The Femme Fatale's Strange Role in Noir

It's one of the staples of the last century of cinematic story-telling that the guy gets the girl in the end — in fact it's more than a staple, it's the basic story of virtually every Hollywood production since the days when movies took over from vaudeville as the dominant mode of public entertainment.

I can't help but watch the femme fatale movies of the 1940s and 1950s and reflect that it's one of the femme fatale's most common catastrophes that she never achieves a romantic coupling.  She never gets the guy — but why?

In the film noir cycle, while you may see the femme fatale driving the action in many films, and consider this as good thing as it raises the possibility of gender-equal roles, it turns out that the ultimate options for the femme fatale were very few — she either dies in the end, or is reformed, or sometimes turns out not to be a femme fatale at all.

Linda Darnell in FALLEN ANGEL (image links to Linda Darnell at WIKIPEDIA)

As a character type, the femme fatale, as typified by Linda Darnell in Fallen Angel (1945), or by Ann Savage in Detour (1945), is not to be believed from the start.  

Firstly, everything she says and does is duplicitous, and typcially she will share in a murder with a male lead before the end of the film, suggesting that there can never be any romantic love for her, because instead of the genders complementing each other as is more common in film narrative, her attraction to the male character, and his to her, ensures a kind of mutual destruction.

Ann Savage in DETOUR (image links to Ann Savage at WIKIPEDIA)

The femme fatale has been of interest to film academics and feminists alike foir a long time now because of the whole mess of contradictions, statements and suggestions which film noir makes about her. 

While there is a lot to say, here are three observations for today, which ring true and general in the film noir cycle of the 1940s and 1950s:

• While she is put of by the wimpishness of the male character, the male character is also put off by her.  Even though he is initally attracted to her, he can never follow through, generally because of his guilty conscience, something she doesn't suffer from.
• The male character in many film noirs has to choose between the femme fatale or whether to settle with a much more conventionally placed woman, who will be styled as a good wife, or even a good friend.
• Oddly enough, although I have said that it is often a film noir femme fatale that drives the action, the moral superiority remains with the male character, a fact which somehow licenses his voiceover.  You will recall, that while the male character is often portrayed as a wimp, he still often delivers a confessional voiceover throughout the picture.

Whether film noir is helpful for womens' equality is therefore not clear.  Certainly gender roles are undermined, and there may even be more fluidity to sexual configurations in noir — but at the same time, the sharp contrast between femme fatale and feminine good girl, doesn't open that many doors to equality at the end of the day.