An essay from a Film Noir class:
“It is femininity, sexualized, excessive femininity, that disturbs the masculine sense of security, selfhood and knowledge of the world in film noir.” Discuss with reference to at least two films screened on the course.
America’s involvement in the Second World War brought with it fundamental and wide-reaching sociological changes within the country. With large numbers of the male population drafted into the army and sent to Europe to fight, and the obvious need for the expansion of the national economy to sustain the war effort, increasing numbers of American women went to work, “overtly encouraged, as part of their ‘patriotic duty’”[1]. This meant a shift away from the primary role of the women as the “home-maker”, while the male fulfilled the role of economic provider, a shift away from the traditional hierarchical structure of the American family, with the male at its head, and a shift towards a society in which gender roles were subverted somewhat – “temporary confusion in regard to traditional conceptions of sexual role and sexual identity”[2]. For American men returning to the country after the end of the war, and American men in general, this subversion of gender roles was coupled with an economy suffering from post-war depression. The threat of high prices and unemployment, and “the increasing size of corporations, the growth of monopolies and the accelerated elimination of small businesses”, forcing people to work for large companies rather than for themselves through “industrialized dehumanization”[3]. Therefore, both the redefining of gender roles and the factor of working according to the goals and purposes of someone “else” meant that the new male position in society was marked with paranoia, alienation and disillusionment, feelings that were to become reflected within film noir. The stronghold of masculine security, selfhood and world knowledge that had existed before the war was under threat, from a changing economic structure, and especially from the “new” American woman and her challenge to preconceptions of masculinity and femininity.
“The attitudes toward women evidenced in film noir – i.e. fear of loss of stability, identity and security – are reflective of the dominant feelings of the time.”[4] Any film reflects the concerns and anxieties of the time in which it was produced (“social values, or the erosion of these values”[5]), so it is no surprise that the American films noirs of the mid 1940s were concerned with the changing role of women in American society after the war, as well as other economic concerns. In films such as Out of the Past (1947) and Double Indemnity (1944), the world is pervaded by a sense of pessimism, uncertainty and fear of the future (“nothing is stable…nothing is dependable”[6]) – and the male characters can find no solace in traditional masculine security, as masculinity, to a certain extent, no longer exists in its previously recognizable definition (hence Jeff’s removal of himself to small town America; away from his previous life, in Out of the Past, and Walter Neff’s attempt to “crook the house” in Double Indemnity – the “house” being the insurance company, the “someone else” that Neff is forced to work for.[7]). The desire to escape from this uncertain existence, and to achieve a more stable and secure existence, is a common theme in film noir, and the means of the escape attempt is often through transgression against social norms (a murder or a robbery, for example), but inevitably the attempt is doomed to fail – the situation inescapable, all the feelings of pessimism and fear proved to be well-founded. Often women play central roles in initiating the struggle to escape an unstable and uncertain existence in film noir and are they, and the idea of possessing them, is “held up as tempting means of escape from…a routinised and alienated existence”[8], an idea evidenced in films such as Double Indemnity and Woman in the Window (1944). Ultimately however, it is these women, the femmes fatales, that represent the very fears of insecure masculinity that the male characters experience, and it is these women, their sexuality and their powerful femininity derived through it, that are at the root of the dread of the male protagonists.
It is these femmes fatales that embody all the male anxieties over sense of self and knowledge of the world in film noir. They represent the idea of the “new” American woman that challenged masculine security in the climate of social change after the war. Of course, no two characters defined as femme fatales are ever entirely the same in film noir. Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Joan Bennet in The Woman in the Window, Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946) – all of these actresses portray characters marked with various different personality traits, but what defines them all, and in a sense establishes them as what can be considered femme fatales, is their distinct “otherness”. They emerge out of a “dark street at night”[9], a place of attractive danger and sexual temptation, a place where the secure order of the “known” world does not exist – “film noir thus starkly divides the world into that which is unknown and unknowable (female) and…that which is known (male)”[10]. This idea that the female realm is an unknown quantity in film noir is created through the powerful, sexual and excessive femininity that the femmes fatales possess, and how this sexualized femininity removes them from the protagonist’s ideals of a secure social order and the masculine “normality” inherent within it. These “new” women present a femininity that is aggressive rather than passive (and naturally subordinate to masculinity) – “calculating, manipulative…she uses her sexual attractions blatantly and without regard for the polite conventions of the past”[11].
In film noir, “the source and operation of the sexual woman’s dangerous power is expressed visually.”[12] The technical construction of the femme fatale in the American noirs is specifically geared towards presenting her as sexually both assertive and active.. Because of the restrictions of the Hays Production Code that dominated 1940s Hollywood and forbade any kind of sexual explicitness, the films had to imply the sexual “deviance”, often relying “chiefly on fetishized detail – an ankle bracelet, a white scarf, a glove, or a long sweep of hair”[13]. It is often these details that introduce the audience to the characters – Gilda dramatically tosses back her hair, Phyllis Dietrichson’s entrance in Double Indemnity is marked by her ankle and it’s bracelet as she descends the stairs. As well as these sexualizing details, femmes fatales often use objects of “unnatural…power”[14], such as guns or cigarettes, objects which usually imply the violence and masculine power of the male, and are therefore subverted in the hands of a female. These details signify the “otherness” of the characters, marking them out from the “normal” female. The femme fatales’ maintain “dominance in composition, angle, camera movement and lighting” in the films, “they are overwhelmingly the compositional focus”[15]. In Double Indemnity the camera lingers over Phyllis, she dominates the frame and the camera moves with her, enticing and seizing the gaze of the camera as surely as that of the male protagonist. Phyllis’ lustrous blonde hair is starkly contrasted to the dark shadows of her house, the shadows of the “dark place” from which she, as the “unknown” woman emerges. The “tough, unromantic close-ups of direct, undiffused light create a hard, statuesque surface beauty that seems more seductive but less attainable, at once alluring and impenetrable”[16]. The affect that the femmes fatales have on the male protagonists is made clear visually from their entrances onwards – the masculine sensibility is threatened by their very physical presence.
The way in which the “otherness” of the femme fatale disturbs and threatens secure masculine sensibility can de defined both by what it means to, and how it damages, the institution of the American family, and how it affects the psychology of the male protagonists in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis. These concepts are linked because they are both based on a system of patriarchy, the authority of which is assumed to be inherently established in society, and therefore are seen as representing the “normal”.
In much film noir, the idea that the family “functions as one of the ideological cornerstones of Western industrial society” and “serves as the mechanism whereby desire is fulfilled or at least ideological equilibrium established”[17] is under attack. The relationship between the mother and father of the family “is sanctified as the acceptable location of…sexuality”[18], sex itself is concealed and de-eroticized, and the female is passive. In a film noir such as Double Indemnity, the female operates sexually outside of the marriage boundary, thereby rejecting its sanctity and the sanctity of the family itself. For the femmes fatales to be sexually assertive and active, and to derive power over men through this assertiveness, clearly marks them out as transgressing against the traditional values of the family, and thus against the masculine sense of order and security. These women are not wives and mothers, at least not in the traditional, expected and passive sense, and not only do they transgress against the familial structure, they often actively serve to damage it. In Double Indemnity, Phyllis’ (implied) sexual activity outside of marriage with Neff eventually leads to the murder of her husband – an action that, through assertive feminine sexuality, “represents an assault…upon the nuclear family”[19]. Indeed, in a great deal of film noir this assault on the family seems to have already done it’s damage – “it is the absence of normal family relations…that forms one of the distinctive parameters of film noir”[20]. The femmes fatales ultimately come to represent this absence. The also come to represent a lack of “romantic love” in film noir. The femmes fatales are not loving females (again signifying them as “other”), and for them sex is not equated with love, as it supposedly should be within the marital relationship. Therefore, “if successful romantic love leads inevitably in the direction of the stable institution of marriage, the point about film noir, by contrast, is that it is structured around the destruction or absence of romantic love, and the family”[21].
The world of film noir is one where the traditional values of the family have been destroyed, thus heightening the overriding sense of alienation, paranoia and doom. In The Woman in the Window, it is only after Wanley’s family leave for a vacation, thereby removing him from a stable family environment, that he begins his transgressive adventure that leads to murder. The woman that he becomes involved with is clearly represented as being “other” – not only does she initiate the “pick up” of Wanley through her sexual assertiveness, she is also the mistress of another man. The absence of the family and the agency of the “unknown” woman in effecting this absence are clearly elements that disturb the world of stable and secure masculinity in film noir.
There exists in film noir the polar opposite of the femme fatale – the “nurturing woman”[22]. She embodies the “normal” woman, whose femininity reinforces the masculinity of the male rather than disturbing it. She is a symbol of the “old” world that the male is familiar with, “the stable world of values, roles and identities”[23]. She is subservient to the system of patriarchal order that the male is secure within, and is highly de-sexualised – a representation of a woman who fits well into the designed structure of the “nuclear” family; Ann in Out of the Past is “safely” feminine, and the equation with her and the small town America of the film means she offers Jeff some form of escape from the alienation of his “unknown” existence. However, this “normality” dictates that the film noir protagonist does not desire her in the same way that he desires a femme fatale – “[he] is precisely attracted by the woman who sets herself against convention (which is suggested in particular by the very presence of the more and, through use of Freudian psychoanalytic techniques, it becomes clear that the film noir hero is attracted to precisely what will disturb his masculinity – the femme fatale, who carries none of the “normal wholesome femininity of the “nurturing woman”, and who directly transgresses the patriarchal structure of maleness.
The idea of the family as a patriarchal structure is one that is connected with Freudian theories of psychoanalysis, theories that also go some way to defining the feminine threat to masculinity in film noir. Freudian psychoanalysis had been “extensively popularized in American culture” after the First World War, and “by the mid-1940s a popularized version of psychoanalysis had become entrenched in Hollywood’s productions”[24]. It is therefore no surprise that much film noir of the period can be read in psychoanalytical terms, and much of the Freudian analysis was concerned with “male desire in relation to an overarching law”[25], and the way that the sexualized female could affect male psychology.
In a simplified definition, Freud suggests that a male newborn child forms his gender role that will define his masculinity (or lack thereof) through his relationships with his mother and father, these figures becoming symbols of masculinity and femininity respectively. He identifies with the “father” while he simultaneously develops an object cathexis towards the “mother” (that is, he internalizes the idea of his desire for her), who he perceives as all nurturing and responsible for satisfying his needs. In this way he sexualizes her. However, his knowledge that the “mother” belongs to the “father”, and that the “father” has patriarchal power over him serves to create a conflict (the Oedipal complex) within him: his identification with the “father” as opposed to his desire for the “mother”. He is forced to choose between identification with the “mother” (a regression) or giving up his object cathexis of the “mother” and identifying further with the “father” – achieving this identification signifies the child’s acceptance of the “normal” male gender role, having removed his object cathexis for the “mother”, who represents the unknown “other” in terms of gender identification.[26]
Therefore, the desire for the “other” represents against a transgression against the patriarchal social order through which the male defines his gender role. This desire represents a regression to a pre-Oedipal state and hence the collapse of masculine selfhood. In film noir however, it is this very desire that the femme fatale awakens in the male protagonist, by means of her sexualized femininity, their very “otherness” that “simultaneously attracts and disturbs [him] because of its difference from the male regime with which he tends to be familiar”[27]. If the concept of the family is taken as the social projection of the patriarchy inherent in the creation of masculinity, then the protagonist attracted by the femme fatale is transgressing not only against “normal” definitions of masculinity, but also against the idea of the “normal” family. Phyllis in Double Indemnity, Kathie in Out of the Past, these females create a new sexual object cathexis within the men they attract, causing regression to a pre-Oedipal state. Only through denial and rejection of this cathexis can the male regain his sense of secure masculinity, but more often than not the damage is irreparable.
Partly because of the restrictions of the “manifestly ideological or propagandistic”[28] Hays Production Code and partly because of his transgression against the patriarchal order that defines his masculinity, the film noir protagonist is doomed from the moment his desire for the femme fatale initiates his transgressive act. Such an assault on the defined values of gender and social normality can only be punished with death in film noir, the very fact that the subversion of masculinity is allowed to occur through the aggressive femininity of the femme fatale is unforgivable, and the idea that association with the female “other” can in some way allow the male protagonist to escape the bonds of his alienated existence becomes “a transgressive fantasy which is marked…by the inevitability of its failure”[29] Thus Walter Neff is ultimately shot and fatally wounded by Phyllis – the embodiment of his disturbed masculinity. However, through acceptance of his fate and the realization that his transgression was ultimately an attack on the masculine system of patriarchy, Neff is offered a chance for redemption before he dies. By the very action of returning to his place of work to record a confession for Keyes – the symbol of patriarchal law and therefore, in terms of Freud, Neff’s “father” – Neff reasserts his “normal” masculinity through acceptance of the patriarchy – “the challenge to the patriarchal order eliminated”[30]. The Woman in the Window also offers the same chance for redemption to its protagonist, but in a different way. Wanley wakes to discover that his transgressive adventure has been a dream, created by the repressed desires of his subconscious, and when he is confronted by the same situation that initiated the transgression in his dream, he flees from it, having “seen” the damage that the sexual femininity of the femme fatale does to his masculinity, the dream being in someway a warning against the power of sexualized femininity over the inherent, pre-Oedipal desires of masculinity, that need to be repressed and controlled if masculinity is to survive in its “normal” form. In Double Indemnity and The Woman in the Window, a retreat to safe, masculine controlled space is the only way for the disturbed masculinity of the protagonist to, in effect, be saved.
Ultimately, the American films noirs of the 1940s reflected a time in which perceived notions of masculinity were under threat. The social developments of the time challenged these notions, as women were placed in a more active role in the economic structure of the country, and moved beyond traditional feminine roles of passivity and subservience to the male within patriarchal society. The femmes fatales presented in the films of the period can be seen as heightened representations of this “new” American women – distinctly “other” in terms of their expression of femininity – sexualized, aggressive and ultimately empowered, a femininity that initiates a collapse of masculinity as defined through Freudian psychoanalysis. They became a disturbing reminder that established gender roles were becoming increasingly subverted. In the films, the “new” woman’s heightened sexual power over men, their comparison and opposition to the “nurturing” female characters and their assault on the traditional social values of the “nuclear” family unit, presents their particular brand of femininity as fundamentally disturbing to the masculine security of self and knowledge of the world, and as a signifier that this world is in collapse. In the end, a climate of such important social change, with the idea of the increasingly emergent “otherness” of women in regards to established social conventions and the economic instability of a country in post-war depression, could not have failed to create a disturbing assault on the masculine sense of security, self-hood and knowledge of the world, and could not have failed to create the sense of alienation, disillusionment and foreboding that pervades the world of American film noir.
[1] Frank Krutnik, In A Lonely Street (Routledge, London, 1991), p. 57
[2] Krutnik, p. 57
[3] James Naremore, More Than Night (University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1998), p. 88
[4] Janey Place, “Women in film noir”, UEA Film Noir Dossier (Spring 2005), p. 37
[5] John Belton, ed., Movies and Mass Culture (Athlone, London, 1996), p. 173
[6] Place, p. 41
[7] Krutnik, p. 142
[8] Belton, ed., p. 177
[9] Place, p. 41
[10] Richard Dyer, “Resistance Through Charisma”, UEA Film Noir Dossier (Spring 2005), p. 116
[11] Bruce Crowther, Film Noir: Reflections in a Dark Mirror (Columbus Books, London, 1988), p.94
[12] Place, p. 42
[13] Naremore, p. 101
[14] Place, p. 45
[15] Place, p. 45
[16] JA Place & LS Peterson, “Some Visual Motifs Of Film Noir”, UEA Film Noir Dossier (Spring 2005), p. 31
[17] Belton, ed., p. 172
[18] Belton, ed., p. 174
[19] Krutnik, In A Lonely Street, p. 139
[20] Belton, ed., Movies and Mass Culture, p. 181
[21] Belton, ed., p. 174
[22] Place, “Women in film noir”, p. 50
[23] Place, p. 50
[24] Krutnik, p. 45
[25] Krutnik, p. 76
[26] Krutnik, p. 78
[27] Krutnik, p. 141
[28] Naremore, More Than Night, p. 96
[29] Krutnik, p. 138
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