Blog Response I: Film Noir, the Femme Fatale and "Double Indemnity"

Film noir and the femme fatale

After World War II, many American film critics were enamored with European film and showed a somewhat snobby derision for movies coming out of the American studio system. But at the same time, American movies were flooding Europe, much of which had been cut off from pop culture in America during the war. In France in particular, there was an explosion of goodwill toward the U.S., who was seen as the main architect of France's liberation from Nazi occupation in 1944. Part and parcel of this was a growth of interest in American movies made during the war and after.

As they enthusiastically watched these movies with relatively fresh eyes, French film critics began detecting a dark current in certain American films. Many of these films were so-called 'B movies': movies produced by the B units that studios used for producing low-budget films designed to be filler for the second halves of double features. And yet, these critics saw them as representing the best of American cinema - a new kind of quintessentially modern film they called film noir ('black film').

Films noirs were typically crime movies - a genre that had existed for some time, and included the immensely popular gangster films of the 30s. But these crime films were different: the heroes and heroines of these films weren't just victims of crime, lust, and betrayal; they perpetrated it. Because of the regime of self-censorship defined in the famous Hollywood Production Code, they were inevitably punished for their misdeeds at the end. However, it was clear that they were the characters that the audience were meant to identify with rather than hate. They weren't just cardboard cutout figures of moral corruption. They were alienated and desperate in ways that seemed to reflect post-war disillusion - especially of the sort that many felt in the explosive, chaotic expansion of big cities that occurred after the war.

 Films noirs also had a distinctive look. They typically used lighting that was chiaroscuro - meaning that their cinematography emphasized stark contrasts between light and darkness. The most iconic noir image is, for example, a character standing in a dark room and looking out a pair of blinds through which light streams in broken bands. These films also abundantly used so-called 'dutch angles' - strange camera angles that created a sense of disorientation. Both of these techniques had a lot to do with the severe budget constraints under which these films were made: they allowed filmmakers to hide and distract away from the cheap sets and costumes. But for many viewers, they become icons for the broken, disorienting worlds that the characters inhabited.

Lastly, films noirs tended to work with a distinctive set of character archetypes. The male heroes tended to be tough, stoic, and sarcastic; they wore fedoras and plain working-class suits; they chain smoked and drank whiskey in abundance. They were often private detectives - figures of law enforcement, but working at the fringes. The other men in the film were usually seemingly respectable authority figures - police, businessmen, doctors; but they were, more often than not, corrupt, inept, malicious, or even all of these things at once.

Our main concern in this course, though, will be the figure of the femme fatale. As the name indicates, she's a 'fatal woman', who in her archetypal form leads the hero to his destruction. She oozes sexuality. But her sexuality is at the same time transgressive and mysterious. Often, she is working-class and a so-called 'tramp': she wears explicitly sensual clothing and heavy makeup; she smokes and drinks like a man (as Americans would have thought of it at the time); she speaks as if her every word were a sexual innuendo. But despite exhibiting all the signs of 'looseness', she is strangely elusive. The hero desperately wants her, but cannot ever manage to possess her. In the end, either through accident or manipulation, she grips him with such obsessive desire that they both plummet to their downfall.

The legacy of the femme fatale

Many of the young French film critics who fell in love with American movies after WWII became filmmakers themselves. In particular, a group of them wrote for the film journal Cahiers du Cinema, and then became directors, forming the foundation for the French New Wave of cinema. In their work, they often explored the tropes and themes of film noir.

For example, there's the iconic figure of the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo in many of the films of Jean-Luc Godard - a variation on the hardboiled noir hero:

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Godard's "Breathless" (1960)

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Godard's "Breathless" (1960)

But it wasn't just in Europe that the films noirs of the 40s and 50s made their mark. Once American critics and filmmakers, largely under the initial influence of the New Wave, fell in love with film noir, they began exploring its conventions, including the figure of the femme fatale. American filmmakers, though, didn't just recycle the tropes of film noir - they developed variations that referenced but also re-interpreted, critiqued, and re-contextualized those tropes. Such films became known as 'neo-noir'.

Here are just a few of the most notable examples of neo-noir movies that, in particular, focus on the figure of the femme fatale:

Blade Runner (1982): In Ridley Scott's film, he combines film noir with science fiction in order to heighten the theme of self-alienation in ways that were impossible in the mostly realistic settings of classic films noirs. In Scott's future world, genetically engineered androids known as replicants, created by the massive Tyrell Corporation, are used for a variety of off-world tasks (e.g., as manual laborers and sex workers). However, though they are programmed to accept slavery and are constructed to have unusually short life-spans. they are viewed as inherently dangerous, and so replicants are forbidden on Earth. 

Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckard, a retired member of the blade runners - a police force tasked with executing replicants who escape their masters and come to Earth. Deckard is compelled back onto the force, and assigned to execute three such replicants who are bent on extending their lives and holding the powerful head of Tyrell Corp., Eldon Tyrell, accountable for his creation.

Deckard is a classic noir hero: stoic, tough, and lonely. And along the way, he meets his femme fatale: Rachael, assistant to Tyrell. Rachael, Tyrell tells him, is a replicant so perfectly constructed that she doesn't even know that she's a replicant. Like a classic femme fatale, she is sexy and mysterious, but in a twist on the classic figure, her sexuality is made uncanny by the fact that she is an artificial construct; and, the great mystery she harbors is whether she is simply a machine, or rather a full-blooded person with a subjectivity all her own.

Ridley Scott self-consciously evokes the classic 40s femme fatale
with the character of Rachael, played by Sean Young.

As Deckard hunts down his prey, he falls in love with Rachael, and, in another twist on the classic noir story, she leads Deckard to his destruction by depriving him of his humanity: through understanding her, he comes to understand that he too is a replicant.

Deckard is led to recognize himself in Rachael's self-alienation.

The Last Seduction (1994): This film critiques the femme fatale precisely by taking it to a shocking extreme: Linda Fiorentino's character of Bridget. In the beginning of the film, Bridget is set up as a victim - an abused wife. Her husband Clay sells pharmaceutical-grade cocaine to raise $700,000 to pay off a loan shark. But after an argument in which he slaps Bridget violently, she runs off with his money. 

Linda Fiorentino as the sociopathic femme fatale, Bridget

While hiding out in small-town New York, she meets Mike, who tries to pick up on her with confident macho bravado. But she throws him off-balance and sabotages his efforts - not, however, by resisting his advances, but rather by aggressively seducing him and then using him for sexual gratification.

Bridget shocks Mike and throws off his attempts at flirtation by
thrusting her hand in his pants to find out the size of his penis.

Eventually, she draws Mike into a plot to kill cheating husbands for their wives. Her husband Clay, pursued by loan sharks intent on making him pay off his debts, begins to track her down. Mike is wrapped around Bridget's finger, and she manipulates him into agreeing to kill Clay, whom she's told Mike they've been hired to kill by his vengeful wife. At the end, Mike catches on to the deception, and Bridget must kill Clay herself. In the climax, she manipulates Mike into raping her and taking responsibility for the murder, recording the whole thing and then reporting Mike to the police. He is taken into custody and arrested for rape and murder, and Bridget escapes with the money and her freedom intact.

Fight Club (1999): David Fincher's early masterpiece follows an unnamed protagonist played by Ed Norton: an alienated office worker who suffers from chronic insomnia. His sleeplessness can only be treated, he finds, by incessant visits to any and every support group he can find - most of which are for ailments he can only pretend to have. Eventually, he befriends a strange man he meets on a plane - Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt) - after his apartment is decimated in a seemingly freak explosion. Durden is a budding demagogue who is slowly building a secret army of men through a network of underground fight clubs; the unnamed protagonist is drawn in, and, while skeptical, participates in Durden's plans to use his army to wreak havoc throughout the social fabric.

Tyler Durden and the protagonist

Fight Club's version of the femme fatale is found in Marla Singer, a woman whom the protagonist meets while frequenting support groups. Marla is dysfunctional and exudes a dark sexuality, and the protagonist loathes her both for what she is and for what in himself she reflects. He attempts to make arrangements so that he never has to see her again. Tyler Durden, however, has other plans. He beds Marla over and over again in a seemingly endless cycle, while the protagonist becomes more and more exasperated - both with his inability to rid himself of Marla, and with Durden's sociopathic plots. 

Helena Bonham-Carter channels the classic femme fatale as Marla Singer

But in a now classic reversal of the femme fatale, Marla isn't, in the end, a femme fatale at all. Rather, the protagonist is an homme fatale: he is Tyler Durden, operating under the delusion that Durden is another man. As Durden, he has seduced Marla, and as the protagonist, he has rejected her - over and over again. And it's only at the end, when he reintegrates with Durden and his/Durden's ultimate plan - the destruction of the country's banking system - comes to fruition that he and Marla are finally, truly united.

Marla and the protagonist hold hands as the banking towers
are demolished by Tyler Durden's many minions

The Works of David Lynch:

The contemporary director who has most influentially re-appropriated and re-interpreted the conventions of film noir is David Lynch. In his films, his interest in surrealism as a young painter and his lifelong love of film noirs and post-WWII Americana converged to create some of the most distinctive American films of the 80s through the early 2000s. The femme fatale archetype shows up in many variations in his work (including Lost Highway, which we will be watching). However, a couple examples will suffice.

Blue Velvet (1986): Arguably the greatest American film of the 80s, Blue Velvet is often credited with giving birth to the flood of dark, transgressive independent American films that came after it. In Lumberton - a city that embodies a strange version of the American post-WWII ideal of small-town life - a young man named Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) finds a severed ear in a field.

The severed ear - molding, decayed, and crawling with ants

His desire to investigate this discovery leads Jeffrey and his new sweetheart - the innocent young Sandy (Laura Dern) - into the twisted, violent underworld of Lumberton. The figure of the femme fatale is embodied by the character of Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). Jeffrey finds Dorothy's erotic allure irresistable, and the mystery of her connection to the severed ear leads him to go see her sing at a local club, and eventually to sneak into her apartment to observe her in secret.

Isabella Rossellini projects both brokenness and intense sexuality as Dorothy singing the song "Blue Velvet"

In one of the most striking scenes of 1980s film - and another reversal of the femme fatale trope - Jeffrey witnesses a scene of disturbing brutality from Dorothy's closet. The ear belongs to Dorothy's husband, who has been kidnapped and tortured by the sadistic Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) in order to coerce her into repeatedly re-enacting a fantasy scene of mother-rape with him.

Jeffrey watches in horror as Frank brutalizes Dorothy

Dorothy discovers Jeffrey in her closet, and in her traumatized delirium, seduces him at knife-point. In this way, she both takes a kind of transferred revenge for Frank's assaults, and satisfies Jeffrey's hidden desires. And so, she becomes the femme fatale - but the femme fatale as cruelly victimized even in her own aggression. She leads Jeffrey, not to his destruction, but to the destruction of his innocence - or more accurately, the realization that he was never innocent to begin with. Eventually, Jeffrey is able to take Frank down, but only after Dorothy's attempts to both protect him and be protected by him leads Jeffrey himself to become one of Frank's victims.

Dorothy tries to distract Frank from harming Jeffrey by awakening
and then submitting to Frank's psychotic fantasy 

At the end of the film, Jeffrey, Sandy, and Dorothy slip back into the idyllic world of Lumberton as if the horrors they underwent never happened. But a stain on the illusion of American suburban perfection remains: a dead insect in the mouth of an obviously artificial robin on their windowsill.

The mechanical robin

Mulholland Drive (2001): Mulholland Drive began as a series pilot for the ABC network in the U.S. When the network rejected the pilot, David Lynch scraped together the funding to shoot additional footage in order to re-conceive it as a feature film.

Despite its reputation for being a maddeningly confusing film, the plot of Mulholland Drive is actually quite simple. A fresh, naive young actress named Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts) moves to L.A. to be 'discovered'. She meets another aspiring actress, Camilla Rhodes (Laura Harring) - the femme fatale whose mixture of raw sexuality and manipulative coldness consumes Diane and leads her to destruction. Diane falls hopelessly, obsessively in love with Camilla. They become friends, and though they have an intermittent sexual relationship, Camilla eventually tells Diane that they must break off the liaison and maintain a platonic friendship. Meanwhile, while Diane's acting career stagnates, Camilla is cast in the leading role of a film directed by one of Hollywood's top directors, Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux). Eventually, Kesher falls for Camilla, and they get engaged to be married. Heartbroken and filled with jealous rage, Diane hires a hitman to murder Camilla. Once the deed is done, she falls into despair and shoots herself in the head.

Diane (Naomi Watts, left) is broken with desperation by the betrayals of Camilla (Laura Harring, right)

What makes Mulholland Drive so difficult on the viewer is that this relatively straightforward plot is left to the final third of the film. For the first two thirds, we aren't presented with this plot at all, but rather with a fantasy concocted by Diane in her final moments before death; and, we aren't told it's a fantasy - something that we can only pick up after watching the final moments of the movie. 

In this fantasy, Diane isn't Diane, but Betty Elms (also played by Naomi Watts). Betty also arrives in L.A. to become an actress. But instead of languishing in failure, she is instantly hailed as a brilliant actress.

Betty stuns the room with a brilliant audition

In the fantasy, Betty also meets Camilla. However, instead of being Camilla Rhodes, she is a woman with no name. At the beginning of the film, the nameless woman (also played by Laura Harring) sits in a limousine on the famed Mulholland Drive. Just as she is about to be murdered at the orders of some shady criminal organization, the limo is demolished violently by a speeding pair of cars, and the nameless woman staggers down through the slopes of the Hollywood Hills, struck with amnesia. She crawls into a random apartment, and is there found by Betty. At first she claims her name is Rita, but quickly, she confesses to Betty her amnesia, and they begin to investigate her lost identity.

Betty (Naomi Watts, left) and Rita (Laura Harring, right) try to
discover the mystery of Rita's identity and the cause of her amnesia

Through the fantasy of Betty and Rita, Diane tries to have what in real life she could not: an instant chance at stardom; but also total possession of Camilla - who, as the amnesiac Rita, is cut off from the rest of the world and relies entirely on her. But even in this fantasy, Diane can't hold on to any of it. She walks away from her chance at stardom, and gets sucked into the mystery of Rita. In another way - through the fantasy figure of Rita - Camilla once again takes hold of her and becomes the femme fatale that leads her to her downfall. In one of the most surreal sequences in the film, Rita leads Betty to a mysterious club in the a dark corner of downtown L.A. (Club Silencio), where Rita is convinced the mystery of her identity will be solved. There, the stage show reveals that everything up to this point is nothing more than an illusion. Rita's identity as a fantasy-construction is indeed revealed, and Diane is forced to confront her fantasy as such. In the final moments of the film, Diane is haunted by the mocking specters of that fantasy as she slips away into death.

Betty and Rita break down in tears as the fantasy is exposed

Double Indemnity

This, along with the first two essays I assigned, is your crash course on film noir, neo-noir film, and the figure of the femme fatale. Before we explore the four noir-influenced films that will make up the rest of the course, though, you also need to watch the classic noir version of the femme fatale in action: in Double Indemnity. 

After reading the two essays and watching the film, please look at the comments below to find your question assignments. Remember, your responses are due by midnight on Wednesday, 9/10 - the very end of Chuseok weekend.