishing her husband for cheating on her. Imogen Sara Smith observes the film’s “relentless theme,” one that is best revealed in relation to the unreliable diary: “people pretend to be better than they are, and relationships crumble or explode when they can’t keep up the acts” (58). It’s interesting that in classic film noir, the hardboiled detective traditionally pretends to be worse than he is (think of Sam Spade telling Brigid at the end of The Maltese Falcon, “Don’t be too sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be”), only to have the films reveal the male protagonist’s virtue or incorruptibility (often registered in his getting rid of the femme fatale). In Gone Girl, Amy herself crumbles and arguably goes mad under the pressure of being “Amazing” or being “Cool Girl.” The critique of female role-playing in Gone Girl 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

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 87

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” (360). A more bracing and less sensationalist film than Gone Girl, Patty Jenkins’s Monster explores a process by which victims become criminal perpetrators. Charlize Theron plays Aileen Wuornos, a woman on the margins of society because of her class, gender, and sexual orientation. Dehumanized by her rape, Wuornos wreaks vengeance on the sexist society that has no viable role for her to play. She becomes a “monster.” A searing film about the construction of fatal women in a world in which their only imagined agency is violent and revenge oriented, Monster challenges the objectification of women, including in their Hollywood film roles, by casting the beautiful and usually glamorous Charlize Theron in the lead role, aggressively critiquing Hollywood’s conventional deployment of female beauty to captivate viewers. In important ways, Monster echoes classic film noir’s exposure of the objectification of women in film noir, women whose desires were punished by labeling and objectifying them as femmes fatales. As Richard Dyer has observed, “It is sexuality that makes people remember Gilda and Laura as femmes fatales when they are

88 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

nothing of the sort” (127). Such misreading of women as bad because their sexuality and their intelligence threaten patriarchal dominance is common not only in critical readings of film noir but also within the very stories themselves (as in Johnny Farrell’s misreading of Gilda, Dave Bannion’s misjudging of Debby Marsh in The Big Heat, and Jake Gittes’s misapprehension of Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown). Another contemporary work that features a woman avenging other women’s abuse is Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011). Like the representation of Aileen Wuornos’s victimization, Lizabeth Salander’s rape is not made a spectacle. Jeffrey Brown is right, I think, in his observation that Salander “represents a far more radical challenge to misogyny than the standard Hollywood action heroine who may beat up men but always looks like a beauty queen while doing it” (58); the contrast might also serve to gloss Sin City’s underworld sex workers, who may “[invite] female viewers into a fleeting sense of empowerment” (Castillo and Gibson 87–88) but also titillate viewers with the “rigorous fetishisation” of their sexual powers (Lindop 91). One other avenging fatal female is worth noting, Hayley (Ellen Page) in Hard Candy, who castrates the rapist and pederast Jeff (Patrick Wilson) in retaliation. Like Lizabeth Salander, this “fille fatale” (Lindop) avenges girls brutalized by “not just specific men but

WARTIME AND POSTWAR FILM NOIR, NEO-NOIR 

• 89

an entire culture that normalizes sexual violence against women” (Brown 58). I have described two feminist strains of the post­ modern story of the femme fatale—the politicization of her trials (exposing a corrupt society that produces her victimization) and the path of violent retribution she undertakes to find meaning in her own otherwise-limited agency. A third strain I want to note is the full-on postmodern stylization of the femme fatale figure in order to deconstruct her fabrication as gender ideation. These films, exemplified by the work of David Lynch, play in narrative and cinematographic ways with the femme fatale, disrupting the ideological grounds on which she is often perceived. Hollywood’s exploitation of female images serves as the backdrop for Mulholland Drive, for instance, proliferating and double exposing femmes fatales (and even foregrounding a poster of Rita Hayworth as Gilda, which inspires the amnesiac played by Laura Elena Harring to call herself “Rita”). The process shows “how insubstantial—that is, fantastical—these images are” (Tasker 367). Lynch’s earlier film Blue Velvet may address clichés in character patterns, but the film has a serious purpose in exploring the dark recesses of human behavior masked by the veneers of social convention and complacent domesticity. Lynch’s films are important revisions of film noir because they further destabilize

90 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

the objectification of the femme fatale by showing the continuity between performance and nonperformance, between the art of acting and “real” behavior in a “real” world. Will Scheibel insightfully addresses Naomi Watts’s “non-naturalistic” performance as Betty Elms in Mulholland Drive, helping us to see Lynch’s representation of artifice as a vital element of being in the world (“Fallen”). The emphasis on female acting in Lynch’s films revisits the idea of performance conventionally associated with the femme fatale. Seen not as inauthentic dissemblers but as vigorous struggling agents, Lynch’s performing noir women communicate instead an affect-laden insistence on both the idea of identity as flexible and the necessity of acting in grappling with trauma and the very objectification that has been institutionalized through the cultural deployment of the notion of the conniving femme fatale.

3 TRACY FLICK AND TELEVISION’S UNRULY WOMEN Beginning with the underrated Election, Alexander Payne’s visceral critique of the American Dream disguised as a coming-of-age high-school comedy, in this final chapter I discuss contemporary representations of the culturally neuralgic theme of female ambition and three television portraits of women perceived as monstrous, in Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990–91) and Twin Peaks: The Return (Showtime, 2017), Alias Grace (Netflix, 2017), and Killing Eve (BBC/AMC, 2018–). The final section examines diverse examples of female transgression that all point to the construction of the femme fatale as a critical tool to disrupt conventional role-playing, further investigating female fatality and criminality as signs of gender trauma and emblematic of social disorders that viewers are enjoined to contemplate. 91

92 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

TRACY FLICK: FEMME FATALE

When we learn from Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) that her mother told her, “the weak are always trying to sabotage the strong,” we see the source of this femme fatale’s ferocity. Tracy’s ambition and unwillingness to compromise her desires constitute her threat to the status quo, the latter ably represented by Jim McCallister (Matthew Broderick), who finds Tracy’s audacity offensive. Alexander Payne’s 1999 film Election introduces Tracy as a kind of Lolita figure, a precocious high-school kid who has an affair with the teacher Dave Novotny (Mark Harelik), an overgrown child who thinks that he has found happiness with fifteen-year-old Tracy. Election depends for its humor and its critique on viewers’ awareness of the film’s unreliable narration. Payne relies on irony, inflating these besotted characters’ narration— especially McCallister’s—to deflate their romantic self-­ presentation. McCallister’s dyspeptic aversion to Tracy Flick stems from the fact that she doesn’t accede to the role of an unassuming high-school girl. “She’s a real go-getter, all right,” McCallister tells Paul Metzger, whom he recruits to run against Tracy in the school’s election of a class president. As Payne observes in the DVD commentary track, Tracy is figured throughout the film with straight

T racy F lick and T elevision ’ s U nruly W omen  

• 93

lines (sharpened pencils, arm straight up high when the teacher asks a question), while McCallister is defined by circles—the circles he draws on the blackboard to suggest to Paul that the world needs apples (circles), as well as oranges (which he draws exactly the way he drew the apples); the film begins with McCallister running around the track, and it ends with his teaching gig at the Museum of Natural History, marshaling kids around the exhibits when a child emulates Tracy’s hand shooting up high in another presumptuously phallic gesture to answer one of McCallister’s questions. His final expression of confused annoyance registers a wannabe player in a social world where young upstarts like Tracy assert a masculine power that is unavailable to the likes of McCallister. Tracy shares traits with Linda Fiorentino’s Bridget Gregory, the relentless femme fatale of The Last Seduction. Both women’s stories end in limousines, having achieved some measure of success while their male counter­part/ competitor of sorts remains a schlemiel, Mike framed by Bridget for murder in jail, McCallister riling himself up voyeuristically watching Tracy flirt with a Republican member of Congress before getting into the limo with him. But notably, both Election and The Last Seduction bring to light the brutal qualities within these “nice guys”—McCallister’s vulgar goading of his friend Dave Novotny’s ex-wife, Linda, to have sex with him with her

94 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

toddler looking on from a crib and, in an entirely different register, Mike’s capacity to rape in The Last Seduction— signaling the fatal woman’s purpose in many texts to bring toxic masculinity to the surface and then best the men who, no longer repressed, try to master the women who threaten their manliness. Part of what film noir, especially neo-noir, has always been concerned with is the male protagonist’s un-self-­ knowing, which is revealed to be not naivete but a poisonous sort of self-delusion whose associated imagery of stable masculinity, when deflated, becomes much more the source of badness than most so-called femmes fatales demonstrate. On the surface, then, McCallister’s cluelessness appears to be a case of arrested development, a sign of adolescent fantasy. McCallister shifts from saying he feels sorry for Tracy to “who does she think she is anyway?!” Like a teenaged boy himself, he throws his soda at her limo, then runs the opposite direction. As McCallister’s hysteria in the voice-over emerges, the affront posed by Tracy is clear (and this is true of Bridget, as well): the woman stokes the man’s sense of futility and impotence, and his response is often to double down and try to prove his masculinity and thus his superiority. Mike is goaded by Bridget, and McCallister takes matters of the election into his own hands and throws away the ballot, assuring Tracy a loss by one vote to Paul Metzler.

T racy F lick and T elevision ’ s U nruly W omen  

• 95

The high-school custodian finds the vote buried in the trash (trash figuring heavily throughout the film to signify characters’ throwing away things of value, things they take for granted). The janitor was introduced early in the film, standing in the hallway behind McCallister as the teacher empties the fridge, carelessly throwing old Chinese food onto the floor that will be cleaned up by the culturally invisible custodial staff member. The janitor is allied with Tracy, not just because he shares her comeuppance in response to McCallister’s smug ownership of the space of the high school but also because Tracy’s femme fatale is motivated in part by class consciousness, as she watches the sweet but utterly hapless Paul surrounded by friends and peers, leaning on his enormous truck, while she takes the bus home. His means and his popularity burn her, as she observes her new election competitor through the window of the bus, the emotion in her voiceover narrative heightening as she alludes to his fancy house and rich family and how most people “don’t have everything handed to them with a silver spoon.” Tracy’s privation—and an obviously narcissistic mother raising a kid to be “special”—sends her desires into overdrive. The rage that follows her setbacks is cleverly scored in the film by an audio clip from Ennio Morricone’s Navajo Joe (the film offers a montage of her tearing down Paul’s posters, then seeing red paint or “blood” on her hands à la Lady

96 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

Macbeth, another fiercely ambitious woman). Tracy’s war cry—shrieking like Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in Twin Peaks and The Return—signifies her determination, and the film’s contribution to understanding the femme fatale lies in the way Payne and Witherspoon show her fierce rejection of limits, her exposure of the male posers around her who seek to put her in her place (“who does she think she is anyway?”)—“flicking” away their false impositions of power on her. The stakes of understanding this representation may be revealed by observing the parallel that some viewers have drawn between Tracy’s electoral ambition and Hillary Clinton’s. In a 2016 piece for the Atlantic, Megan Garber discussed Election’s “meditation on political ambition—and . . . the pitfalls and punishments that can result, in particular, when that ambition has the audacity to be realized by a woman.” Clinton has reportedly told Reese Witherspoon that she is often asked about Tracy Flick. Garber wonders why it is “Tracy Flick, whose ambition makes her a menace,” whom Clinton is asked about, rather than a score of other strong female characters in film or television. The Atlantic article pinpoints the tie between Tracy and the real-life female politician: they both actively campaign for advancement, a dynamic that is seen “with a mixture of resentment and resignation: Running for office requires—at all levels, but especially

T racy F lick and T elevision ’ s U nruly W omen  

• 97

at the highest—bragging and smarming and compromising and pissing people off and, in all but the best of circumstances, making promises you will almost certainly be unable to keep. . . . [The] assorted forms of swaggering are particularly frowned upon when they’re exhibited by women” (Garber). Women are still best liked when they fall into two female stereotypes: angel in the house or self-sacrificing maternal figures who “know their place.” Once a woman is shown to want power, she is seen as threatening and “shrill.” Garber notes in popular culture, “the discrepancy between notions of female ambition (which is often pathologized) and its masculine counterpart (celebrated, rewarded, normalized).” How can a woman be critical, insistent, and charismatic—“saying the things that women are often not supposed to say,” as the columnist Patt Morrison observes, “that we are supposed to keep to ourselves and bury”—and not be villainized as a “nasty woman” or femme fatale? Recall Senator Mitch McConnell’s censure of Elizabeth Warren after Warren read Coretta Scott King’s letter about Jeff Sessions during Senate debates about the latter’s appointment by Donald Trump to be attorney general: “She was warned. She was given an explanation Nevertheless, she persisted” (see Victor). Many people remember Clinton’s notorious remark in 1992 that she could have “stayed home

98 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

and baked cookies” while her husband was governor of Arkansas but chose to maintain her career as a lawyer. While Clinton was lambasted for seeming to insult women who choose to stay at home, the lack of generosity toward her (her words, her choices) throughout her campaigns to become senator and president surely underscores the fragility of cultural support for women’s advancement and their voicing of desires that don’t follow an easily identifiable or conventional script for women’s roles. Instead, fundamentally misogynist attitudes toward female power are easily stoked, Trump’s toxic presidency standing alongside the whole-cloth dismissal of women vying in the United States to become the Democratic candidate in the 2020 presidential election. In 2016, Maureen O’Connor wrote of the significance of cultural context in reading the characters in Election; her comments resonate further when considering the contemporary Incel-type prevalence of the nerd-turned-aggressor role: McAllister’s entertainment value has changed. In the late 90s his powerless frustrations were funny and a little bit sad. But today, when groups of strangers routinely channel their malevolence into coordinated attacks on random women whose so-called crimes are roughly the same as Tracy’s—annoying others simply by existing and striving

T racy F lick and T elevision ’ s U nruly W omen  

• 99

and refusing to back down from their goals—the whole affair is much darker. McAllister is no longer a powerless twerp with benignly misogynist impulses—he’s a precursor to the type of hatred that would one day drive chanting crowds and respected officials to call for the imprisonment (or even execution) of Hillary Clinton.

TWIN PEAKS AND GENDER TRAUMA

In the strongly noir-influenced series Twin Peaks and The Return, Mark Frost and David Lynch present powerful women whose varied embodiment of the femme fatale demonstrates her dynamism and her potential to subvert the gender status quo (see Grossman and Scheibel). The show generally depicts women wanting more excitement and fulfillment than their hometown allows. Even the relatively flat-character receptionist Lucy Moran (Kimmy Robertson) registers her desire for change and a more dynamic life. Reporting to Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) in episode 11 (“Laura’s Secret Diary”), Lucy describes her encounters with the boorish fashionista Richard Tremayne: “Most of his behavior was asinine, but at least he was different.” Despite Lucy’s dissatisfaction with Richard (with irony and contempt, she calls him “Dick” throughout season 2), she connects with him out of frustration with her suitor Andy and a desire to

100 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

break out and explore experiences beyond her immediate setting. And, of course, in The Return, undoing any underestimation of Lucy, it is she who shoots “bad” Cooper / Mr. C. (also Kyle MacLachlan), saving her colleagues in a crucial moment of danger. Most significantly, however, Twin Peaks exposes the process of making icons of women. Laura Palmer, like many of the femmes fatales discussed in this volume, seeks to escape such objectification. Like her namesake Laura Hunt from Preminger’s 1944 film, she is figured prominently as a picture before appearing in ghostlike fashion later in the text. Her sexuality is a means to escape the alternating poles of ennui in a small town and being possessed by the demon BOB, who, in the form of her father, Leland Palmer, has raped her continually since she was a young girl. The brutality of this portrait is mediated by Sheryl Lee’s powerful performance as Laura Palmer, who reappears not only as cousin Maddy (who is murdered in the second season by Leland/BOB) but also repeatedly in Agent Cooper’s dreams that take place in the Black Lodge. In The Return, Lee also plays Carrie Page, another woman embroiled in violence; Cooper finds her in Odessa, Texas, intent on bringing her home to Twin Peaks, a place that no longer exists in the timespace continuum in which these characters exist at the end of the series.

T racy F lick and T elevision ’ s U nruly W omen  

• 101

Also in The Return, Cooper does achieve the ultimate heroic purpose of “saving the girl”; he is responsible for Laura Palmer’s rerouted fate. A new “page” in the life of Laura Palmer, Carrie Page is in trouble (again?) in Odessa, Texas. She seems to have killed someone who may have assaulted her in her house, and Cooper’s efforts to restore Laura Palmer to her hometown house are undermined by a cosmic shift that has erased the familiar Twin Peaks from the universe. With a dark send-up of ameliorative endings, Sarah Palmer’s voice calls out her daughter Laura’s name, and the detective’s certitude is wiped away, along with the town he knew, to leave viewers only with Carrie’s shriek. Chock full of references to film noir throughout the series’s run in the early 1990s and in 2017, Twin Peaks featured multiple references to the figure of the femme fatale. In season 2, the dark-haired Maddy Ferguson (with Donna and James’s assistance) is dressed up to look like cousin Laura, in order to disorient Dr. Jacoby (another reference to Preminger’s Laura, as “Jacoby” is Laura Hunt’s portraitist) and expose him as possibly involved in the young girl’s murder. As Maddy appears in a blond wig, she echoes another fated Madeleine, Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), whom Scottie ( James Stewart) seeks to revive and whose image the male seeks to control by transforming

102 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

Judy Barton (also Kim Novak) into it. In Twin Peaks, as Maddy emerges out of the shadows looking like Laura, Angelo Badalamenti’s score reaches a haunting crescendo of minor chords. The self-consciously repeated practice of “redesigning” the woman critiques the destructive romanticism at the heart of turning women into icons and images. In Twin Peaks, Maddy recognizes the deployment of her self as recompense for the loss of Laura: “All I did was come to her funeral, and I feel like I fell into a dream. . . . People think I’m Laura, and I’m not. I’m nothing like Laura,” Maddy cries. And yet she seems possessed by Laura when she looks at James alluringly during their performance of “Just You and I” in Donna’s living room. When Laura was alive, never having a body controlled only by herself, she lured men because it gave her a semblance of feeling powerful: “Why is it so easy to make men like me,” we hear Laura say on the tape recording she makes for Dr. Jacoby. Even dead, she still has power, like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. James Hurley says of Laura’s ghost, she is “out there wandering like a restless spirit.” Donna melodramatically shouts at Laura’s burial site, “You’re dead, Laura, but your problems keep hanging around. It’s almost like they didn’t bury you deep enough.” Laura Palmer’s resilience as a poignant figure of trauma and strength, a doomed and powerful

T racy F lick and T elevision ’ s U nruly W omen  

• 103

woman, represents the show’s use of the femme fatale figure to underscore themes of female objectification and exploitation. The gender critique in the Twin Peaks universe is further reinforced by giving voice in The Return to Diane, Agent Cooper’s nonspeaking, invisible secretary in the show’s first two seasons. Charismatically embodied by another Laura (performer Dern, that is), Diane as we see her in The Return seems to be a tulpa (copy) of the “original” Diane, subverting the notion of a single objectified female self. Diane, like Laura, or Maddy, evokes the idea of replicated women of mystery—femmes fatales. But with her tagline response to the men in Twin Peaks— “Fuck you, Albert”; “Fuck you, Gordon”—she trashes any male attempts to control her. Laura Dern’s Diane rejects the idea of the disembodied female image, the ethereal “Diane” formerly relegated to Agent Cooper’s auditor and amanuensis. If with her chameleon richly colored hair Diane in The Return embodies a bluntly aggressive femininity, she is also, like other femmes fatales in Twin Peaks, complex and vulnerable. In part 17 of The Return, Diane tells Gordon, Albert, and Tammy the story of having been raped by Mr. C (bad Cooper), years before. He may even have killed her, before this tulpa of Diane later emerged. In Diane’s heartbreaking revelation in this scene, we are reminded of the repeated assaults on women that haunt

104 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

the modern worlds of Twin Peaks. Dern’s performance as Diane also reinforces the critical role that the figure of the femme fatale assumes in deconstructing and exposing that predation and showing that part of the danger lies in men’s projection of evil onto woman. As Laura in Jennifer Lynch’s The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer (1990) writes to BOB, “You fed me pain when I had none, and when I did have pain, you said it was my own fault” (89). Further, Laura, “a fallen girl” (88), is eviscerated by a melodramatically extreme version of toxic masculinity; though she is “lost,” however, “a stronger, more manipulating Laura is rearing her head, and opening herself up to threats and games played only in the dark” (67). The Twin Peaks universe has a lot to tell us about how the fatal woman is an outgrowth of women’s trauma that is itself a direct result of how narrow opportunities are for female expression in society and how quick men can be to judge and demonize women for their perceived divergence from simple stereo­types of female goodness. Not just Laura and Diane but also Audrey Horne assumes a complex version of the femme fatale to divide and conquer, as it were, conventional ideation about female experience: Audrey is most famous for her dance, with Badalamenti’s seductive score attached to it. But Audrey is no straightforward fatal woman and exemplifies how “Lynch employs iconic types who exceed the

T racy F lick and T elevision ’ s U nruly W omen  

• 105

boundaries of their typecasting” (Gillian 16). She is a detective figure in seasons 1 and 2, spying on her father and others at the Great Northern and courageously going under cover as a perfume salesperson at Horne’s Department Store to solve the case of Laura Palmer’s murder. While working at the perfume counter, she is recruited to become a prostitute at One-Eyed Jacks, the Canadian casino also owned by her father. Crossing geographical and existential borders, Audrey exceeds her role as high-school vixen to become an agent for Agent Cooper, trying to help him to discover Laura’s killer. As “the new girl” at One-Eyed Jacks, Audrey is painfully offered to her unaware father (she wears a cat mask), presenting a new threat of incest and the exploitation of innocence seen so palpably in the story of Laura Palmer and her father, Leland. Audrey’s story at One-Eyed Jacks multiplies the show’s depiction of perverse father-daughter relations, in which the teenager must come to terms with her father’s criminality, exploitation, and sexual predation. Audrey is also a disrupter of capitalist exploitation. One of the first disruptions we see her perform is in the first episode after the pilot: Audrey scares off the Scandinavian investors, there to help build Ben Horne’s real-estate venture of Ghostwood Estates, by revealing the story of Laura Palmer’s murder, thereby puncturing the fantasy that Twin Peaks is idyllic. Gleefully watching the business

106 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

capitalists decamp from the Great Northern, Audrey demonstrates the power to destabilize her father’s patriarchal control, culminating at the end of season 2 when her activism takes the form of chaining herself to a vault within the bank as an act of civil disobedience. It is worth observing that the hero of Twin Peaks, Agent Dale Cooper, also contributes to destructive ideation about women. On the one hand, throughout Twin Peaks, Cooper’s charm derives from his identification with the feminine, as Martha Nochimson has insightfully discussed: with his androgynous given name of Dale, Cooper’s “compassion for the body” (149) and his role as “specialist in crossing boundaries” (147) ally him with feminine values and make him a vehicle for a very Lynchian disruption of binary gender roles. However, Cooper’s openness also leaves him vulnerable to a romanticism that is his undoing, revealed in the sequence involving the detective’s infatuation with Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham). For the Black Lodge may be implied in Annie’s surname—“blackness” “burns” in even the lightest and seemingly most innocent of characters— and the denouement of Cooper’s possession by evil at the end of season 2 reveals the dark side of Cooper’s romanticism—an ostensibly appealing version of the same kind of ideation that this book has been exploring in its different forms—to be a terrifying abyss. Cooper’s

T racy F lick and T elevision ’ s U nruly W omen  

• 107

gaze at Annie is often accompanied by a goofy affect; for example, the mise-en-scène in the Double R Diner (with its prominent plastic ice-cream cone in the background) reinforces the absurd foundation of boy-meets-girl in a world torn apart by trauma.

ALIAS GRACE: OBSESSION, POSSESSION, AND THE FEMME FATALE

Alias Grace illustrates how the idea of female mystery contributes to the deadliness of “woman.” The novel is based on a Canadian true story from 1843, when a domestic worker, Grace Marks, may or may not have aided in the murder of Thomas Kinnear, her employer, and Nancy Montgomery, the housekeeper who previously hired Grace as a servant in the household. Another example of Neil Gabler’s “Life the Movie,” where entertainment values subsume the rational basis for determining guilt and innocence, the case is explored by Atwood as a story about celebrity and gender, beginning with Grace’s traumatic sea crossing from Ireland to Canada, during which her mother died and she was left in poverty with multiple siblings and an abusive father. After the death of Kinnear and Montgomery, Grace’s purported coconspirator, McDermott, is hanged, and Grace is sent to prison, followed by stints in solitary confinement and an

108 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

asylum. The focus of the novel is sixteen years later, when a group of concerned liberal citizens in the town employ an American psychologist, Simon Jordan, to intervene in the group’s efforts to determine the innocence of Grace to gain her a pardon. Atwood’s novel, published in 1996, and the 2017 Netflix miniseries adaptation find the assault surrounding the femme fatale figure not inherent within the woman but owing to the mistreatment of women by men and an overreliance on rationalist discourse that doesn’t acknowledge ambiguity and complexity as fundamental human traits. This failing in nuanced perception and concomitant obsession with single truths that fail to take gendered social contexts into account lead to crimes of various sorts—by and against the women who are scapegoated as these failures unfold. One thinks here again of the murderess Mrs. Wright in Susan Glaspell’s story “A Jury of Her Peers.” In this story, Mrs. Wright’s neighbors divine that the woman did indeed kill her husband, but she did it as an act of desperation after many isolated years of enduring her husband’s coldness and cruelty. The women practice “jury nullification,” hiding details that might implicate or condemn Minnie Wright, while the men use ratiocination and legal methods to solve the crime, which gets them further and further away from figuring out the truth. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters (the latter of whom is

T racy F lick and T elevision ’ s U nruly W omen  

• 109

the sheriff ’s wife and thus “married to the law”) establish a subjectivity to Minnie Wright, denied her as a result of gender, and it is this very context that fleshes out Minnie’s character and lends meaning to Glaspell’s story. Criminality is understood broadly in Glaspell’s story in relation to the contexts of suffering and ambiguous motivations and actions that make women who are imprisoned by social rules before they commit any legal crimes sympathetic to readers and viewers. In Alias Grace, the question of “what is true and what is not true” tortures Dr. Jordan, a scientist, who, like the men in Glaspell’s story and the husband in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” do not respond healthily to a “case” in which a strong or desirous woman is trapped in circumstances in which she has few resources to rebel against or ameliorate her situation. The woman in Gilman’s story escapes to madness, the only means of channeling her despair, as Norma Desmond does at the end of Sunset Boulevard. Gilman’s woman steps out of submissiveness at the end—“‘I’ve got out at last,’ said I, ‘in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!’” (196)—just as Grace’s rebellion against the men who have sought to control her is expressed by her dead friend, Mary Whitney, who takes control of her mind. Mary was Grace’s confidante and only friend at the Parkinson residence,

110 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

where she was seduced by the Parkinson’s son, then died from a botched abortion. Traumatized by the death of the only person who had been kind to her, Grace seems to be possessed by Mary, the latter speaking from Grace’s body during a staged scene of hypnosis. “You’re the same,” Grace/Mary intones, in Mary’s North American accent: “you won’t listen to me, you don’t believe me, you want it your own way, you won’t hear” (Atwood 403). As is the case in Gilman (or for Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond), escape and rebellion occur through extreme mental states. Such altered states are the province of the femme fatale, often the “madwoman in the attic” whose efforts to find freedom upset the status quo and sometimes cause destruction. The defining feature of the femme fatale is a dynamism usually accompanied by intellect and wit. For Grace Marks, the energy appears in her storytelling, reflected as well in the quilts she weaves; the 2017 Netflix miniseries, adapted by Sarah Polley and directed by Mary Harron, cuts often to close-ups of Grace’s stitching, underscoring visually the idea that Grace is embroidering a story. And like Penelope’s endless sewing in the Odyssey to ward off suitors, Grace’s weaving of her tale allows her an endless deferral of closure or unwelcome resolution. Such suspension of a single truth displaces definitive conclusion in favor of constant storytelling that is always

T racy F lick and T elevision ’ s U nruly W omen  

• 111

contextualizing questions of guilt. As it did for Penelope, the act of embroidery gives the woman agency to push off the unwanted attention of men and to determine her own story and means of survival. Indeed, the only power Grace has in the world of Alias Grace is to present her self, which she does avidly, much to the chagrin of Dr. Jordan, whose role as a Victorian physician does little to adulterate his commonality with film noir’s male protagonist. For the “case” of Grace follows the same pattern taken up by the so-called femme fatale and her lover in classic film noir. Dr. Jordan in Alias Grace can be likened to Johnny Farrell in Gilda, utterly undone by the woman with whom he is obsessed. Johnny lacks the ability to control Gilda, to master her, and this eventually drives him to perverse behavior and psychological sadism. So, too, Dr. Jordan tries to suss Grace out, to capture her using his scientific discipline. He wishes to be her hero by determining the truth of her innocence and vindicating her. But Grace’s victimization, rebellions, and storytelling provide no simple answers. In eluding his ratiocination (his capacity to detect and determine in clear terms her innocence or guilt), she causes him to unravel. Revealed in this way to be a femme fatale, Grace has undone Dr. Jordan, exposing a perverse network of gender relations where men’s cultural habit of assuming control is met by female ambition and ingenuity. In Alias Grace, Grace recognizes Jordan’s

112 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

desire to create her in his own image: “While he writes,” she says, “I feel as if he is drawing me” (Atwood 69). The comment echoes Jessica Rabbit’s defense of her corruption in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988): “I’m not bad,” she says. “I’m just drawn that way.” The reason Dr. Jordan cannot “draw” Grace is that her subjectivity is more complicated than his dyadic understanding of guilt and innocence allows for; his “drawing” is monochromatic. Further, part of the guilt Dr. Jordan so wants to assign or reject regarding Grace evades him because, as Grace says, “He doesn’t understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you’ve done, but from the things that others have done to you” (Atwood 377). The insight helps to gloss the many literary, film, and cultural femmes fatales, who must grapple with the idea that guilt is projected onto them, constructing a double bind: the more still and passive women are, the more amenable they are to such projection and the further they are from achieving any happiness. When they rebel against convention and capture opportunities to be successful or independent, they become dangerous, or they enter threatening worlds where their agency can mean destruction. It should thus be no surprise that the female monster figure associated with the femme fatale—from Selena Kyle becoming Catwoman in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns (1992) to Charlize Theron’s biographical

T racy F lick and T elevision ’ s U nruly W omen  

• 113

portrayal of Aileen Wuornos in Monster—alludes to women rebelling violently against the harm done to them because of their previous victimization and submissiveness. No longer amenable, Catwoman and Wuornos turn to violence. At the beginning of Patty Jenkins’s film, Wuornos is shown to identify as a child with a fantastical cultural myth: “Marilyn Monroe . . . discovered in a soda shop.” The making of a “monster” is directly linked to the radical disappointment of her dreams and illusions about the world. This creates, once again, an altered state out of which emerges the monster figure, wreaking vengeance on the forces that have caused her trauma. Femmes fatales resist male efforts to control them. Part of the drama that then ensues is these men’s compensatory actions, their own desperate acts born of lack of control. In Alias Grace, this dynamic fits perfectly, as Jordan acts out his need to master Grace’s “case” by becoming involved with the unfortunate Mrs. Humphrey, his waiflike landlady. She is characterized as airy, helpless, and in dire need of attention from Mr. Jordan after being left by her husband. Dreaming of Grace, Mr. Jordan submits to Mrs. Humphrey not in starting a sexual affair with her but for his own need to take control of this “motionless being” he can dominate (Atwood 352). In The Last Seduction, Mike Swale appears as a “dumb-lug” “good guy” whose inner violence, as earlier discussed, is stoked when

114 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

his masculinity is questioned. Seduced by “Wendy” into raping her in order to assert his manhood—afraid of being perceived as gay—Mike asserts himself with a vengeance, like Dr. Jordan’s sexual exploitation of Mrs. Humphrey in Alias Grace. Men in film noir stories are stirred up by femmes fatales to reveal their sometimes hidden need to control women, even becoming predators. Such capacity to do violence is the noir underside to the idealism often associated with these male protagonists. Dr. Jordan’s mother writes, “You have always been an idealist” (51). The flip side of such idealism, an idealism rooted in part in a patriarchal assumption of mastery, is a cynicism that stokes these men’s vitriol against women (“You’re like a leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another,” says Jeff Markham to Kathie Moffatt in Out of the Past). Idealism can be a cover for repressed anxiety about mastery and control: if the world doesn’t accede to the male protagonist’s grand wishes, there must be someone to blame. The women often become tabula rasa in this regard: the screen on which to project disappointment that the world the male protagonists have expected does not obtain. Thus it is that Grace is perceived in contradictory ways. The incoherence of her public persona is not a result of people seeing her complexity but a product of people projecting onto her multiple identities that reflect their own desires.

T racy F lick and T elevision ’ s U nruly W omen  

• 115

The gender puzzles revealed by the presence of femmes fatales are problems associated with such projection and the gender anxiety that pervade society. For if the passivity of women who conform to patriarchal conventions doesn’t help them to be happy, the strength of women who rebel against conventional social roles further provokes men and patriarchy to put them back in their place, since their projected roles for women are violated. This is why so many femmes fatales are either clearly expressing desires and ambitions otherwise not allowed to women or performing roles to avoid persecution for their upstart ambitions. Regarding the latter, the femme fatale performs the role others expect her to assume. Says Grace, “If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided with one” (Atwood 33). Some femmes fatales play to their audience. Hayworth’s Gilda, for example, seduces, strips, and insinuates in front of the man, Johnny Farrell, who is preoccupied with her perceived promiscuity and untrustworthiness. Gilda’s energy and sexuality threaten his ability to order the world around him. Gilda rebels by performing the role of betrayer that Johnny assumes is real: “Now they’ll all see what I am, Johnny.” Toward the end of Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects (the 2006 novel and 2018 miniseries on HBO), Camille’s lover, the detective Richard Willis, lacks empathy for Camille, calling her a slut and giving up on her entirely. In a cathartic

116 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

moment scenes later, he apologizes to Camille, but we’re meant to find that apology utterly insufficient to explain his summary disgust with her. Cops such as Willis and Devlin in Notorious only appreciate truth when it serves their binary way of reading the world. Alicia mournfully recognizes Devlin’s incapability of accepting her wholly, saying to him, “What a little pal you are: never believing in me.” This is a long and powerful strain in cultural representations of sexually marked women—reminding us, for example, even of Lizzie Siddal’s sketch of “La Belle Dame sans Merci” circa 1855, which Grant Scott describes as adapting the role of “la belle dame” to emphasize her “resignation and defeat. She has neither the energy nor the will to resist the knight or seek the viewer’s eye, and in all three versions of the scene looks grimly downwards” (508). Once again, performance may also be a way to avoid unbearable roles. Grace Marks is “alias Grace” or “alias Mary Whitney” because performing Mary during the hypnosis scene, whether planned or unconscious (and the novel subverts readers’ desires to know which of these it is), is a means of survival for Grace. She takes on another role that allows at least a temporary freedom from the one that has caused her such suffering. Grace’s name in Atwood’s novel is telling: she is Grace “Marks,” and she says late in the novel that she has “left no marks,”

T racy F lick and T elevision ’ s U nruly W omen  

• 117

which is “almost the same as being innocent” (342). But the novel suggests that making a mark means for women that they are de facto guilty. This relates back to the issue of performance, since an additional reason why women perform roles is so that they can appear to be less than they are. To avoid suspicion, or assault, one refuses to make a “mark.” For example, Grace mitigates her role as “celebrated murderess” by showing less intelligence than she in fact has. Her lawyer advises such: “I should not appear to be too intelligent” (23). Pages later, she says, “I’ve learnt how to keep my face still” (26). The comment is culturally resonant, as strong women have continually engaged in gender pretense to appear less able, so as not to threaten male colleagues. Therese Grisham and I report similar kinds of psycho-­ social negotiations in our discussion of Ida Lupino’s directing in the postwar period: the filmmaker pretended to know less about camera work than her male colleagues on set so as to ensure their cooperation (see Grisham and Grossman). And Christine Becker recounts Dinah Shore’s insistence when she emceed her talk show in the 1970s that she would never have male guests on her show whom she would be perceived to overshadow. And yet, Grace Marks, in telling her story in Alias Grace, rebels. When Dr. Jordan describes the female culture in his hometown USA with a “moist and reminiscing look in

118 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

his eye,” underscoring the character’s patriarchal romanticism, Grace responds to the doctor’s detail about the magazine the women produce, “with literary offerings” (Atwood 68). She tells Dr. Jordan, “Who would want a wife like that, writing things down for everyone to see, and made-up things at that, and I would never be so brazen” (68). Brazen she is, however, because narrating her life is a subversive act for the very reason that it requires her to make a mark. The Netflix miniseries adaptation of Alias Grace also makes expressive use of Sarah Gadon’s facial expressions. The show begins with a voice-over description of all the qualities Grace Marks was contradictorily said to possess: “I think of all the things that have been written about me,” Gadon’s voice-over begins: That I am an inhuman female demon. That I am an innocent victim of a blackguard, forced against my will and in danger of my own life. That I was too ignorant to know how to act and that to hang me would be judicial murder. That I am well and decently dressed. That I robbed a dead woman to appear so. That I am of a sullen disposition with a quarrelsome temper. That I have the appearance of a person rather above my humble station. That I am a good girl with a pliable nature and no harm was told of me. That I am

T racy F lick and T elevision ’ s U nruly W omen  

• 119

cunning and devious. That I am soft in the head, little better than an idiot.

This adapts Atwood’s language at the beginning of the novel: “And I wonder,” Grace says, “how can I be all of these different things at once?” (23). In the miniseries, with each part of this opening speech, Gadon performs that emotion, affect, or characteristic that matches the description, presenting visually the show’s focus on gender and the mystery of the woman. The medium close-up of Gadon as her expressions transform from aggressive, possibly murderous and mad, to vulnerable and victimized enacts the problem of the femme fatale: no matter what her affect is, she provokes viewers to objectify her as one thing or another. Further, this tour-de-force introduction of the character of Grace foregrounds the show’s thematic treatment of performance—Grace must perform to survive, evading, eluding, and sometimes enacting the roles ascribed to her. In Atwood’s novel, it is worth repeating, Grace avers, “If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided with one” (33). The visual presence of Gadon’s expressively chameleon face in the miniseries constitutes a thrilling adaptation of the role of the femme fatale and her strategies for upending expectations and defeating the men who seek to control her.

120 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

The Netflix Alias Grace has another important feature to it, as a collaboration among creative women. Atwood served as producer and consulted with Polley, who adapted the novel. Polley is known for her interest in female storytelling, having made the autobiographical documentary Stories We Tell in 2013. Polley was interested not only in the idea of storytelling as agency and in the ambiguities and complexity of Grace’s character but also in the rage that such a character must have felt after being victimized from such a young age and in so many ways. Polley has also noted the topical relevance of the story of Alias Grace (as well as Hulu’s adaptation of Atwood’s most famous novel, The Handmaid’s Tale). The team leading Alias Grace included Atwood, Polley, the performer Sarah Gadon, and the director Mary Harron, known for her own feminist approaches to stories about violence, as in I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) and American Psycho (2000). Harron’s interest in “characters crossed with madness” (Harron, qtd. in Onstad) focalized this formidable female alliance, a rejoinder to #MeToo and the exploitation of women in Hollywood, about which Polley has commented directly. “To look back and forward is very important at this moment when women’s rights are incredibly precarious and fragile,” Polley said in the summer of 2017. On October 14, 2017, Polley recounted her own dealings with Harvey Weinstein in a New York Times

T racy F lick and T elevision ’ s U nruly W omen  

• 121

editorial. Polley had been a child performer in Hollywood and resisted Weinstein’s offer of a “very close relationship.” She has said, “I got off totally easy. . . . There wasn’t a moment before this one where anyone would have cared about what those women had to say, where those women wouldn’t have been ridiculed for coming forward, where they wouldn’t have been thought of as whiners or strident or angry” (qtd. in Onstad). Regarding efforts to ban lateterm abortions and antiwoman legislation looming in the United States (fears increasingly realized since Atwood spoke), Atwood expands, “We are at a moment in history when some parts of North America are trying to turn the clock back, and if they want to turn it back, what do they want to turn it back to. . . . There’s a reason the women’s movement really started in the 19th century. If they do go back, they’ll end up with [a woman] dying on a bloody mattress” (qtd. in Onstad). For these reasons, the ending of the miniseries adds power to the novel’s conclusion, which establishes that Grace remains most profoundly connected to the other two women who have influenced her life and who were both brutally exploited by men and a class and gender system that imprisons them and causes their deaths. The quilt that Grace completes at the end of the story combines patches of garments, including a red portion from Mary Whitney’s petticoat, a faded yellow patch

122 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

from Grace’s own prison nightgown, and a square from Nancy Montgomery’s “pink and white floral” dress that Grace wore when she ran away from Mr. Kinnear’s after the murders. “And so,” she says, “we will all be together” (460). Atwood’s moving concluding line from the novel is accompanied in the miniseries with Gadon’s direct gaze at the camera, asserting Grace’s subjectivity in the face of past and potential audiences that have sought to limit and define her existence.

KILLING EVE: FEMALE VILLAINY, “TOTALLY FOCUSED YET ALMOST ENTIRELY INACCESSIBLE”

The trajectory of Killing Eve—gradually revealing that the “good” detective Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) identifies with the sociopathic assassin Villanelle ( Jodie Comer)— follows many of the themes associated with the femme fatale and her critique of normative roles and categories of behavior in society. Such themes are announced even before the credits of the first episode when the cherubic-looking Villanelle makes goo-goo eyes with a child in a Viennese cafe. Villanelle is a master of social codes and imitation, copying the gestures of others to learn how to behave “normally” to aid her in seduction and manipulation. In this scene, Villanelle mimics the expressions of a server behind the counter who is charmed by children

T racy F lick and T elevision ’ s U nruly W omen  

• 123

and greets customers with a warm and cheerful smile and affect. After a montage of shots alternating among the child, Villanelle, and the server, Villanelle consummates her visual connection with a beaming smile, which elicits the same from the child. The show perversely presents the child as Villanelle’s first “mark,” a prey to the sociopath’s manipulation. After achieving her aim, Villanelle exits the restaurant but on her way out dumps the child’s ice cream in her lap. Most significantly, this preamble introduces Villanelle’s acute powers of observation, watching people who embody social codes of behavior so that she may appropriate them. Further, like Bruno popping the child’s balloon in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), the scene shows Villanelle subverting the social norm of idealizing children, thus establishing her not only as a foil to convention but as a source of mischievous pleasure for the viewer. Killing Eve demonstrates the femme fatale’s role to call out the insufficiencies of conventional role-playing for women in culture—it is noteworthy that Villanelle’s misdemeanor assault is on a young girl in the cafe and not a boy, rebelling against a gender expectation of sweetness that is associated with little girls. Part of the reason why that first scene is so effective is that Jodie Comer’s Villanelle seems beatific. By momentarily assuming the role of an angel in the house who nurtures children, the

124 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

show establishes the viewer as its prey, caught as we are in the trap of assuming that Villanelle is having a sugary encounter with a child in a cafe. We are seduced by Comer’s performance, an analogue to cultural misreadings of women as fulfilling narrow categories: angel, devil. The scene is a primer for reading femmes fatales, for interpreting gestures not in isolation but as part of a context that teaches us what the shot or scene means. We learn the importance of interpreting images in context rather than interpreting them based on cultural stereotypes. From the show’s earliest moments, Killing Eve warns us not about the danger of manipulating or “performing” women but about seeing beyond icons of sexy women (and immediately assuming they’re bad) and icons of angels in the house (and assuming they’re good). A similar challenge to viewers is posed in the third season of FX’s television adaptation of Fargo (2014–), in which viewers are seduced by the clever, sexy ex-con Nikki Swango (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) to interpret her as a femme fatale. As the season unfolds, it is made clear that Nikki’s love for the hapless Ray Stussy (Ewan McGregor), whom she calls her “honey bear,” goads Fargo’s audience to mistrust Nikki’s affection because she seems to present a familiar iconic role. Instead, in the end, Nikki devotes her life to avenging Ray’s death, her authenticity reminding viewers that cultural stereotypes

T racy F lick and T elevision ’ s U nruly W omen  

• 125

provide inadequate means to understand character and story patterns. In Killing Eve, if Villanelle’s villainy—rooted within her name—is tied to an unwriting of social scripts, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the good detective Eve Polastri begins to show an empathy with the sociopath, revealing a dissatisfaction with normal life and her obsession with Villanelle. Eve bristles at the suggestion that her husband is boring but announces early on that “trouble’s not interested” in her. In the sixth episode of season 2, Villanelle tells Eve to remember, “The only thing that makes you interesting is me.” When Eve first sees Villanelle, their reflections are merged in a mirror, symbolic of their shared psyche; later, it is the mirror that triggers Eve’s memory that she has seen the assassin before. In the third episode of season 1, Eve’s and Villanelle’s images are once again merged in a mirror, when Eve tries on clothes at a store in Berlin that her dark sprite Villanelle has surreptitiously picked out for her. Alerting us to the show’s questions about identity, mirrors signal Eve’s investigation and repositioning of her own self-image. Mirrors also suggest that we’re seeing inverse reflections of character patterns and conventional narrative, for example, when Eve puts on the designer dress that Villanelle has sent her in place of her own clothes, which she has stolen just before killing her best

126 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

friend, Bill, in a dance club. As Eve admires the perfectly sized dress that Villanelle has curated for her, running her hands over her own slim figure, in effect dressing for her “date,” Villanelle appears moments later in her house because she’d like to “have dinner” with Eve. Mirrors ignite Eve’s dissatisfaction with images of herself in the professional world and her self-image. Under­estimated from the show’s start, she is labeled by colleagues as inept. Villanelle’s first murder is accomplished, Eve surmises, because the person killed was a misogynist and, off his guard, wouldn’t have expected to be attacked by a woman. Both Eve and Villanelle are thus initially defined in terms of being underestimated by the men around them (a similar motif appears in Steve McQueen’s film Widows [2018], in which Veronica [Viola Davis] tells the other women that they may succeed in their $5 million heist because no one would expect them to attempt it). In Killing Eve, it is another restless and imaginative woman, Fiona Shaw’s character Caroline, who sees the depth of Eve’s talent and insight: “You’re intuitive, and you make insane suggestions” (it is worth noting that showrunner Phoebe Waller-Bridge changed this male character from Luke Jennings’s book into a central female character). The show further consummates its conviction that viewers must be able to shift their assumptions in understanding dynamic women who are

T racy F lick and T elevision ’ s U nruly W omen  

• 127

themselves shape-shifters, performers intent on disrupting social norms in role-playing, particularly regarding gender. Villanelle is a catalyst in this regard, as she continually performs conventional female roles, the ballerina in her pink tulle dress, the nurturing mother figure, the vulnerable girlfriend. When Sebastian walks with her in the park eating ice cream, he assures her, “I am never going to hurt you,” recalling Mike Swale’s clueless appropriation of simple boy-girl romance narratives in The Last Seduction, “I thought you were the one, Wendy.” Focused on the patronizing comments of these “good guys,” such scenes reveal the vapidity of ameliorative narrative. There is surely a reading of the show that might focus less on gender and more on the moral landslide in Eve’s life after becoming obsessed with Villanelle. Signaled in Eve’s early comment to Caroline, “if [the assassin’s] not killing me, frankly it’s not my job to care anymore,” the idea of “killing Eve” evokes the death of Eve’s moral center. But the show’s featuring of two immensely strong women in the central roles who problematize easy categories of good versus evil, detective versus villain, more importantly points out the insufficiency of familiar character patterns to help us understand human motives and agency within the context of culture and society. This critique is achieved through the sheer charisma of the two female leads.

128 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

Like most female characters associated with the idea of the femme fatale, Villanelle calls attention to the sexism around her. Just before she kills her first victim, an Italian mogul who finds her in his bedroom and assumes she is there to engage him sexually, she tells him, “You should ask before you touch a person.” In the fourth episode, Nadia and Villanelle (or Oksana, as she is known in Russia) reject their male colleague’s dominance when he says, “I give the orders.” Oksana laughs at him, and when Nadia kills him, she joins Oksana in objecting to the classic use by men of diminutives or cutesy names for women, saying, “I am not pumpkin.” Instead, Villanelle and Eve themselves appropriate the infantilizing “baby” in classic noir, calling each other this (“Sorry, baby”). Killing Eve’s showrunner is Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who made a name for herself in Britain with the comedy hit that I mentioned in the introduction, Fleabag, which Waller-Bridge describes as having been inspired by Lena Dunham’s Girls (2012–17). Both shows feature clever and complex female characters who defy expectation by depicting layered experience and desires. In the context of detective thrillers, Waller-Bridge’s recent comments about being drawn to projects that inspire fear are especially interesting, suggesting that there is more at stake in pursuing nonformulaic characters and story patterns in familiar genres. As authors, showrunners, directors,

T racy F lick and T elevision ’ s U nruly W omen  

• 129

writers, and actors, women require a kind of bravery in bucking a male-dominated entertainment and arts culture that may make the femme fatale a particularly apt vehicle for investigating the obvious and subtle ways in which ideation about female power informs real and represented situations and stories and also for exploring women’s challenges, their talent, and their rage at being underestimated or exploited. In discussing the relevance of her dark female characters to contemporary gender politics, Gillian Flynn said about Sharp Objects, “to me, there’s something a little bit sad that: in 2005, to write about women and violence, and women and sexuality, and women and rage, I knew I’d have to disguise it in a mystery” (Abbott). In Killing Eve, Eve’s description of Villanelle for the police sketch artist captures the idea of the mysterious femme fatale; Eve says, “Her eyes are sort of catlike,” and “she’s totally focused yet almost entirely inaccessible.” The depiction of the criminal here, as is the case for myriad femmes fatales, invites projection based on simple stereotypes of women. But for engaged, concerned, and empathic viewers open to the critical powers and endless fascination of the fatal woman, her seeming opacity may invite analysis and understanding. *

130 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

Because of the power of the femme fatale to critique cultural norms, fatal women have morphed over the decades into bionic women, superheroes, and political mavens. By the second and third decades of the twenty-­first century, the contemporary female agitator can be an aspirational icon. She still uses wit and self-confidence to overcome obstacles, but she has built on the idea of the hypercompetent female in diverse roles, from Lena Olin’s ruthless and gymnastic Mona Demarkov in Romeo Is Bleeding (1993) to Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman in Batman (“I am woman, hear me roar”), Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) or Theron’s role in The Atomic Blonde (2017), Sonja Sohn’s strong-minded and adept Kima Greggs on The Wire (2002–8), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Powerpuff Girls, Princess Mononoke, Xena the Warrior Princess, Olivia Pope in Scandal (2012– 18), and comics adaptations that use the phantasm of the medium to show women breaking the mold, such as Wonder Woman or Carol Danvers’s Captain Marvel. One need only think of Elizabeth Moss’s Peggy Olson walking the hall of McCann Ericson toward the end of the run of Mad Men (2007–15), carrying her office supplies wearing a mod dress and sunglasses, with a cigarette dangling from her lips, to see the morphing figure of the female badass. These characters productively break down the conventions of good versus bad woman, exploring

T racy F lick and T elevision ’ s U nruly W omen  

• 131

instead dynamic women who use their minds, bodies, words, and dress to critique the status quo, problem-­ solve, achieve their desires, and generally kick butt in all forms of being in the world. The femme fatale is a Janus-faced figure, looking back, looking forward, and helping us to understand the representation and lived lives of women in history and culture. Following elections in the United States in 2018 when record numbers of women won congressional seats, CNN revived its web series called The Badass Women of Washington, suggesting the knock-on effects of popular cultural, literary, cinematic, and televisual images of women who break the mold. These femmes fatales provide fictional intertexts for appreciating the achievements of Elizabeth “I’ve Got a Plan for That” Warren or “AOC” (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), who responded to backlash to her powerful presence in Congress, “Don’t hate me cuz you ain’t me,” or even Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi standing up to men and institutions saying at the end of 2018 to President Trump, “Don’t characterize the strength that I bring.” If the legacy of the femme fatale includes more open rebellions against gender discrimination, representations of fatal women will continue to be important in generating further conversation about gender and cultural change. #MeToo has brought about massive shifts

132 

• 

THE FEMME FATALE

in cultural norms, but it has also been followed by snags to progress, including postfeminist backlash and anxiety that the movement is on the one hand merely a fad and on the other an insufficient means of dealing with bad behavior, issues surrounding corroboration, questions about accountability, and the stubborn resurgence of binary thinking. Stories that invoke the style and language of the femme fatale remain an important critical tool for exploring gendered power dynamics. The femme fatale will continue to raise problems and provide intoxicating pleasures, as a persistent source for research and analysis and as a significant, if vexing, provocation to think about and act in response to representations of female power.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Huge thanks to friends and colleagues who have given me suggestions, conversed with me about film noir, and offered incredibly productive critique, especially Jill Beifuss, Amy Breiger, Steve Cohan, David Greven, Helen Hanson, Phil Novak, Barton Palmer, Ann Ryan, and Will Scheibel. Very special thanks to Nicole Solano at Rutgers University Press for her guidance and encouragement and to Gwendolyn Audrey Foster and Wheeler Winston Dixon for being such excellent and supportive series editors. Many thanks to my copy editor Andrew Katz. Warm and deep thanks to Leslie Mitchner for getting me started on this rewarding project. Thank you to Le Moyne College’s Research and Development Committee and to my wonderful chairs and deans, provost, and president at the college: Maura Brady, Kate Costello-Sullivan, Jeanne Darby, Jim Hannan, Linda LeMura, Joe Marina, and Michael Streissguth. Thanks to my student-scholar assistants, Emily El Younsi

133

134 

• 

A cknowledgments

and Emma Discenza, whose passion for the ideas undergirding femmes fatales has inspired me. Parts of this manuscript, especially discussion of neonoir in chapter 2, are revised from an essay I contributed to The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender, edited by Kristin Hole, Dijana Jeleca, E. Ann Kaplan, and Patrice Petro (2017), called “The Postmodern Story of the Femme Fatale.”

FURTHER READING

Basinger, Jeanine. A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960. London: Chatto and Windus, 1993. Print. Beckman, Frida. “From Irony to Narrative Crisis: Reconsidering the Femme Fatale in the Films of David Lynch.” Cinema Journal 52.1 (2012): 25–44. Print. Bould, Mark, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck, eds. NeoNoir. London: Wallflower, 2009. Print. Britton, Andrew. “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth: Misogyny in The Lady from Shanghai.” The Book of Film Noir. Ed. Ian Cameron. New York: Continuum, 1992. 213–21. Print. Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Gender and Noir.” Film Noir. Ed. Homer B. Pettey and R. Barton Palmer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016. 143–63. Print. Diawara, Manthia. “Noir by Noirs: Towards a New Realism in Black Cinema.” Shades of Noir: A Reader. Ed. Joan Copjec. London: Verso, 1993. 261–76. Print. Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Print. Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2009. Print. Greven, David. “Ida Lupino’s American Psycho: The Hitch-Hiker.” Bright Lights 27 Feb. 2014. Web. https:// 135

136 

• 

F urther R eading

brightlightsfilm.com/ida-lupinos-american-psycho​ -hitch​-hiker-1953/#.XOap-NNKjEY. ———. Representations of Femininity in American Genre Cinema: The Woman’s Film, Film Noir, and Modern Horror. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print. Grossman, Julie. “Women in Film Noir: Pulp Fiction and the Woman’s Picture.” Kiss the Blood Off My Hands: On Classic Film Noir. Ed. Robert Miklitsch. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2014. 37–61. Print. Hanson, Helen, and Andrew Spicer, eds. A Companion to Film Noir. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. Print. Harvey, Sylvia. “Woman’s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1998. 35–46. Print. Hodges, Dan. “Woman in Distress vs. Femme Fatale.” The Film Noir File: A Dossier of Challenges to the Film Noir Hardboiled Paradigm. Web. 19 Mar. 2019. http://www​ .filmnoirfile.com/woman-in-distress-vs-femme-fatale/. Hollinger, Karen. “Film Noir, Voiceover, and the Femme Fatale.” Film Noir Reader. Ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini. New York: Limelight, 1996. 242–59. Print. Kemp, Philip. “From the Nightmare Factory: HUAC and the Politics of Noir.” The Big Book of Noir. Ed. Edward Gorman, Lee Server, and Marton Harry Greenberg. New York: Carrol and Graf, 1998. 77–86. Print. Klevan, Andrew. Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation. New York: Wallflower, 2005. Print. Lott, Eric. “The Whiteness of Noir.” Whiteness: A Critical Reader. Ed. Michael Hill. New York: NYU P, 1997. 81–101. Print.

F urther R eading  

• 137

Miklitsch, Robert. The Red and the Black: American Film Noir in the 1950s. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2017. Print. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18. Print. Neale, Steve. Genre and Hollywood. London: Routledge, 2000. Print. Newman, Kim. Cat People. London: British Film Institute, 2013. Print. Silver, Alain, and James Ursini. Film Noir Prototypes: Origins of the Movement. Milwaukee, WI: Applause, 2018. Print. Sobchack, Vivian. “Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotype of Film Noir.” Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory. Ed. Nick Browne. Berkeley: U of California P. 129–70. Print. Stacey, Jackie. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. London: Routledge, 1994. Print. Stott, Rebecca. The Fabrication of the Late Victorian Femme Fatale: The Kiss of Death. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1992. Print. Wager, Jans B. Dames in the Driver’s Seat: Rereading Film Noir. Austin: U of Texas P, 2005. Print.

WORKS CITED

Abbott, Megan. “Gillian Flynn Isn’t Going to Write the Kind of Women You Want.” Vanity Fair 28 June 2018. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/06/gillian​ -flynn-isnt-going-to-write-the-kind-of-women-you-want. Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. New York: Random House, 1996. Print. Baby Face pressbook. Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. Print. Badass Women of Washington with Dana Bash. CNN Politics, premiered 6 June 2017. Web Series. Bara, Theda. “The Ex-Vampire.” Vanity Fair Oct. 1919. Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Print. Barton, Ruth. The Most Beautiful Woman in Film. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2010. Print. Becker, Christine. It’s the Pictures That Got Small: Hollywood Film Stars on 1950s Television. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2009. Print. Biesen, Sheri Chinen. Blackout: World War II and Origins of Film Noir. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005. Print. Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story. Dir. Alexandra Dean. Reframed Pictures, 2017. Amazon Prime. 139

140 

• 

W orks C ited

Boozer, Jack. “The Lethal Femme Fatale in the Noir Tradition.” Journal of Film and Video 51.3–4 (Fall–Winter 1999–2000): 20–35. Print. Breen, Joseph I. “Letter to William Hays. Re. ‘Baby Face.’” 8 June 1933. History of Cinema, Series 1, Hollywood and Production Code Administration. Ed. Alfred E. Green. Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, Beverly Hills, CA. Print. Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Femme Fatale—Negotiations of Tragic Desire.” New Literary History 35.1 (Winter 2004): 103–16. Print. Brown, Jeffrey A. “Torture, Rape, Action Heroines, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” Heroines in Film and Television: Portrayals in Popular Culture. Ed. Norma Jones, Maja Bajac-Carter, and Bob Batchelor. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. 47–64. Print. Castillo, Ryan, and Katie Gibson. “We’ve Seen This Deadly Web Before: Repackaging the Femme Fatale and Representing the Superhero(ine) as Neo-Noir Black Widow in Sin City.” Heroines in Film and Television: Portrayals in Popular Culture. Ed. Norma Jones, Maja Bajac-Carter, and Bob Batchelor. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. 77–89. Print. Cohan, Steven. “Censorship and Narrative Indeterminacy in Basic Instinct.” Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. Ed. Steve Neale and Murray Smith. London: Routledge, 1998. 263–79. Print. Cohen, Joan. “Strange Romances.” Program notes on Leave Her to Heaven, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Leave Her to Heaven Clippings File, Margaret Herrick

W orks C ited  

• 141

Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Print. Cook, Pam. “Duplicity in Mildred Pierce.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1978. 68–82. Print. Copjec, Joan, ed. Shades of Noir: A Reader. London: Verso, 1993. Print. Cowie, Elizabeth. “Film Noir and Women.” Shades of Noir: A Reader. Ed. Joan Copjec. London: Verso, 1993. 121–66. Print. Crime of Passion script. 1956. Virginia Grey Papers, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. Print. Dishonored Lady pressbook. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, New York, NY. Print. Doane, Mary Ann. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print. Dyer, Richard. “Postscript: Queers and Women in Noir.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1998. 123–29. Print. Edison, Bob. “Interview with Hedy Lamarr.” Films in Review 25.6 ( June–July 1974): 350–66. Print. Evans, Delight. “Does Theda Believe Her Own Press Agent?” Photoplay May 1918. Theda Bara Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. Print. Evans, Peter William. “Double Indemnity (or Bringing Up Baby).” The Book of Film Noir. Ed. Ian Cameron. New York: Continuum, 1992. 165–83. Print.

142 

• 

W orks C ited

Ferran, Victoria. “Femmes Fatales.” BBC 4 (A Just Radio Production) 2017. Web. https://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/b08rp0gv. Flynn, Gillian. Gone Girl: A Novel. New York: Broadway Books, 2014. Print. Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. “Baby Face.” Library of Congress Film Registry. Web. https://www.loc.gov/static/​ programs/national-film-preservation-board/ documents/baby_face.pdf. French, Philip. “The Blue Angel.” Guardian 9 Mar. 2013. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/mar/​ 10/dietrich-blue-angel-classic-dvd. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 2013. Print. Gabler, Neal. Life the Movie : How Entertainment Conquered Reality. New York: Vintage Books, 2000. Print. Garber, Megan. “Hillary Clinton, Tracy Flick, and the Reclaiming of Female Ambition.” Atlantic 9 June 2016. Web. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/ archive/2016/06/hillary-clinton-tracy-flick-and-the​ -reclaiming-of-ambition/486389/. Gates, Philippa. Detecting Women : Gender and the Hollywood Detective Film. Albany: SUNY Press, 2011. Print. ———. “Independence Unpunished: The Female Detective in Classic Film Noir.” Kiss the Blood Off My Hands: On Classic Film Noir. Ed. Robert Miklitsch. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2014. 17–36. Print. Gillian, Jennifer. “Textural Poaching Twin Peaks: The Audrey Horne Sweater Girl GIFS.” Series 2.2 (Spring 2016): 9–24. Print.

W orks C ited  

• 143

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper, Herland, and Selected Writings. New York: Penguin, 1999. Print. Glaspell, Susan. Her America: “A Jury of Her Peers” and Other Stories. Ed. Patricia Bryan and Martha C. Carpentier. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2010. Print. Gledhill, Christine. “Klute 1: A Contemporary Film Noir and Feminist Criticism.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1978. Print. ———. “Klute 2: Feminism and Klute.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1978. Print. Golden, Eve. Vamp: The Rise and Fall of Theda Bara. Vestal, NY: Emprise, 1998. Print. Grisham, Therese, and Julie Grossman. Ida Lupino, Director: Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2017. Print. Grossman, Julie. Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. Grossman, Julie, and Will Scheibel. Twin Peaks. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2020. Print. Hanson, Helen. Hollywood Heroines : Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007. Print. Hanson, Helen, and Catherine O’Rawe, eds. The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print. Hemingway, Ernest. “The Killers.” The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. 215–22. Print.

144 

• 

W orks C ited

Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. Print. Jancovich, Mark. “Phantom Ladies: The War Worker, the Slacker and the ‘Femme Fatale.’” New Review of Film and Television Studies 8.2 (2010): 164–78. Print. Johnston, Claire. “Double Indemnity.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1978. 100–111. Print. Kael, Pauline. 5001 Nights at the Movies. New York: Holt, 1982. Print. Kann, Red. Review of The Blue Angel. Motion Picture News 22 Nov. 1930. The Blue Angel Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. Print. ———. Review of To Have and Have Not. Motion Picture Daily Review 11 Oct. 1944. Lauren Bacall Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. Print. Kaplan, E. Ann. “The ‘Dark Continent’ of Film Noir: Race, Displacement, and Metaphor in Tourneur’s Cat People (1942) and Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1948).” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1998. 183–201. Print. ———, ed. Women in Film Noir. London: British Film Institute, 1978. Print. Keats, John. “La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad.” 1819. Poetry Foundation. Web. https://www.poetry​ foundation​.org/poems/44475/la-belle-dame-sans​ -merci​-a​-ballad. Kehr, Dave. “The Right ‘Move.’” Review of One False Move.

W orks C ited  

• 145

Chicago Tribune 8 May 1992. Web. https://www.chicago​ tribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1992-05-08-9202100842​ -story.html. Kipling, Rudyard. “The Vampire.” 1897. Bartleby. Web. https://www.bartleby.com/364/121.html. Klevan, Andrew. Barbara Stanwyck. London: British Film Institute, 2013. Print. Kotowski, Mariusz. Pola Negri: Hollywood’s First Femme Fatale. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2014. Print. Lindop, Samantha. Postfeminism and the Fatale Figure in Neo-Noir Cinema. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Print. Lockwood, Charles. “Priestess of Sin.” Horizon Jan. 1981: 65–69. Theda Bara Clippings Files, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. Print. Lynch, Jennifer. The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990. Macdonald, Fraser (Toronto Film Society). Program notes for A Fool There Was. Toronto Film Society. Theda Bara Clippings Files, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. Print. “Marlene Dietrich Tells the truth about Herself!” Motion Picture Classic Jan. 1932. Marlene Dietrich Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. Print. Martin, Nina K. Sexy Thrills : Undressing the Erotic Thriller. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2007. Print. McClean, Adrienne L. Bring Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity,

146 

• 

W orks C ited

and Hollywood Stardom. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2005. Print. Morrison, Patt. “A Year after the Election, There’s Still Ferocious Power in the Phrase ‘Nasty Woman.’” L.A. Times 8 Nov. 2017. Web. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/ op-ed/la-ol-patt-morrison-kate-harding-nasty-woman​ -20171108-htmlstory.html. Naremore, James. More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. Oakland: U of California P, 2008. Print. Negra, Diane. “Immigrant Stardom in Imperial America: Pola Negri and the Problem of Typology.” A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema. Ed. Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. 374–403. Print. Nochimson, Martha. “Desire under the Douglas Firs: Entering the Body O.” Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. Ed. David Lavery. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2009. 144–59. Print. Novak, Phillip. “‘It’s Like Waking’: Making Meaning in and of Christopher Nolan’s Memento.” Journal of Film and Video 71.4 (Winter 2019): 29–50. Print. O’Connor, Maureen. “The Very Uncomfortable Experience of Rewatching Election in 2016.” Cut 27 Sept. 2016. Web. https://www.thecut.com/2016/09/election-tracy-flick​ -and-hillary-clintons-2016-campaign.html. Onstad, Katrina. “‘Alias Grace’: Twenty Years in the Making but on TV at the Right Time.” New York Times 25 Oct. 2017. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/arts/ television/alias-grace-margaret-atwood-sarah-polley​ .html.

W orks C ited  

• 147

Palmer, R. Barton. “The New Sincerity of Neo-Noir.” International Film Noir. Ed. R. Barton Palmer and Homer Pettey. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014. 193–216. Print. Patmore, Conventry. “The Angel in the House.” 1854. Project Gutenberg. Web. https://www.gutenberg.org/ files/4099/4099-h/4099-h.htm. Perelman, S. J. “Cloudland Revisited: The Wickedest Woman in Larchmont.” New Yorker 10 Oct. 1952: 34–36. Theda Bara Clippings Files, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. Print. Pidduck, Julianne. “The 1990s Hollywood Fatal Femme: (Dis)Figuring Feminism, Family, Irony, Violence.” Cineaction 38 (1995): 65–72. Print. Place, Janey. “Women in Film Noir.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1998. 47–68. Print. Polley, Sarah. “Sarah Polley: The Men You Meet Making Movies.” New York Times 14 Oct. 2017. Web. https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/10/14/opinion/sunday/harvey​ -weinstein-sarah-polley.html. Rhodes, Richard. Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. New York: Vintage Books, 2012. Print. Rich, B. Ruby. “Dumb Lugs and Femmes Fatales.” Sight and Sound 5.11 (Nov. 1995): 6–11. Print. Rothfeld, Becca. “Gone Girl’s Feminist Update of the Old-­ Fashioned Femme Fatale.” New Republic 8 Oct. 2014. Web. https://newrepublic.com/article/119743/gone​-girl​ -has-offered-feminism-new-hero.

148 

• 

W orks C ited

Ryan, Jack. “Body Heat: Lies in the Dark.” Creative Screenwriting 5.6 (1998): 45–49. Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. Print. Salzberg, Ana. Beyond the Looking Glass: Narcissism and Female Stardom in Studio-Era Hollywood. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. Print. Santos, Marlisa. “Edgar Ulmer’s Homicidal Noirs: Psychosis and Possession in Strange Illusion, Strange Woman, and Bluebeard.” Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row. Ed. Gary D. Rhodes. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010. 133–44. Print. Scheibel, Will. “A Fallen Star over Mulholland Drive: Representation of the Actress.” Film Criticism 42.1 (Mar. 2018). Web. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/f/fc/​ 13761232.0042.107?view=text;rgn=main. ———. “Working It: Gene Tierney, Laura, and Wartime Beautification.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 33.2 (98) (1 Sept. 2018): 161–98. Print. Schrader, Paul. “Notes on Film Noir.” Film Comment 8.1 (1972): 8–13. Print. Scott, Grant F. “Language Strange: A Visual History of Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci.’” Studies in Romanticism 38.4 (Winter 1999): 503–35. Print. Short, Sue. Darkness Calls: A Critical Investigation of NeoNoir. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Print. Smith, Agnes. “Confessions of Theda Bara.” Photoplay June 1920: 57–58, 110–11. Theda Bara Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. Print.

W orks C ited  

• 149

Smith, Ella. Starring Miss Barbara Stanwyck. New York: Random House, 1985. Print. Smith, Imogen Sara. “A Modern Noir Marriage? Gone Girl.” Noir City Winter 2015: 57–61. Print. Snelson, Tim. Phantom Ladies: Hollywood Horror and the Home Front. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2016. Print. Stables, Kate. “The Postmodern Always Rings Twice: Constructing the Femme Fatale in 90s Cinema.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1998. 164–82. Print. Staiger, Janet. Bad Women : The Regulation of Female Sexuality in Early American Cinema. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995. Print. Stamp, Shelley. “Film Noir’s ‘Gal Producers’ and the Female Market.” Women’s History Review Dec. 2019: 1–21. Web. DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2019.1703536. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000. Print. Straayer, Chris. “Femme Fatale or Lesbian Femme: Bound in Sexual Differance.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1998. 151–63. Print. Tasker, Yvonne. “Women in Film Noir.” A Companion to Film Noir. Ed. Andrew Spicer and Helen Hanson. Chi­ chester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. 353–68. Print. Victor, Daniel. “’Nevertheless, She Persisted’: How Senate’s Silencing of Warren Became a Meme.” New York Times 8 Feb. 2017. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/08/ us/politics/elizabeth-warren-republicans-facebook​ -twitter.html.

150 

• 

W orks C ited

Waller-Bridge, Phoebe. Monologue. Saturday Night Live. NBC 5 Oct. 2019. Television. “Welcome to Hell.” Saturday Night Live. NBC 2 Dec. 2017. Television. Williams, Linda Ruth. “A Woman Scorned: The Neo-Noir Erotic Thriller as Revenge Drama.” Neo-Noir. Ed. Mark Bould, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck. New York: Columbia UP, 2009. 168–85. Print. Wingate, James. “Letter to J. L. Warner.” 11 May 1933. History of Cinema, Series 1, Hollywood and Production Code Administration. Ed. Alfred E. Green. Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. Print. Wollstonecraft, Mary. “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” and “The Wrongs of Woman, or, Maria.” Ed. Anne K. Mellor and Noelle Chao. London: Pearson Longman, 2007. Print. Woolf, Virginia. “Professions for Women.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M. H. Abrams, Jack Stillinger, and George Ford. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 1993. 1986–90. Print.

SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY

Alias Grace (2017) Baby Face (1933) The Big Heat (1953) The Blue Angel (1930) Body Heat (1981) Cat People (1942) Chinatown (1974) Crime of Passion (1957) Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) Double Indemnity (1944) Election (1999) Fire Walk with Me (1992) A Fool There Was (1915) Gilda (1946) Killing Eve (2018–) The Last Seduction (1994) Laura (1944) Leave Her to Heaven (1945) The Maltese Falcon (1941) Monster (2003) Mulholland Drive (2001) Notorious (1946) One False Move (1992) 151

152 

• 

S elected F ilmography

Out of the Past (1947) Pandora’s Box (1929) Road House (1948) Sunset Boulevard (1950) Twin Peaks (1990–91) Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) Vertigo (1958)

INDEX

Badass Women of Washington, The (web series, 2017–), 131, 139 Bara, Theda, 16, 18–19, 21–32, 46, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147–49 Barbara Stanwyck (book, 2013), 51, 145 Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992), 75–77, 84, 140 Batman Returns (Tim Burton, 1992), 112, 130 Beals, Jennifer, 82 Beaumont, Hugh, 42 Becker, Christine, 117, 139 Bedelia (Lance Comfort, 1946), 84–85 Bee, Samantha, 14–15 Behind the Green Door (Mitchell Brothers, 1972), 77 Bendix, William, 42 Bennett, Joan, 53 Berg, Peter, 22 Bergman, Ingrid, 6 Biesen, Sheri Chinen, 42–43, 139 Big Heat, The (Fritz Lang, 1953), 2, 76, 151

Alias Grace: book (1996), 107–8, 111–17, 119; miniseries (2017), 16, 91, 107, 109, 118–20, 139, 146, 151 American Dream (concept), 7, 75, 91 American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000), 120 Andrews, Dana, 85 “angel in the house” (concept), 20, 97, 123, 147 Antheil, George, 56 Atlantic, The (publication), 96, 142 Atomic Blonde (David Leitch, 2017), 130 Atwood, Margaret, 12, 107–8, 110, 112–13, 115–16, 118–22, 139, 146 Baby Face: film (Alfred E. Green, 1933), 18, 32–40, 67, 139–40, 142, 151; song (1926), 37, 50 Bacall, Lauren, 5–6, 144 Badalamenti, Angelo, 102, 104 153

154 

• 

I ndex

Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir (book, 2005), 42, 139 Black Widow (Bob Rafelson, 1987), 74 Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), 74 Blood Simple ( Joel Coen, 1984), 74 Blue Angel, The ( Josef von Sternberg, 1930), 23, 35, 142, 144, 151 Blue Dahlia, The (George Marshall, 1946), 41, 68 Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1989), 74 Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986), 74, 80, 89 Body Double (Brian De Palma, 1984), 74 Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981), 11, 22–23, 75–77, 148, 151 Body of Evidence (Uli Edel, 1993), 77 Bogart, Humphrey, 5–6 Bombshell (Alexandra Dean, 2017), 56, 139 Boozer, Jack, 76, 140 Bound (Wachowskis, 1996), 75, 149 Breen, Joseph, 40, 140 Brent, George, 36 Brick (Rian Johnson, 2005), 78–79

Broderick, Matthew, 92 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 8, 51–55, 135, 140 Brooks, Louise, 34 Brown, Jeffrey, 88–89, 140 Bryant, Aidy, 13 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series, 1997–2003), 130 Burne-Jones, Edward, 18 Burne-Jones, Philip, 18 Burr, Raymond, 69 Burton, Tim, 112 Cain, James M., 1, 22 Camera Obscura (publication), 63, 148 Captain Marvel (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, 2019), 130 Carnovsky, Morris, 62 Cat People ( Jacques Tourneur, 1942), 43–50, 137, 144, 151 Caught (Max Ophüls, 1949), 73 Chambers, Marilyn, 77 Chandler, Raymond, 1, 22 Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), 66, 88, 151 Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), 44 Cleopatra, 37 Clinton, Hillary, 48, 96–99, 142, 146 CNN (Cable News Network), 131, 139 Comer, Jodie, 16, 122–24

I ndex  

Conway, Tim, 44 Cook, Donald, 37 Cook, Pam, 8, 141 Copjec, Joan, 8, 135, 141 Cowie, Elizabeth, 8, 141 Cowper, Frank Cadogan, 20–21 Crain, Jeanne, 59 Crawford, Joan, 52, 62 Crime of Passion (Gerd Oswald, 1957), 67–68, 70–73, 141, 151 Curtis, Tony, 2 Dano, Royal, 70 Da Silva, Howard, 42 Davis, Viola, 126 Dean, Alexandra, 56, 139 de Coppet, Theodosia (Theda Bara), 28 de Ravin, Emilie, 79 Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972), 77 Dern, Laura, 103–4 Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin, 1995), 80, 82, 151 Dietrich, Marlene, 23, 34–35, 142, 145 Dishonored Lady (Robert Stevenson, 1947), 56, 61–63, 65–67, 141 Doane, Mary Ann, 8, 47, 141 Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), 9, 50, 54, 67, 70, 74, 141, 144, 151

• 155

Dowling, Doris, 41 Dracula (novel, 1897), 18, 46, 149 du Maurier, Daphne, 102 Dumbrille, Douglas, 37 Dunham, Lena, 128 Duryea, Dan, 53 Dyer, Richard, 87, 141 Ecstasy (Gustav Machatý, 1933), 55 Eisinger, Jo, 72 Election (Alexander Payne, 1999), 16, 91–96, 98, 146, 151 Emerson Browne, Porter, 18 Ethier, Alphonse, 38 Evans, Peter William, 50–51, 141 Eve (biblical figure), 5, 11 “fallen woman” (stereotype), 20 Fargo (TV series, 2014–), 124 Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987), 23, 75, 77 Feminine Mystique, The (book, 1963), 47–48, 71, 142 Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts, The (book, 2010), 9, 143 Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (book, 1991), 8, 141 Film Comment (publication), 73, 148

156 

• 

I ndex

film noir (genre), 1–12, 15–16, 22–23, 25, 41–90, 94, 99, 101, 111, 114, 128, 133–37, 139–50, 155; neo-noir, 7, 10, 12, 15, 22–23, 41, 55, 74–78, 80, 82–83, 94, 140, 145, 147, 150; postwar, 41–43, 55–56, 61, 67, 73, 117, 137; wartime, 41, 43, 45, 48–49, 73, 148 Fincher, David, 80, 84 Fiorentino, Linda, 52, 93 Fleabag (TV series, 2016–19), 12, 128 Flynn, Gillian, 84, 115, 129, 139, 142 Fool There Was, A: film (Frank Powell, 1915), 19, 21, 23–28, 145, 151; poem (1897), 18, 24 Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Volume 1 (Warner Archives DVD, 2016), 33 Ford, Glenn, 2 Foucault, Michel, 47 Fox Studios, 18, 28 Franklin, Carl, 80, 82–83 Frenyear, Mabel, 19 Friedan, Betty, 47–48, 71–72, 142 Frost, Mark, 99 Full Frontal (TV series, 2016–), 14 FX (TV network), 124 Gabler, Neil, 31, 107, 142 Gadon, Sarah, 118–20, 122

Game of Thrones (TV show, 2011–19), 13 Garber, Megan, 96–97, 142 Gates, Philippa, 9, 142 German expressionism (film movement), 43 Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946), 5, 87, 151 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 109–10, 143 Girls (TV series, 2012–17), 128 Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher, 2011), 80, 88, 140 Glaspell, Susan, 70, 108–9, 143 Gledhill, Christine, 8, 143 Goldfrap, Johnny, 28–29 Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014), 80, 83, 85–86, 142, 147, 149 Good, Meagan, 79 Gordon-Levitt, Joseph, 79 Graham, Heather, 106 Grahame, Gloria, 2, 52, 76 Grant, Cary, 6 Grisham, Therese, 117, 143, 155 Gun Crazy ( Joseph H. Lewis, 1950), 73 Haas, Lukas, 79 Hammett, Dashiell, 1, 22 Handmaid’s Tale, The (novel, 1985), 120 Hanson, Helen, 9, 133, 136, 143, 149

I ndex  

Hard Candy (David Slade, 2006), 80, 88 Hard Way, The (Vincent Sherman, 1943), 33 Harelik, Mark, 92 Harring, Laura Elena, 89 Harris, Theresa, 36 Harrison, Joan, 9 Harron, Mary, 12, 110, 120 Hayden, Sterling, 3, 68 Hays Office (censors), 33, 140 Hayward, Louis, 57 Hayworth, Rita, 5, 28, 89, 115, 135, 145 HBO (Home Box Office), 115 Headey, Lena, 13 Hedy’s Folly (book, 2012), 56, 147 Heflin, Van, 62 Hemingway, Ernest, 1, 22, 143 Hickman, Darryl, 58 Hitchcock, Alfred, 101, 123 Hodges, Runa, 19 Hulu (streaming service), 120 Hurt, William, 22, 75 Huston, John, 79 Hwang, David Henry, 85, 144 In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950), 23, 73 I Shot Andy Warhol (Mary Harron, 1996), 120 Jannings, Emil, 23 Jenkins, Patty, 80, 87, 113

• 157

Jennings, Luke, 126 Johnson, Rian, 79 Johnston, Claire, 8, 144 Jones, Leslie, 13 José, Edward, 21 “Jury of Her Peers, A” (story, 1917), 70, 108, 143 Kaplan, E. Ann, 7, 46, 67, 134, 136, 141, 143–44, 147, 149 Kasdan, Lawrence, 74 Keats, John, 11, 20, 144, 148 Kehr, Dave, 83, 144 “Killers, The” (short story), 2, 143 Killing Eve (TV series, 2018–), 12, 16, 91, 122–29, 151 Killing, The (Stanley Kubrick, 1956), 3 King, Coretta Scott, 97 Kipling, Rudyard, 18, 21–24, 145 Klevan, Andrew, 51, 54–55, 136, 145 “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (poem, 1819), 11, 20, 116, 144, 148 Ladd, Alan, 41 Lamarr, Hedy, 55–57, 59, 61, 63–64, 66, 139, 141, 147 Lancaster, Burt, 2, 68 Last Seduction, The ( John Dahl, 1994), 22–23, 52, 93–94, 113, 151

158 

• 

I ndex

Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944), 63, 85, 87, 100–101, 148, 151 Leave Her to Heaven ( John M. Stahl, 1945), 52, 57–58, 62, 85, 140, 151 Lee, Sheryl, 96, 100 “Life the Movie” (concept), 31, 107, 142 Lilith (biblical figure), 5, 11 Lindop, Samantha, 76, 79, 88, 145 Lockart, Gene 57 Loder, John, 64 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 59, 140 Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997), 80 Lundigan, William, 61 Lupino, Ida, 15, 33, 117, 135–36, 143, 155 Lynch, David, 80, 89–90, 99, 104, 106, 135, 145 Lynch, Jennifer, 104, 145 MacKinnon, Kate, 13 MacLachlan, Kyle, 99–100 Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015), 130 Mad Men (TV series, 2007–15), 130 Maltese Falcon, The ( John Huston, 1941), 1, 7, 43, 79, 86, 151 Martin, Nina, 39, 145

M. Butterfly (musical, 1988), 85, 144 McConnell, Mitch, 97 McGregor, Ewan, 124 McQueen, Steve, 126 Meaning of Life, The (Terry Jones, 1983), 60 Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), 80–81, 146 MeToo (movement), 11, 14, 120, 131 Mitchum, Robert, 2, 75 Monroe, Marilyn, 113 Monster (Patty Jenkins, 2003), 80, 87, 113, 151 Monty Python (comedy troupe), 60 Morricone, Ennio, 95 Morrison, Patt, 97, 146 Moss, Carrie-Anne, 80 Moss, Elizabeth, 130 Motion Picture Daily Review (publication), 5, 144 Motion Picture Magazine (publication), 29 Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001), 55, 80, 89–90, 148, 151 Naremore, James, 82, 146 Navajo Joe (Sergio Corbucci, 1966), 95 Negra, Diane, 30, 146 Negri, Pola, 30, 32, 145–46

I ndex  

Netflix (streaming service), 91, 108, 110, 118, 120 New Literary History (publication), 8, 140 “New Woman” (concept), 20 New York Dramatic Mirror (publication), 28 New York Evening Post (publication), 32 New York Herald Tribune (publication), 33 New York Times (publication), 120, 146–47, 149 New Yorker (publication), 24, 147 Nochimson, Martha, 106, 146 “Notes on Film Noir” (essay, 1972), 73, 148 Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946), 6, 116, 151 Novak, Kim, 101–2 Novak, Phillip, 81, 133, 146 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 131 O’Connor, Maureen, 98, 146 Odyssey, The (epic poem), 110 Oh, Sandra, 122 O’Keefe, Dennis, 64 Olin, Lena, 130 One False Move (Carl Franklin, 1992), 80, 82–83, 144, 151 O’Rawe, Catherine, 9, 143 Other, The (racial and ethnic), 46

• 159

Out of the Past ( Jacques Tourneur, 1947), 2, 6, 23, 114, 152 Page, Ellen, 88 Palmer, R. Barton, 77, 133, 135, 147, 155 Pandora’s Box (G. W. Pabst, 1929), 34, 152 Pantoliano, Joe, 75 Paramount Studios, 35 Parsons, Harriet, 9 Patmore, Coventry, 20, 147 Paxton, Bill, 82 Payne, Alexander, 16, 91–92, 96 Pelosi, Nancy, 131 Perelman, S. J., 24–26, 147 Pfeiffer, Michelle, 130 Phantom Ladies (book, 2020), 45, 149 Photoplay (publication), 27, 31, 141, 148 Pickford, Mary, 21 Pitfall (André De Toth, 1948), 15 Place, Janey, 8, 147 Polley, Sarah, 12, 110, 120–21, 146–47 Pope, Olivia, 130 Possessed (Curtis Bernhardt, 1947), 62 Powell, Dick, 15 Powerpuff Girls, The (TV series, 1998–2005), 130 pre-Code (censorship), 33, 40

160 

• 

I ndex

Preminger, Otto, 100–101 Princess Mononoke (Hayou Miyazaki, 1997), 130 “problem with no name” (concept), 48 Production Code Administration (censorship), 1, 33, 40, 75, 140, 150 “Professions for Women” (speech, 1931), 20, 150 “Put the Blame on Mame” (song), 5 Rains, Claude, 6 Randolph, Jane, 44 Reagan, Ronald, 76 Reinhardt, Max, 55 Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for her Close Up (book, 2009), 9, 51, 143, 155 Rhodes, Richard, 56, 147 RKO Radio Pictures (studio), 43 Road House ( Jean Negulesco, 1948), 15, 152 Roberts, Alice, 34 Robertson, Kimmy, 99 Romeo Is Bleeding (Peter Medak, 1993), 130 Ronan, Saoirse, 13 Sanders, George, 60 Santos, Marlisa, 60–61, 148

Saturday Night Live (TV series, 1975–), 12–13, 150 Scandal (TV series, 2012–18), 130 Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945), 53 Scheibel, Will, 63, 90, 99, 133, 143, 148, 155 Schrader, Paul, 73, 148 Scott, Grant, 116, 148 Scott, Lizabeth, 15, 52 Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, The (book, 1990), 104, 145 Selig, Al, 28–29 Sessions, Jeff, 97 Sexy Thrills (book, 2007), 39, 145 Shades of Noir (book, 1993), 8, 135, 141 Sharp Objects: miniseries (2018), 115; novel (2006), 115, 129 Shaw, Fiona, 126 Shaw, George Bernard, 10 Short, Sue, 83, 148 Siddal, Lizzie, 116 Simon, Simone, 44 Sin City (Robert Rodriguez, 2005), 88, 140 Slade, David, 80 Smith, Imogen Sara, 84, 86, 149 Smith, Kent, 44 Snelson, Tim, 45, 47–48, 149

I ndex  

Sohn, Sonja, 130 Stanwyck, Barbara, 16, 18, 32, 35–37, 50–52, 54–55, 67–68, 72, 145, 149 Stewart, James, 101 Stoker, Bram, 18, 46, 149 Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2013), 120 Strange Woman, The (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1946), 56–58, 148 Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951), 123 Strong, Cecily, 13 Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950), 73, 109–10, 152 Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957), 2, 68 Tasker, Yvonne, 77, 86, 89, 149 Temp, The (Tom Holland, 1993), 77 Tess of the D’Urbervilles (novel, 1891), 48 Theron, Charlize, 87, 112, 130 Thurber, James, 25 Tierney, Gene, 52, 58–59, 62–63, 85, 148 To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944), 5, 144 Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958), 1, 43 Trump, Donald, 14, 97–98, 131 Turner, Kathleen, 11, 22, 76–77

• 161

Twin Peaks (TV series, 1990–91), 16, 91, 96, 99–106, 142–43, 146, 152, 155 Twin Peaks: The Return (TV series, 2017), 91, 96, 100–101, 103 United Artists (studio), 65 vamp (trope), 12, 18–24, 26–28, 30–32, 46, 61, 79,143, 145 Vanity Fair (publication), 26, 139 Van Upp, Virginia, 9 Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), 101, 152 Victorian gender roles, 20, 45, 48, 137 Villaseñor, Melissa, 13 Vindication of the Rights of Women, The (book, 1792), 37, 150 von Sternberg, Josef, 35 Waller-Bridge, Phoebe, 12, 126, 128, 150 Warner Brothers (studio), 33, 40 Warren, Elizabeth, 97, 131, 149 Weinstein, Harvey, 120–21, 147 “Welcome to Hell” (Saturday Night Live skit, 2017), 13–14, 150

162 

• 

I ndex

Whirlpool (Otto Preminger, 1947), 62, 85 Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Robert Zemeckis, 1988), 112 Widows (Steve McQueen, 2018), 126 Wild West (US), 13 Wilde, Cornel, 15, 58 Williams, Cynda, 82 Wilson, Patrick, 88 Windsor, Marie, 3 Winstead, Mary Elizabeth, 124 Wire, The (TV series, 2002–8), 130 Witherspoon, Reese, 16, 92, 96

Wollstonecraft, Mary, 37, 150 Women in Film Noir (book, 1978), 7–8, 136, 141, 143–44, 147, 149 Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins, 2017), 130 Woolf, Virginia, 20, 150 World War II, 1, 41–43, 139 Wuornos, Aileen, 87–88, 113 Xena the Warrior Princess (TV series, 1995–2001), 130 “Yellow Wallpaper, The” (story, 1892), 109, 143 Zehetner, Nora, 79

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julie Grossman, a professor of English and communication and film studies at Le Moyne College, has published numerous scholarly essays on literature, film, television, gender and culture, and adaptation. She is the author of Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up (2009) and Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and ElasTEXTity (2015). She is the coauthor (with Therese Grisham) of Ida Lupino, Director: Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition (2017). She is also the coauthor (with Will Scheibel) of Twin Peaks (2020). She is the founding coeditor (with R. Barton Palmer) of the book series Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture and, with R. Barton Palmer, the co­ editor of the essay collection Adaptation in Visual Culture: Images, Texts, and Their Multiple Worlds (2017). She is the coauthor (with R. Barton Palmer) of the forthcoming monograph Hollywood Noir Performers.