Page 11 - Noir106 Femme Fatale

we may revere it as something valuable, what supports our very existence, what we should go back to in a kind of romantic effort to recapture an ideal past
and we may also try to go beyond it, to think ourselves above it with our technology and our culture
TT: Well, it is true that I like nature, although sometimes I do take my scythe to those nasty weeds. Which reminds me of the way The Shadow in noir used to say “The Weed of Crime bears bitter fruit.” But I don’t think he was talking about us girls. He specifically mentions, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men,” so I think he knows that men are usually the bad guys. But I do think romantic efforts is a good thing.
C: Yes, Tina. It is easy in Noir to see the man when he is the bad guy. Simone also says that
women are sometimes viewed as symbols of of purity, goodness and innocence but also of corruption, evil, temptation and sexual seduction
Beauvoir refers to images in the Bible: the virgin mary vs Eve
TT: Well, as you know, Christina, there can be good apples and bad apples. It may be that Eve just happened upon a bad apple because of the snake. But then you can also get an Eve with more than one face, like my mentor Joanne Woodward did in 1957. Not everybody is exactly the way they seem, especially today with social media and Twitter.
C: Huh. Why should there be these seemingly contradictory images of women, Beauvoir asks? Well, it makes sense if you think of one group as being “other” to another group: the dominant group sets itself up as the norm, and project onto the dominated group all that they do are not--both what they want to be and don’t want to be, Beauvoir says.
Woman, according to Beauvoir, “is all that man desires and all that he does not attain .... He projects upon her what he desires and what he fears, what he loves and what he hates.”
TT: That makes sense to me, and explains a lot. I wonder if Beauvoir say that women project on Man all kinds of stuff like tough and fighting? Because they sure seem to do a lot of that kind of stuff in noir, with all their guns, and car chases, and stuff. And why is it always a big pickup truck on jacked up tires that needs to go faster than me and pass me in a huff? That Marlboro man on his horse back then has been replaced by some guy in a pickup. It’s a fantasy thing, I think. But maybe that’s the way we want men to be? Or men think we want them to be?
C: You know, Tina, I don’t remember Beauvoir saying anything in The Second Sex about what women project on to men. Remember she was writing this in the 1940s and she says that men are the ones mostly in charge of culture and politics and such, and so how they define things is how things are defined. Maybe that wasn’t entirely true then, and it certainly isn’t always the case now. Maybe the men wanted to be the gun and car chase guys.