Page 22 - Noir106 Femme Fatale

women who wished to pursue a career, and even women who wished to have a job, referring to such "unlovely women" as "lost," "suffering from penis envy," "ridden with guilt complexes," or just plain "man-hating."”
I - but I thought that some commentators saw film noir as healing the collective trauma of war. This was the time when an entire generation learned that life could end abruptly, From Pearl Harbor to the Holocaust to Hiroshima, the war undermined previously held moral absolutes, beliefs about human nature, and the very notion that life was predictable. Americans suffered an identity crisis and this produced a rootless and fragmented sense of self. What we see in Noir is the sentiments of cynicism and bitterness expressed perfectly. Was the critique of women who went against the stereotype part of this sentiment?
K- In some ways yes. The film noir femme fatale character reinforced the idea circulating at the time that if you, as a woman, didn’t conform to the new standard idea of “woman as keeper of the hearth and home” you were a bad woman.
In “Blonde Ice” for example, the subordinate female character shields her boss, can do his job as well as he can, but is ‘the good girl” who looks longingly at the male lead and lets him take the credit for her work. The bad girl, Claire, blonde, beautiful, cold, remorseless who wants what she wants to the point of murdering for it (three times) comes to a bad end, as only bad girls do. Her epitaph? “She wasn’t even a good newspaper woman,” said over her dead body before the men walk out and leave her body on the floor like yesterday’s garbage. The subliminal messages of this film are easy to see. If you’re a bad woman, you’ll come to a bad end.
I - For some like James Naremore Noir is not a definable genre, but an anti-genre, mirroring the quintessential antihero that populates shadowy scenes full of doomed and flawed characters who become obsessed with manipulative women, the femme fatale.
K- Noir also borrowed from the literary philosophy of naturalism, a hard view of the consequences of the capitalist system. It highlighted a portrait of economic and psychological collapse” as Hirsch wisely tells us. It was the “tabloid-style story,” such as Double Indemnity where a cheating wife used a sucker to kill off her husband and planned to run off with the insurance money. The prototypical femme fatale story in film noir.
I-And of course we are, as women and as a society as a whole, still recovering from the idea that a woman’s place is only in the home, subservient to a man’s wishes. or are we?
I’m Mariana Funes for DS106 Noir on the Couch.