hello my lovely little serpents, welcome back. in
light of recent events... paramount copyrighting my video and our ensuing power struggle...
i thought we could take it back once again to hollywood's yesteryear, because clearly i
experience a lot of luck in that area of interest. just so everyone has some idea of
what this figure is: the femme fatale, as defined by oxford dictionary, is "an attractive
and seductive woman, especially one who is likely to cause distress or disaster to a man who
becomes involved with her." if you've taken any gender studies class, you've probably heard a
lot of bad things about this character trope–big bad anti-feminist things that second wave
feminists in particular have said that she represents. and i'm here today to tell
you that they're wrong, or well, kind of. the femme fatale is mostly attributed to 40s and
50s classic film noir films, but you know 99% of western media has some roots in
judaeo-christian and greek mythology, and so even though i'm focusing on mainly classic
noir films today, it's important to look at her origins. the setup that led to her contemporary
emergence, if you will. so, many people consider the first femme fatale to be eve. yes, THE eve
from the story of adam and eve. in the book of genesis, it is said that god told adam and eve
they could eat whatever they wanted except for the forbidden fruit on the tree of knowledge in
the garden of eden. of course there is a nasty little serpent that we kind of don't put enough
blame on but yes, it tempts eve to pick the fruit. she then tempts adam to eat the fruit with her
in order to gain illicit knowledge, and thus, lures him and the rest of humankind to their
spiritual deaths. and so because of this action, in much of the literature, eve is analyzed
as being the first archetypal femme fatale. good for her. similarly in greek mythology, there are tons of
femme fatale figures. one of the most popular ones is probably medusa. her power that she can turn
men into stone by looking at them ties in themes of feminine appearances and its destructive
power. and if you believe freud (boo) then she also represents masculine shame because
her snake hair resembles phalluses and in the myth when perseus beheads her, it's like symbolic
castration or something... but we're not going to get into that because freud talks out of his ass,
and i cannot stand that fraudulent sexist man. oh brother this guy stinks! according to kiki karoglou, the associate curator
in the met's department of greek and roman art, "beauty, like monstrosity, enthralls, and female
beauty in particular was perceived to be both enchanting and dangerous, or even fatal."
this has proven even more so with lucian's version. in his retelling of the story, it was not
medusa's monstrous face that turned men to stone, but her beauty that "stunned its beholders
and made them speechless." so as we can see, the connection between beauty sexuality and male
death has been tied to woman characters for a very long time now. however despite these previous
incarnations of dangerous seductive women, i would say that the first wave of the femme fatale as a
type of character didn't come about until the late 1800s. in "the romantic agony," mario praz says:
"during the first stage of romanticism up till about the middle of the 19th century, we meet with
several fatal women in literature, but there is no established type of fatal woman in the way that
there is an established byronic hero." and you may be wondering why that is? well multiple scholars
have suggested that male anxieties around rising lower classes, foreign invasion, and feminism
have all influenced 19th century depictions of the femme fatale. also something very interesting:
one of the reasons for anxiety around feminism is because in the victorian era, there was also a
rise in female crime. female violence was viewed as something very unnatural. like women are
not supposed to be like that, so if a woman is like that, it means something is extremely
wrong... whereas if a male is violent, it's wrong, but it's expected. people at the time understood
that men could get aggressive, they just could not understand why women could get aggressive. like
what could possibly drive women to violence? like what could possibly... you know we oppress them in
all areas of life and don't let them have jobs or property... we also enact violence onto them and
get away with it... yeah what could possibly drive women to violence? judith knelman writes, "by the
1840s, when murder by women seemed very prevalent, the press was regularly registering
profound shock, contempt, disgust, and dismay are the increasing evidence that
women were killing members of their own families for money." so on the surface, it sounds like a
lot of women were just getting annoyed at home and starting to kill their husbands or whatever.
♪ they had it coming! they had it coming! ♫ but, in reality it was a lot sadder. a lot of
these murderers were desperate mothers who were committing infanticide because they were too poor
to feed all their children. the life insurance industry was also growing, which led to sadly more
motivations for people to off themselves or off their relatives in order to get money to
keep the rest of the family alive. one of the popular ways to commit murder was via arsenic
poisoning. according to one london physician, writing in 1849, the crime of arsenic
murder had become "a national disgrace." this was such a big problem that the government
actually passed legislation requiring apothecaries and pharmacists to record all arsenic sales in a
poison book. while it's probably more satisfying to think that the femme fatale emerged because
victorian men were just extremely repressed, that's not entirely true. it's partially true but
there are multiple reasons. jess sully says that her problem with femme fatale scholarship is that
many people propose that all femmes fatales were created under the same circumstances and with the
same intentions, regardless of the fact that very different artistic and literary groups existed in
the 19th century. for example in the 19th century, there was also a growing interest in ancient
mythologies and esoteric religions. artists and writers took inspiration from characters like
cleopatra, medusa, and salome and creatures like vampires and sirens. this interest is also
probably why depictions of the 19th century femme fatale leaned on mystical and orientalist
imagery. this imagery was then exploited by fox studio in the 1910s. probably the most
significant femme fatale actress in early cinema history was theda bara. she often played this
orientalist femme fatale, most notably cleopatra. however she was only acting for about four years
and then her contract was not renewed in 1919. diane negra notes that bara and other vamp
actresses such as nita naldi, lye de putti, and pola negri had heritage in southern and
eastern european countries or played characters of these origins. the fall of the femme fatale and
the rise of the all-american good girl portrayed by the likes of mary pickford and clara beau
coincide with strengthening anti-immigrant values. i do want to clarify first that the movies that
we call film noir today from the 40s and 50s were not labeled as film noir at the time. that
label only became widely used in the 1970s. as james naremore says, "film noir is an
idea that we projected onto the past." with that in mind, let's get into what
film noir is. according to janey place, the dominant world view expressed in film
noir is paranoid, claustrophobic, hopeless, doomed, predetermined by the past without clear
moral or personal identity. the visual style conveyed this mood through expressive use of
darkness, both real, in predominantly under-lit and night time scenes, and psychologically,
through shadows and claustrophobic compositions, which overwhelm the character in exterior
as well as interior settings. according to michelle mercure, key elements of the
genre include humphrey bogart. just kidding. hey queen. girl you have done it again.
constantly raising the bar for us all. key characteristics of the classic film noir
include a male protagonist, usually a private detective, some element of criminality, a
lack of morality, and an ambiguous plot. in general there is an aura of uncertainty
that permeates throughout the film. but why is this the case? sylvia harvey says,
"the feelings of loss and alienation expressed by the characters in film noir can be seen
as the product both of post-war depression and of the reorganization of the american
economy." corporations were growing bigger, monopolies were being established, and
small businesses were getting squeezed out by competition. women were also introduced
in the labor force and while this was temporary, it did shift the dynamics of the traditional
family unit. and so, film noir can also be seen as an indirect response to this "assault"
on traditional family structures and values. "look you might as well know it now, both of
you. your father and i have decided to separate." one clear example is the film "mildred pierce,"
which came out in 1945. the main character mildred played by joan crawford becomes a business mogul
after leaving her husband and needing to support her daughters. harvey writes, "the image of
mildred in a masculine style of dress holding her account books and looking away from her lover
typifies this kind of displacement." so now that we're getting into the female characters let's
define the femme fatale a little bit more clearly. according to mercure, some of the most prominent
characteristics of the outward appearance of the femme fatale include a cigarette, long sexy
legs that often dominate the frame, thick luscious lips, gorgeous wavy hair that frames
her face perfectly, and an attire that is often very flashy–fur shawls and coats, long gloves
that extend to the elbows, evening gowns that shimmer and sparkle, clothing that reveals legs,
cleavage, arms, back, and/or shoulders, and a sexy pair of high heels. the femme fatale's sexual
power is an important aspect of her character. "gilda are you decent?" "me?" because of this, scholars like janey place view
the femme fatale as being a manifestation of the male protagonist's internal fears of sexuality
and his need to control and repress it. "he can't keep getting away with this!" i feel like i need to put a disclaimer or
something here. i don't disagree entirely with this take, i just hate freud. and so, i get
irritated when people try to shove genitalia into literally everything. like i literally read a
sentence that femmes fatales holding guns is like symbolizing women taking sexual power from men
because guns are phallic. like i don't know about that... also, so much of freud's research has been
disproven and he's also a pedophilia apologist. i'll leave info about it in the description
so youtube doesn't demonetize me but yeah. mercure writes, "the femme fatale is an actress
in every sense of the word. she lies, cheats, double-crosses, even murders her victims and
then cries, screams, sings, or whispers words of affection to the male protagonist to win
him over, only to double-cross him again. "your sister's a very dangerous woman, katie. she
could worm the secrets right out of a sphinx." and unlike her predecessor, the vamp
seductress, often her motivation is ambition. and because she is a woman, this
ambition is inappropriate and must be squashed. sometimes the femme fatale is not evil,
like laura from the movie "laura." her only fault is that she falls in and
out of love with three different men. it's their projection onto her and
their jealousy that sets off a murder. "when a man has everything in
the world that he wants except what he wants most, he loses his
self-respect. it makes him bitter, laura." that wasn't her intention but it's the
independence which is the problem here, and she and everyone around her must be punished for
that. as place says, "whether evil or innocent, her desire for freedom, wealth, or independence
ignites the forces which threaten the hero." "i never have been and i never will be bound
by anything i don't do of my own free will." so because of these motivations, a lot of
scholars have viewed the 1940s femme fatale as being part of this wartime disillusionment.
specifically, they view the femme fatale as being a cautionary tale warning women to get back
in the home so men can have their jobs back. and this is supported by the fact that at the end
of these film noirs, the femme fatale is often punished in some way: she either dies or goes to
jail. but mark jancovich does point out a hole in this theory, which is that these dangerous
women were usually not working women. they were usually greedy women who were using men to get
money quickly and easily. they weren't trying to get any jobs. in the case of "mildred pierce,"
the femme fatale is not the hard-working mildred but her lazy spoiled daughter. but personally i
believe there is some truth in that some of these movies reflect post-war time anxieties about women
in the workforce, and it's also no surprise that misogynistic ideals would creep into the scripts
because society as a whole was misogynistic at the time–still definitely is. but i think
blindly clinging on to one societal ideology of the time as the reason for everything
can be quite limiting. steve neale argues that the concept of film noir itself tries to
homogenize a bunch of very distinct movies. remember what i said: this genre label came out
20 years or so after the movies were already made, and so what we end up with is a set of
rules that dictate the film noir genre and a bunch of movies that contradict those rules
but are still considered to be part of the genre. and it's confusing. like laura is considered
to be a femme fatale even though she has no villainous bones in her body. anytime
a woman from these movies is even remotely desirable by men, she is pigeonholed as being a
femme fatale and i think that's a super lazy way of understanding the material. and this is
just a problem i have with tropes in general. i think tropes offer some structure and some
understanding for us, but at the same time they don't account for all these exceptions. and if
you actually have seen a lot of film noir movies, you'll realize that every main woman character
is completely different from the others. and i think by labeling these women as merely
"femmes fatales"... it's a disservice. i still am going to keep doing it for the purposes of this
video, but that's my stance on the situation. and also something to consider is that a lot of women
at the time loved the femme fatale character. i mean a lot of women still like the femme fatale
character hence the #goodforher movement. in virginia allen's book
"femme fatale: erotic icon," she discusses that the femme fatale was
popular among women even in the 19th century. she says, "the femme fatale offered one of
the few role models for women in the 19th century that combined freedom with fascination and
erotic intrigue. by imitating the femme fatale, women could imagine that they acquired
more than her attractions: her freedom, her sexual independence–and considerable
enjoyment." so rather than being interpreted as solely a cautionary tale warning women to stick to
the rules of patriarchal society, the femme fatale can also be subverted by viewers like us into
becoming this empowering role model. i want to talk about two movies in particular, very briefly,
that i think can be reinterpreted. the first movie is the 1947 film "out of the past." in "out of the
past," the protagonist and detective jeff bailey falls in love with femme fatale kathie moffet
played by jane greer. jeff was initially hired to find her by her ex-boyfriend whit sterling because
she allegedly shot whit and stole his $40,000. good for her. there's a lot of double crossing and murder. it's
honestly a little bit confusing and i don't really want to try to explain it, but at the end of the
movie, jeff tries to turn kathie into the police and kathie shoots him dead. and then the police
shoot her dead. what i've taken away from this movie is not that kathie is inherently evil but
that she resorts to murder as her only means of escaping from her relationships with men, and
because of this, even though kathie dies, it's hard to imagine that this film could in any way
be endorsing marriage as a good place for women. john and stephanie blaser further argue that
kathie's death signifies her unwillingness to compromise her rebellious values and that is in
part why we remember her allure and confidence so well after the movie is long over. they write,
"it is the image of the powerful, fearless, and independent femme fatale that sticks in our
minds when these movies end. perhaps because she, unlike powerful women in other hollywood films,
remains true to her destructive nature and refuses to be converted or captured, even if it means
that she must die." the other movie i want to talk briefly about is "gilda," which came out in 1946
and stars rita hayworth as gilda. this movie's protagonist is johnny farrell, a casino manager
who works under the mysterious and powerful ballin mundson. ballin goes off to get married
and when he comes back, it's revealed that his new wife gilda used to date johnny. throughout the
movie, johnny believes gilda to be a promiscuous, unfaithful woman, because she openly flirts and
dances with other men. but it's revealed later on that her promiscuity was a performance to get
under johnny's skin and gilda had always been faithful to her male partners. through johnny's
eyes, gilda is a psychological tormentor. her famous striptease is not coded as sexy
to him, but as manipulative and deceitful. while the striptease as a concept has
traditionally been a male fantasy, it rouses frustration in johnny and he has
her dragged off stage. but this striptease is actually very powerful for women. michelle mercure
writes, "by causing this tension for johnny, gilda prevents the satisfaction of his desire to control
her. gilda successfully uses her objectification to produce a pleasureless experience for
her subject, a frustrating one, in fact. what she is really doing by performing for johnny
(on and off stage) is teaching him and the viewer a lesson–that his (and our) relationship with
her should not be one of subject versus object." and the film critic bosley crowther actually hated
this movie. in his review, he said, "[rita] wears many gowns of shimmering lustre and tosses her
tawny hair in glamorous style, but her manner of playing a worldly woman is distinctly five and
a dime. a couple of times, she sings song numbers with little distinction, and wiggles through
a few dances that are nothing short of crude." i honestly think mr. crowther is not a
man of taste, but maybe that's just me. adrienne l. mclean has suggested that the
reason for this distaste among male film critics is probably because gilda is not
a male fantasy but a woman's film. and that brings me to my
next point, which is that in some ways, film noir is
tailored to female audiences. "why would you say something
so controversial yet so brave?" female spectatorship is something that
has gone generally unnoticed in film feminist theory and much of the reason
honestly has to do with our preoccupation with the male gaze. the male gaze, if you
don't know, is the act of depicting women from a cishetero masculine perspective
that represents women as sexual objects. "EWWW" and i fully believe in the male
gaze, like i believe it exists. the only thing i'm saying is that
in a lot of feminist discourse, so much emphasis is put on the male gaze, and
there's not enough emphasis on the female gaze. anne dennon says that women use spectatorship to
learn behaviors and project personal desires onto the woman that they like in film. she writes, "the
female gaze trained on the femme fatale takes her sexiness, her beauty, and her fetishized
fashion as honest signals of her power." also to note, because of world war ii and
because a lot of men were off fighting the war, the majority of audiences at
movie theaters were women. angela martin writes, "there had to be something
in these film noirs for female spectators, whether it was the treat of seeing women
giving as good, if not better, than they got, the idea that men and women can be equally evil or
equally innocent, confirmation of the existence of masculine perversity, or simply the refreshingly
life-sized image of male fallibility." and dennon goes so far to argue that
film noir's prioritization of character development and personal relationships and the
overall characterization of women characters all follow female viewer preferences. some
reviews of the time even validate this theory. in october 1946, picturegoer published the
story "will the goody goody heroine survive?" and in it, they write, "why are so many of the
present screen heroines so tough? this question has been put to us many times recently and the
only logical answer we can give is that you, the picture goers who pay, like them that way.
the era when movie heroines had to be sweeter than a chocolate sundae and wind up in the
hero's arms appears to have run its course." in her book star gazing: hollywood
cinema and female spectatorship, feminist film theorist jackie stacey interviewed
british women who went to the movies in the 40s and 50s to research attitudes towards actresses of
the time. she observed that not only did a lot of these women admire the beauty of the actresses but
they also admire the way she handled situations, which goes to show dennon's point. one of the
interviewees joan clifford said, "i liked seeing strong capable and independent types of female
characters, mostly because i wish to be like them." a lot of these roles that these women play
are punished at the end of the movie either by death or jail time or sometimes worse, marriage,
but stacey notes that these female spectators did not choose to talk about this aspect at all.
instead they focused on the femme fatale's desirable characteristics, the characteristics
that they often wished they had themselves. jeanine basinger argues that all movies were
made with men and women audiences in mind. because producers just wanted as many people at
the theater as possible. but obviously that's an impossible task, so a lot of these movies
end up having mixed messages which leads to mixed interpretations. is gilda empowering
for rebellious women or is her ending reunion with johnny appealing to patriarchal society?
it could be read either way. what i'm mainly trying to say is that the femme fatale is a
complex archetype. rather than writing her off as this definite anti-feminist character that
we've sincerely outgrown since the 40s and 50s, we should accept her as just a character that
means something different to different people. for some people, she represents the worst misogynistic
parts of mid-20th century american society, and for others, she represents a confident and
free young woman unwilling to compromise herself in a time period that was forcing women to stay in
this very rigid structure. it just depends on you and what scenes or aspects of her that
leave a lasting impression on your mind. okay so this is the end of the video. thank you
so much for coming along with me on this ride. let me know in the comments what you think
of the femme fatale archetype and who your favorite femme fatale of the era was. mine is
personally barbara stanwyck in "double indemnity." i also just am biased towards barbara
stanwyck in general, i love her to death. anyways i hope you all have a lovely rest
of your day and i'll see you next time. bye!
