Power Through Sexuality: The Femme Fatale

Film Noir is a French term that is literally translated as black cinema. It refers to a kind of urban American film genre that sprang up during World War II. It emphasized a fatalistic, despairing universe where there is no escape from mean streets, loneliness, and death. Stylistically, film noir emphasized low-key and high-contrast lighting, complex compositions, and a strong sense of dread and paranoia. The Femme Fatale is a staple of this genre. She emphasized the fatalistic universe. She was an icon to the men involved with her. She used this elevated status to control the men who worshiped her. She exudes power through how she looks and in how she talks. Also, in how she is framed within the mies-en-scene. In this paper I will be applying feminist film theory to examine how strong, independent women must rely on their sexuality to achieve power, but in achieving this power, it causes the down fall of the male protagonist. I will also be discussing how the male film noir protagonist fetishizes the Femme Fatale to hide his self destructive nature and how he, through voice over (another film noir staple), places blame on the Femme Fatale for his down fall. The film I will be focussing on is Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944). This film has a very strong example of the Femme Fatale and is highly regarded as the quintessential film noir. But, first, I will discuss film noir's background.

"To a significant extent, film noir is a man's world"; states Bruce Crowther (115). Most film noir protagonists are men. The voice-over narration is a man's. Most film noir films have their origins in the literary world. Screenplays were adapted from novels written by tough-guy writers, such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. These novels were about hard-boiled heroes, such as Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe. These novels excluded women from principle roles. The dominance of men on the production side of the motion picture industry, such as studio bosses, producers, art directors, cinematographers, and directors, weighed against women. "The subordination of women in film noir was exacerbated by an unmistakable measure of misogyny, especially noticeable in the novels of Cornell Woolrich, and less overtly, in those of Raymond Chandler" (Crowther 115).

As a result of Hollywood's limited vision, women in film noir have tended to fall into two broad categories. The first was the predictable stereotype of the home loving, girl next door that retained a dog-like devotion to the protagonist despite his often-perverse alienation. The second was startlingly different to the apple pie baking types. The advent of film noir brought this new breed of woman to the foreground. She was calculating, manipulative, cruel, and she used her sexual attractions blatantly and without regard for the polite conventions of the past. This woman knew what she wanted and she didn't care what she did to get it. "She understood that while society dealt her a low hand from a stacked deck, she did have an ace up her sleeve, her body" (Crowther 115). The Femme Fatale was born.

"In the noir thriller, women often appear as victims of circumstance who frustrate male desire" (Palmer 139). Barbara Stanwyck played "Phyllis Dietrichson." Fred MacMurry was "Walter Neff." Billy Wilder was the director and Raymond Chandler co-wrote the screenplay. The film was Double Indemnity, and it is considered the best of the genre. The film begins as Walter Neff enters a building and heads to his office. Inside, he collapses into his chair. We see he has been shot. He gets the dictation machine and begins to recount the events, leading up to the present, for his boss and friend, Burton Keys (Edward G. Robinson). Neff starts his confession, but, R. Barton Palmer disagrees; "... it is not a confession... he intends to simply set the record straight, to let Keys... know what really happened in the apparently accidental death of a Mr. Dietrichson, one of the company's insured" (43). We fade out on Neff's line; "Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money and for a woman. I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. Pretty, isn't it?" Neff reveals that the scheme was formulated after an accident. Dropping by a client's house to renew an auto policy, (he was an insurance salesman) Neff was struck by the coquettish beauty of Phyllis, the client's wife.

The introduction of the Femme Fatale is very important to a director. They have to create the perfect mies-en-scene for her. The audience must feel for her what the protagonist feels for her. The fist images we get of Phyllis are her coolly emerging from a room on the second floor. She has been sunbathing and is wearing nothing but a bath towel. She stands on the second floor, displaying herself unabashedly, looking down on Neff and the audience. She is lit like an angel in heaven. All this exudes superiority. She is better than Neff, better than the rest of us and she knows it.

Phyllis and Neff chitchat for a few seconds. Neff makes some comments about how Phyllis is dressed that she doesn't respond to and excuses herself to put on something more comfortable. Neff goes in the living room and studies the objects around the room while waiting. The main hall where Neff was standing a few seconds ago was brightly lit but this room has a darker look to it, like something sinister is going to happen. Phyllis reappears but we only see her legs. Then we focus in on what Neff sees, specifically, her ankle chain. Not even five minutes of screen time and already Phyllis is being fetishized. This woman is turned into an object by Neff and by the male gaze of the camera. And she wants it to end. But the only way she can do it is by using her body. Phyllis decides to get Neff to help her kill her husband and collect on an insurance policy. She uses the only valuable thing she has in a film noir world, sex. Neff, of course, agrees to help her.

The scene when Neff and Phyllis get her husband to sign on the dotted line is a perfect example of how powerful Phyllis is. Billy Wilder places her on the arm of a chair with her foot resting on the couch her husband and Neff are sitting on. Neff is a taller man than the husband so other than an end table across from him the husband is the smallest thing in the room. Both of his impeding killers are all ready hovering over the body and the husband doesn't even know it. Yet, still Phyllis is staring down, from her placement within the shot, on Neff as he looks back to her. He is looking to her for reassurance in what they are doing and are going to do. He gets it through her looks. She is controlling the events of his life and he accepts this. And probably enjoys it, although we couldn't tell that from the voice-over narration.

As I have stated, the voice-over narration is used to place blame on the Femme Fatale. Neff does it by stating he killed for money and a woman. But the reason why the male protagonist shifts the blame is very interesting. According to Karen Hollinger, what the "confessing male narrators of these films search for in their past experiences or psychological condition is a revelation that involves the truth, not so much about masculinity but rather about femininity," Hollinger continues; "these films seem to be concerned with ascertaining 'what the woman wants,' finding the essential nature of female difference, which is often symbolized in female sexuality. Femininity thus becomes the ultimate subject of the films discourse" (244). Voice-over creates a sort of fragmenting effect by establishing a fight for narrative power as the narrator struggles to gain control of the narrative events recounted. This battle between the narrator and the film's flashback visuals leads to an extreme tension between word and image. "It has been argued that voice-over narration in film noir implicates the spectator completely in the perspective of the film's male narrator and leads this implicated spectator to join with the narrator in his condemnation of the film's major female character, the dangerous and often deadly femme fatale" (Hollinger 245). By having voice-over in a film noir we are getting the one sided recollection of a condemned man, who, has an agenda of casting a dark shadow over the Femme Fatale; to shift the blame. Mary Ann Doane sees the "noir voice-over as embedding the figure of the femme fatale in the narrator's metadiegetic level framing her speech within an overpowering masculine discourse in order to withhold from her access to narration and grant the male narrator control of both her words and her image" (54-55).

While one can point to those characteristics of film noir first person voice-over as a attempt to subject the female image to male narrational power, this power is not nearly as complete as Donane suggests. As a number of feminist critics have suggested, women in classical Hollywood films have been positioned as objects of spectacle, fixed and held by the male gaze. (Which is why Phyllis feels trapped, she is the subject of a gaze she cannot control, so, she will control who is gazing at her). The Femme Fatale is clearly yet another female object of spectacle, defined by her dangerous, yet desirable sexual presence, but she is an object with a difference. Female characters in classical Hollywood films are traditionally the apple-pie baking-type I have already mentioned. They were portrayed as weak, ineffectual figures safely placed in the fixed female roles of wives, daughters, and mothers. They were also in desperate need of a man's affection or protection. The film noir released the female image from these fixed roles and granted it overwhelming visual power. The iconography of the Femme Fatale grants these beautiful, provocative women visual primacy through the mies-en-scene.

Phyllis has the freedom of movement and visual dominance. She controls those around her. Because of these two things, she is deemed dangerous. Narratively, this dangerous, evil woman is dammed and ultimately punished, but stylistically she exhibits such an extremely powerful visual presence that the conventional narrative is disoriented and the image of the erotic, strong, unrepressed woman dominates the text, even in the face of repression. The male voice-over, while it may attempt to control the female image, serves instead to pit the Femme Fatale's dominant visual presence against the male voice. And that is a battle the Femme Fatale cannot win because in film noir the voice-over is gospel.

Phyllis Dietrichson wanted to be free. Free of the male gaze and free of the male voice-over. But because of how the Femme Fatale is pitted against the male gaze/voice-over, they are structured as scenes of battle between conflicting aspects of their social milieux, so to speak. The embattled narrational and resulting ideological structure that the voice-over technique and the unresolved issue of female sexual difference create within the text points to the conflicted nature of film noir. Specifically in regard to their presentation of women, they strongly represent through their narrational structure the inability of a patriarchal society not only to answer the question of "what the woman wants," but to understand it. Walter Neff tried to understand it but didn't, couldn't. Phyllis was afraid and wanted to hide from the gaze. Instead she was trapped by it, as well as Neff's voice-over blaming her for his own greed, condemning her to die. No happy ending for Phyllis, she dies at Neff's hands, showing her true, scared emotions. Could she have lived if she accepted her place in the male gaze and didn't rebel against? I think so, but some objects were never meant to be locked in a cage. The femme Fatale is one of them.