Publisher Description

Ostensibly the villain, but also a model of female power, poise, and intelligence, the femme fatale embodies Hollywood's contradictory attitudes toward ambitious women. But how has the figure of the femme fatale evolved over time, and to what extent have these changes reflected shifting cultural attitudes toward female independence and sexuality?

This book offers readers a concise look at over a century of femmes fatales on both the silver screen and the TV screen. Starting with ethnically exoticized silent film vamps like Theda Bara and Pola Negri, it examines classic film noir femmes fatales like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, as well as postmodern revisions of the archetype in films like Basic Instinct and Memento. Finally, it explores how contemporary film and television creators like Fleabag and Killing Eve's Phoebe Waller-Bridge have appropriated the femme fatale in sympathetic and surprising ways.

Analyzing not only the films themselves, but also studio press kits and reviews, The Femme Fatale considers how discourses about the pleasures and dangers of female performance are projected onto the figure of the femme fatale. Ultimately, it is a celebration of how "bad girl" roles have provided some of Hollywood's most talented actresses opportunities to fully express their on-screen charisma.

Author Biography

JULIE GROSSMAN is a professor of English and communication and film studies at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. Her books about film, television, literature, and gender include Ida Lupino, Director: Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition (with Therese Grisham), Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up, Adaptation and ElasTEXTity: Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny, and Twin Peaks (with Will Scheibel).
 

Table of Contents

Contents
Introduction
1          "Theda Bara and Barbara Stanwyck's "Baby Face": Exoticism and the Street-Smart Vamp"
2          Wartime and Postwar Film Noir, Neo-Noir, and the Femme Fatale
3          Tracy Flick, and Television's Unruly Women
Acknowledgements
Further Reading
Works Cited
Selected Filmography
Index
 

Review

"In this lively and engaging book, Julie Grossman elegantly traces the long tradition of the femme fatale figure in film, television and popular culture. She deftly analyses a diverse range of characters, from Theda Bara's vamp in early Hollywood, the hard-boiled dames of classic Film Noir, to the complex and vibrant Villanelle in contemporary television's Killing Eve. Grossman persuasively illustrates the centrality of role performance to these femme fatale figures, and establishes performance as a key mode by which they resist inequalities in social structures. This book provides both a history of how women have been represented, and a compelling case for the relevance of the femme fatale to contemporary debates on gender politics."
 — Helen Hanson, author of Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film
"A fascinating exploration of Hollywood's most notorious female that goes beyond film noir. With a focus on the performance of gender as subversive and empowered, Grossman illuminates over a century of femme fatales from silent cinema's 'Vamp' Theda Bara to television's Killing Eve."— Philippa Gates, author of Detecting Women: Gender and the Hollywood Detective Film

Long Description

Ostensibly the villain, but also a model of female power, poise, and intelligence, the femme fatale embodies Hollywood?s contradictory attitudes toward ambitious women. But how has the figure of the femme fatale evolved over time, and to what extent have these changes reflected shifting cultural attitudes toward female independence and sexuality? This book offers readers a concise look at over a century of femmes fatales on both the silver screen and the TV screen. Starting with ethnically exoticized silent film vamps like Theda Bara and Pola Negri, it examines classic film noir femmes fatales like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity , as well as postmodern revisions of the archetype in films like Basic Instinct and Memento . Finally, it explores how contemporary film and television creators like Fleabag and Killing Eve ?s Phoebe Waller-Bridge have appropriated the femme fatale in sympathetic and surprising ways. Analyzing not only the films themselves, but also studio press kits and reviews, The Femme Fatale considers how discourses about the pleasures and dangers of female performance are projected onto the figure of the femme fatale. Ultimately, it is a celebration of how ?bad girl? roles have provided some of Hollywood?s most talented actresses opportunities to fully express their on-screen charisma.

Review Quote

"In this lively and engaging book, Julie Grossman elegantly traces the long tradition of the femme fatale figure in film, television and popular culture. She deftly analyses a diverse range of characters, from Theda Bara's vamp in early Hollywood, the hard-boiled dames of classic Film Noir, to the complex and vibrant Villanelle in contemporary television's Killing Eve . Grossman persuasively illustrates the centrality of role performance to these femme fatale figures, and establishes performance as a key mode by which they resists inequalities in social structures. This book provides both a history of how women have been represented, and a compelling case for the relevance of the femme fatale to contemporary debates on gender politics."

Description for Reader

JULIE GROSSMAN is a professor of English and communication and film studies at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. Her books about film, television, literature, and gender include Ida Lupino, Director: Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition (with Therese Grisham), Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up , Adaptation and ElasTEXTity: Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny , and Twin Peaks (with Will Scheibel).

Excerpt from Book

Introduction Intelligent, witty, able to role-play and perform, deceptive, enraged, frustrated, mercenary, seductive, overtly sexual, fearless and tough as nails, physically self-confident with a striking appearance: these are the qualities we associate with the femme fatale. The figure is commonly understood as a beautiful woman who seduces a male protagonist into criminality and a web of deceit, causing his demise and, when film industry production codes required, her own death too. The femme fatale has always been perceived as a staple of classic film noir (generally thought to date from The Maltese Falcon [1941] to Touch of Evil [1958], the dangerous dame seen as a counterpart to the slick and cynical male detective. As many are aware, classic film noir refers to the series of brooding post-WWII films characterized by low-key lighting, an emphasis on urban anonymity and alienation, the seductions of criminality, and cool-cat highly metaphorical language drawn in part from the hardboiled fiction of James Cain, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway penned a quintessentially dark exchange in his short story "The Killers": "''What''s the idea?,'' Nick asked. ''There isn''t any idea,''" returns one of the hired killers. This kind of playful nothingness becomes endemic in film noir, which sleekly adapts a literary vernacular and melds it to compelling character patterns. In Out of the Past (1947), Jeff Bailey [Robert Mitchum] tells a cabbie, "I think I''m in a frame...I don''t know. All I can see is the frame"; in The Sweet Smell of Success (1957), J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) says to Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), "you''re dead, son. Get yourself buried." While the focus in film noir has habitually been on the beleaguered tough guy, for whom the irony in such language becomes a defense against the fear of living meaninglessly, women in noir share this world-weariness, despite viewers'' and critics'' conventional focus on the hardboiled male and the women''s part in adding to the troubles of men. Indeed, a close look at film noir''s ingrained character patterns reveals the classic femme fatale brandishing many of the qualities we associate with the male noir protagonist. In The Big Heat , Debby Marsh (Gloria Grahame) comments as she enters Detective Dave Bannion''s (Glenn Ford) barren hotel room, "I like it. Early nothing." Debby''s line alludes to the visible boundaries of nothingness, and that angst-ridden insight, while traditionally associated with men in noir, is crucially important for understanding noir''s modern women as they strive to find meaning outside of oppressive social roles. The hardboiled women in noir show their rage or malaise differently from how postwar fraught masculinity is expressed, where tough leading men are more able to sublimate their unease and disappointments into a workable cynicism and an appealing "cool" demeanor that complements their masculine competence. For women, displaying such cynicism breaks the conventional gender mold, threatening the cultural idolatry of mothers and virgins. Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) tells Sherry (Marie Windsor) in The Killing (1956), "You like money. You''ve got a great big dollar sign there where most women have a heart." Bad boys have always been more easily adapted into accepted social types; bad girls, however, are demonized and often punished for their resistance to social norms. One of the main ways that film noir''s classic femme fatale has rebelled against social conventions and pushed against boundaries is by roleplaying. There is, I will suggest throughout this volume, an abiding relevance in the practice and notions of performance embedded in the idea of the classic femme fatale, not only because cinema''s fatal women are so often portrayed by strikingly charismatic actors but also because the theme of performance captures the double-bind active and rebellious or transgressive female characters find themselves in: they perform roles sometimes to escape objectification or the rigid or socially sanctioned positions that oppress them, but then when they assume or "perform" unconventional or unprescribed roles, their ambition to find fulfillment outside of convention constitutes them as "bad actors," as deceptive, inauthentic, or "spider women." Putting on "a show," performing femininity while charting the damage done to women because of predatory men and institutional biases is trademark femme fatale. A serious rejoinder to institutional sexism, the most compelling femmes fatales show two paths taken by women as a result of their privation and sense of loss, violation, or unfulfillment: desperate grabs for power or happiness, or a mocking vengeance against those who have contributed to their desolation. Both avenues usually involve criminality. This book attends to the stories of femmes fatales, delineating their words and behavior as insurgencies against conventional gender categories that are insidious. The figures addressed in this book are dangerous women whose sly rebellions against the status quo offer images and portraits of strong defiant women. Viewer obsessions with the femme fatale replicate the noir men''s fascination with and dread of the powerful woman. Indeed, female badness is ripe for exploitation as a theme with a ready audience. We find over the centuries a deeply rooted cultural habit of glomming onto the titillating icon of the bad woman, the Eve or Lilith figure that threatens patriarchy and individual men whose loss of control can then be blamed on the woman: as Rita Hayworth sings in Gilda (1946), first rebelliously, then plaintively, "Put the Blame on Mame." With its sex and glitter, the icon can blind us from evaluating nuanced representation that is crucially inflected with vibrant female performance. For example, none of Lauren Bacall''s roles in classic film noir included a "badness" associated with the idea of the deadly female. When Bacall first exploded onto the Hollywood scene in 1944, the Motion Picture Daily Review captured this powerful and misleading dynamic by associating Bacall''s seductiveness with villainy: "Her deportment has a decided "come-hither" look and her brand of acting is purring and tintillating [sic] in the slow-cooking manner: She is the bad girl . . . " (Kann, To Have and Have Not ). A pickpocket in To Have and Have Not (1944), Marie Browning (Bacall) lives on the edge to survive, but the focus here on the threat she poses is part and parcel of the cultural dynamics that determine and continually reinscribe the role of the femme fatale. Further, there is a moment in To Have and Have Not when Bogart comments on Marie''s manipulation, "You''re good. You''re awful good," a judgment that speaks to the woman''s powers of artifice. This is a theme that will recur in this study: female characters branded as femmes fatales perform roles in order to survive, to seduce, or to manipulate others in order to get what they want, yet any "pretense" to better their position is received as immoral and invites male scorn. Female dissimulation means that Marie is a "good" performer, but that makes her untrustworthy. Because Marie''s role as femme fatale is subordinate in her noir films to Bacall''s partnership with Bogart, her characters are rewarded with romance and happy endings. But the exchange about how awfully "good" she is exposes an ideology of mistrusting women that sends a message that women are bad even when they are "good," and this is because they are not in these cases "good" as a gendered ideal--angel in the house, domestic savior--but good at something , such as performance or work in general. It is then when they are often perceived as threatening. Marie''s sarcastic comment to Steve later in this conversation is thus fitting: "Who was the girl . . . . the one who left you with such a high opinion of women?" Marie''s exchange with Steve offers a kinder version of Devlin''s (Cary Grant) disdain for Alicia''s (Ingrid Bergman) performance as Alex Sebastian''s (Claude Rains) wife in Notorious (1946) -- "Dry your eyes, baby; it''s out of character"--or Jeff Markam''s cynical repetition to Kathie Moffatt that she is "good" in Out of the Past : "Oh, you''re good, Kathie." Kathie is murderous, like Brigid O''Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon , but these two female characters become the benchmark for other women in noir, particularly in the way they perform and dissemble. In The Maltese Falcon , Spade also says "You''re good" to Brigid, followed by "It''s chiefly your eyes ... and that throb you get in your voice." Brigid responds, "it''s my own fault if you can''t believe me now," and Spade confirms that it is female performance that is most threatening: "Now you are dangerous." Men within these films and often the viewers cathecting on the role of the femme fatale are especially alert to female dissimulation, when there are important distinctions to be drawn among these many energetic modern women whose motives vary. In classic film noir, the destruction of the male protagonist and the fatal woman constitute a critique of the American Dream--its failed promise of success and happiness seen through the perspective of marginalized figures.&nb

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