Feminist, Postmodern, Violent: Postwar Film Noir Romance, and the Undoing of Truth and Subjectivity (original) (raw)

Femmes, filles, and hommes: postfeminism and the fatal(e) figure in contemporary American film noir

The femme fatale of North American film noir has attracted considerable attention from feminists, film scholars, and psychoanalytic theorists over the decades. However, despite the large body of scholarly research on the figure, a number of gaps and limitations exist in the field that have been overlooked to date. Firstly, interest in the deadly woman has, for the most part centred on the classic film noir era of the 1940s and1950s and neo-noir of the 1980s and1990s. There is a noticeable lack of scholarly attention to the femme fatale as she appears on screen in the new millennium. Secondly, there is a conspicuous absence of feminist enquiry into the figure through critical engagement with dominant postfeminist discourse. This is despite the fact that postfeminism emerged on the cultural landscape around the same time as the deadly woman regained popularity in neo-noir. The third limitation is that lethal sexuality has been aligned with the femme fatale, meaning other incarnations of the figure, namely the fille fatale and homme fatal have been almost entirely overlooked. This is particularly true of the fatal man. Though the presence of this character is recognised in noir scholarship, very little analysis of the figure has been done, especially from a socio-cultural perspective that takes account of historical and cultural factors rather than offering predominantly psychoanalytic interpretations. Similarly, while the deadly girl has received some academic attention, this is negligible in relation to the mounting popularity the field of research on the fatale figure. In the process I engage with theorists such as Angela McRobbie and Yvonne Tasker whose scholarly work is significant to understanding what constitutes postfeminism and the way it interacts with creative mediums such as film. Following this I analyse a number of key English-language cinematic texts produced mainly

Film Noir's “Femme Fatales” Hard-Boiled Women: Moving Beyond Gender Fantasies

Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2007

In her essay "Professions for Women," Virginia Woolf says "It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality" (1346). Nowhere is this insight truer than in the culture's preoccupation with the femme fatale, a figure I want to identify as a phantom, an illusion and myth that I wish not so much to kill, but to deconstruct as a category that feeds cultural gender fantasies. Feminist film critics have long recognized the ideological power of the femme fatale: first in terms of her role as a projection of male fear and desire; later, as a politically forceful symbol of unencumbered power. I want not only to extend recent emphases by critics such as Christine Gledhill, Elizabeth Cowie, and Jans Wager on how noir speaks to women but also to show the striking extent to which femme fatales-seductresses whose desires and malevolence are seemingly unmotivated-don't in fact exist in the noir movies in which so-called bad women appear. Instead film noir's lead female characters predominantly demonstrate complex psychological and social identity, resisting the spectator's habit (traced in criticism and cultural responses) of seeing past her as opaque or ambiguous (thus a screen on which to project male fears and desires) or of fixing on her as the thing, a dangerous body, to be labeled and tamed by social roles and institutions. This essay will point to the dearth of film noir's actual femmes fatales, evil women whose raison d'être is to murder and deceive, focusing on films in which the femme fatale is presented in terms of exigency. That is, I want to call attention to the many female characters in original-cycle noir who are shown to be limited by, even trapped in, social worlds presented as psychotically gendered. Exigency for most so-called femme fatales moves these women to express-in aggressive physical and verbal gestures-an insistence on independence, which is then misread as the mark of the femme fatale. Readings of and references to the femme fatale miss the extent to which her role depends on the theme of female independence, often misconceiving her motives and serving mainly to confound our understanding of the gender fantasies that surround these so-called bad women. Such myths are propelled by the culture now both by film criticism and popular culture. Indeed, critics have settled in their discussion of women in noir on the few female characters who conform to the notion of the quintessential femme fatale (as she is represented by Phyllis Dietrichson [Double Indemnity], Kathie Moffett [Out of the Past], and Brigid O'Shaughnessy [The Maltese Falcon]), who then define the category. This has two significant consequences: first, these few really bad women draw all of the attention; second the construction of a false binary opposition between femme fatales and other

Femme Fatale as Powerful Mother: Psychoanalytic Theory of Cinematic Pleasure and Film Noir

This essay will show that Mulvey's model does produce a valid critique of the phallocentric bias of the industry, but makes inadequate allowances for films that test the bounds of genre. To do this I will apply the work of Laura Mulvey and Gaylun Studlar to the cycle of movies that have been dubbed "Film noir" and show that, using the latter, films like This Gun for Hire (1942) offer challenges to patriarchy, despite the hegemony of traditionally sexist film form.

Fatal Woman, Revisited: Understanding Female Stereotypes in Film Noir

2015

Danielle LaRae Barnes-Smith: Fatal Woman, Revisited: Understanding Female Stereotypes in Film Noir Film noir stereotypes female characters through the archetype of the femme fatale: the fatal woman or the fatal wife. However, critics are currently reexamining the femme fatale. For example, in the second paragraph of Film Noir's Progressive Portrayal of Women, Stephanie Blaser and John Blaser write "even when [film noir] depicts women as dangerous and worthy of destruction, [it] also shows that women are confined by the roles traditionally open to them." With Blaser and Blaser's understanding of the double nature of the femme fatale in mind, can one say that the femme fatale generates fear of feminism? Can one read her as a martyr and a heroine? I will examine facets of the femme fatale in modern and classic iterations, while contextualizing women's historical roles in society. Historically, the femme fatale originated as a response to World War II. As Gary Morris notes in the last paragraph of "High Gallows: Revisiting Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past," "[she] embodies postwar fears that women, having contributed mightily to the war effort and moved into 'men's work,' might abandon the domestic sphere entirely... and even the most powerful men around her can't comprehend or control the violent forces she represents." Additionally, the essay will focus on Phyllis in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, Kathie in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, and Evelyn in Roman Polanski's Chinatown. To include a literary dimension, I will also provide a close reading of Velma in Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler. To comprehend the femme fatale and her relationship to women's roles in Western society, these women must be placed in a broader, historical spectrum. Transhistorical examination of the femme fatale will be achieved by examining one of the most prominent characters in Judeo-Christian society, Eve. The close reading of this proto-femme fatale will specifically examine her role in Genesis and Milton's Paradise Lost. Closely reading the femme fatale is important because it contextualizes modern women's roles, both locally and globally, and aids in the drive towards gender equality.

Out of the Past: Film Noir, Structure and Temporality

This paper contends that, given the thoroughgoing criticism of Lacan and despite the current turn towards philosophy in film studies, psychoanalytic theory must not be abandoned. To this end, I propose a new reading of the critical category of film noir in terms of Lacan’s point de capiton and his theorisation of the retroactive construction of meaning. This is not a regression to the investigations of film, language and psychoanalysis articulated in the 1970s (Metz, Screen) but a return to the site of this encounter to plot a new trajectory for psychoanalytic enquiry into the cinema. While the intersection of psychoanalysis and noir is of course well established, the major interventions (Kaplan, Krutnik) have been oriented towards questions of gender. This leaves unexplored the possibility of noir’s relation to Lacan’s theory of signification presented Seminar III, ‘Instance of the Letter’ and ‘Subversion of the Subject’. It is a truism of film criticism that noir is a retroactive category. However, this function is insufficiently understood in noir historiography (Naremore), which gives little consideration to the theoretical implications of this characterisation. This paper investigates both the wealth of writing on noir as well as various film noir tropes to understand this conception of noir as retroactively constituted. The critical history of noir and the films themselves indicate a structure, predicated on the retroactive production of meaning, which is irresistibly suggestive of Lacanian theory. Reading noir with Lacan, I suggest that this retroactive “noir temporality” is the temporality of the Symbolic order. As such, this paper explores the function of the signifier “noir” as a point de capiton in film criticism, enabling the analysis of a certain type of 1940s Hollywood film; and how a noir film such as Double Indemnity (1944) is concerned with the retroactive production of knowledge through narrative structure.

Why Film Noir? Hollywood, Adaptation, and Women's Writing in the 1940s and 50s

Adaptation: the Journal of Literature on Screen Vol 4. No 1.

Between the elite intellectual culture of high modernist literary experimentation and the low culture of 'pulp' made up of the lurid-covered dime store novels of westerns, crime, romance, sensationalist, and detective stories, the critically derided American 'middlebrow' was significantly composed of female authors of commercial popular fiction who wrote scores of best-sellers that were adapted into major Hollywood films. Elizabeth Janeway's 1945 novel Daisy Kenyon: An Historical Novel of 1940-42 illustrates the historical effacement of women writers from histories of Hollywood adaptations, the article addresses ways in which the conceptual constrictions of the term 'film noir' have operated to obscure a hidden history of women-authored writing in relation to Hollywood adaptations of the late 1940s/1950s. The article argues for a revaluation of film noir as the meta-genre accounting for crime film in the period; it points to the existence of corpus of women writers such as Vera Caspary, Evelyn Piper, Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, Hannah Lees, and Mary Collins in the margins of the middlebrow as well as a huge number of forgotten women writers circulated through the pulp fiction circuits whose widely read commercial fiction explored the boundaries of normative patriarchal ideology, exploiting imaginative scenarios of crime to disrupt heterosexual relations from the point of view of women as writers, characters, and readers. In this, women-authored popular fiction in general (and women's crime fiction in particular) during the 1940s and 1950s is uniquely positioned to advance feminist understanding through distanciating exposures of the period's social, sexual, familial, and emotional constraint on women.