The femme fatale in the nocturnal world of film noir
Elisabeth Bronfen
Plenary Lecture given at the conference on Crime Cultures at the University of Portsmouth, July 2008

   
As Vivian Sobchack notes, "it is now a commonplace to regard film noir during the peak years of its production as a pessimistic cinematic response to volatile social and economic conditions of the decade immediately following World War II."  Yet the flourishing of these dark b-pictures can not simply be reduced to the urban discontent of post-war American culture. Rather, it calls our attention to the manner in which this particular film genre came to fruitfully negotiate the dark-side of the modern condition humaine in general. Indeed, what is rendered visible, once one focuses specifically on how the night comes to serve as stage for states of transgression and fatality in film noir, is the toxic underbelly of the blanc world of classic modernity, prompting me to speak of a noir or dark modernity. The nocturnal settings of film noir open up a cinematic site for heists, fatal love stories, or murder plots. At the same time, one of the impulses of film noir follows the biblical command, "Let there be light". Thus the night also serves as a time zone one enters so as to disclose not only individual crimes, but also political corruption and with it the dark side of the law. Sometimes those who enter this nocturnal world are cops, sometimes private detectives or journalist, then again the friends of a man unjustly charged with a crime. The voyage to the end of the night all these characters undertake, however, is meant to bring to light what others had sought to cover up, often in the form of a confession. Whether they are sitting alone in a dark hotel room or together with an officer of the law in an interrogation room, the stories the strangely disaffected heroes and heroines of film noir tell shed light on nocturnal events, even while we see these as flashbacks on the screen. The illumination their confession affords corresponds to the beam of light of the projector, as it passes over a strip of film, projected onto a white screen in a dark space.
Illus. Laura
To revisit film noir in an effort to map its use of the night as stage and state of mind for transgressions proves, however, to be particularly revealing in relation to the question of a gendering of the night. If antiquity created the goddess Nyx, cradling her children death and sleep in her arms, so as to give a feminine embodiment to the night, this mythic figure returns in the nocturnal world of film noir as the femme fatale. Representing the dark side of justice, which punishes the transgressions of the night in the night, these fatal women force the noir hero to acknowledge the consequences of his transgressive desire. However, while noir heroes violate both the laws of the everyday and those of rationality, the femme fatale follows a didactic project. Luring her deluded lover into the dangerous world of crime, she ultimately forces him to recognize that he had wanted to be betrayed by precisely the nocturnal dreams and ambitions she had embodied for him.
    In Jules Dasin's Naked City (1948), the dream of glamorous success in New York City, as well as the fatal failure of those infected by this promise, is negotiated over the tragic fate of Jane Dexter. Shot in the style of a documentary film, Dasin's story begins the morning after her murder and depicts two days of the police investigation, in which the city, the night and the transgressive woman emerge as mutually implicated. What the detective, assigned to her case, discovers is that Jean was the head of a band of jewellery thieves, who ultimately fell victim to their naked violence. Her unabashed desire for money and glamour are thus presented as the result of the seduction of the neon-lights of the big city. At the same time, she is herself complicitous with this fatal force, given that she infected others with her transgressive desire. Conflating dangerous feminine desire with the sparkling lights of nocturnal New York, the role Jean plays in the fantasies of her survivors is, however, ambivalent. For the readers of the daily newspaper, she is only a brief event, for the police merely one of many victims of the naked city. For her parents she is a sad example for the American dream gone awry. But to her fiancé she appears at night as a phantom lady. We will never know whether he will be we able to resist the lure of the big city. But what we do know is that she inspires him to dream about the fatal woman and her demise.
Many film noir have a male voice-over, offering a commentary on why the hero fell for the allure of a woman, who called forth fantasies about how, for once, he might be lucky. Noir heroines, in turn, rarely take centre stage and more often than not have no voice in how their story comes to be told. Nevertheless, these fatal seductresses dominate the fate in store for all those who embark upon nocturnal adventures,  because they not only confuse, betray, warn, teach and sometimes even save the noir heroes. Rather, they are also the ones who draw these men into experiences that can only end in failure, destruction and death, and in so doing embody the fatalistic understanding of modern human existence subtending this film genre. Indeed one might say, precisely because the narration of these stories is focalized by men who want to be duped, the noir heroines not only mirror the desires and anxieties of their deluded lovers. Their mysterious attraction also corresponds to the unfathomability of the night itself. Given that their story exceeds what the male voice-over has to tell, they function as the dark vanishing-point of a narrative which they call forth, even while it never fully contains them.
To look at film noir under the auspices of the night, thus my claim, brings to the foreground a significant gendering of this chronotopos: Noir heroines, inhabiting the night with a confidence lacking in their male counterparts, offer a panoply of ways in which human existence is influenced by accident and fate. If film noir presents us with a differentiated palette of shades of the colour black, so, too, the manner in which the noir heroine embarks upon her idiosyncratic pursuit of happiness is everything but single coloured. Noir's femmes fatales, thus, cannot be reduced to any simple formula. At stake, instead, is the relation these dark women entertain to the manner in which the night as stage and state of mind conjoins protection, fantasy work and death. One must thus ask: If these noir heroines long for self-expenditure, is it different from the jouissance that drives their blinded lovers into the night? And do they obliquely represent diurnal law, given that by luring the hero into his destruction, they bring about his punishment?
    One afternoon, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), agent for the All Risk Insurance Company, happens to ring the doorbell of Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), seeking to renew the policy on her husband's car. In the opening sequence of Billy Wilders Double Indemnity (1944), this femme fatale leans over the railing on the second floor of her home and gazes at the young man, who has followed her housekeeper into the entrance hall. He has disturbed her sunbathing, and she, wrapped only in her bathing towel, towers over him like a love goddess. The excessive blond hair leaves no doubt in our mind that she is not to be trusted. In the shadow of her living room a verbal sparring match unfolds, during which feminine seduction and masculine desire for risk come to clash. They talk about insurance, yet safety is precisely what neither of them is after. Phyllis promises erotic bliss, but the contract she proposes to Walter is of a different nature. He is to trick her husband into signing a life-insurance policy with a double indemnity clause, and then help her murder him to get his money. Although their first encounter takes place in the afternoon, the artificial lighting of the living room highlights the fact that both have entered a fatal scene of fantasy.
    Initially, Walter is able to leave without compromising himself, but Phyllis has recognized that he is only waiting to be deceived by her. She waits for night to visit him in his apartment, where he is sitting alone in the dark, as though their meeting that afternoon had plunged him into a mental darkness only she can illuminate. If she is the one who, upon entering, turns on the light switch, he remains in the shadows as he listens to her talk about the unbearable marriage she violently wishes to bring to an end. At the same time, her story is also illuminating to us, given that we come to realize how fully cognizant she is of the consequences of her actions. She is willing to pay any price for her freedom, while not deluding herself about what Walter's true interest in her case is. Although he pretends that he is after the love and the money this dangerously alluring woman seems to promise, their accidental meeting offers him a different opportunity, which he has also been longing for. As an insurance agent he has been obsessed with finding a way to trick his company and thus prove he is more clever at fraud than the men and women who have tried to deceive him. Significant about the fatal bond the two noir lovers enter upon that night is, thus, not only the fact that the murder of Mr. Dietrichson allows them to realize their respective clandestine desires. Rather what Billy Wilder reveals is that these desires are not the same, and indeed not even compatible.
    Important for my claim that Billy Wilder's femme fatale emerges as a complex character, with a subjectivity of her own, is the fact that while she beguiles Walter, Phyllis is at no point herself deluded. She does not think of herself as an innocent victim of dark circumstance, but rather shamelessly manipulates her lover, even while recognizing the fatality of her actions. It is for this reason that Billy Wilder offers us a series of close-ups of his femme fatale. In the first instance she is standing lost in thought on the threshold to her home after her husband has unwittingly signed his own death warrant. The murder she is dreaming about at this point will also be rendered as a subtle facial gesture. While a few weeks later, Walter strangles Mr. Dietrichson from the back seat of his car, Billy Wilder again offers us a close-up of his femme fatale. Initially we see her thinking soberly about the reality of the killing she has provoked, then suddenly quiet joy spreads across Barbara Stanwyck's face.
    On the evening after the inquest, in which the judge declares the death of her husband to have been an accident, she visits Walter but waits to enter his home, because she hears the voice of his colleague (Edward G. Robinson) coming from inside the apartment. Charged with investigating the Dietrichson insurance claim, Keyes is angrily vociferating that he would like to hand the widow over to the police. In her face we see signs of trepidation at the thought that the law might, after all, catch up with her. At the same time we get a sense that she is privy to the way Walter will sacrifice her to protect himself. For this reason she asks him to come to the supermarket they have chosen as their clandestine meeting point. Initially wearing sunglasses to shade her eyes, she takes these off as she declares that she will not withdraw her claim. "We went into this together, and we are getting out together," she assures him. "It's straight down the line for both of us". In her uncompromising gaze we are asked to recognize that she will not cede her lethal desire, even if it means she will pay with her life.
    While she, thus, recognizes the fragility of her nocturnal pursuit of happiness, Walter, by contrast, foolishly believes that he can absolve himself of guilt by killing off the woman who inspired his dark fantasies. They meet one last time in the darkened living room of her home. Because she rightly assumes that he has come to kill her, she has placed a gun underneath her seat and with it fires the first shot. At this point, however, she drops the gun. One last time Wilder offers us a close-up of her face, while, having begun to embrace her faithless lover, she confesses, "I never loved you nor anybody else. I used you, just as you said, until the minute when I couldn't fire the second shot". For Billy Wilder's femme fatale, to inhabit the night with confidence means to recognize the moment when one must relinquish all deception and look one's fate straight in the eye. Walter, in turn, tenaciously holds onto his delusions and fires his gun. We see a flicker of astonishment on Barbara Stanwyck's face and then she briefly winces at the pain she has begun to feel. Death, the brother of her dream of freedom, is not terrible to her. She has acknowledged her tragic fate as the necessary consequence of her actions, because at this point she has relinquished all self-delusion.
    Illus. Double Indemnity
     In the world of film noir one can, however, also find delusion and betrayal cast in a mirthful tone. In Charles Vidor's Gilda (1946), Rita Hayworth uses her ravishing beauty to spur on a lethal love contest, even while the nocturnal phantasmagoria she inspires has nothing fatal about it. Buenos Aires at the end of the Second World War, where she suddenly turns up as the wife of Ballin Mundson (George Macready), owner of a night club, functions as a liminal site between war and peace, as well as between the exotic and the familiar. As in Double Indemnity, the narrative begins in the afternoon, only in this case it is her husband who brings home the young man whom he has just hired as his new right hand. Initially the two men stand in the shadow before her door and listen to her singing to herself. As they enter the brightly lit interior of her private room, they see her practicing her art of seduction in front of a mirror. As her gaze falls on Johnny(Glenn Ford), whom Gilda immediately recognizes as her former lover from New York, her smile freezes into the mask of smooth elegance. She triumphantly stares at the man whom she knows to be utterly surprised to find her married, thus signalling to him that this is her revenge for his having abandoned her.
    However, as was the case with the close-ups Billy Wilder gives to his femme fatale, so, too, Charles Vidor moves his camera towards Gilda's face and we recognize that within seconds her sparkling confidence has transformed into worried annoyance. The appearance of the two men will force her into playing at a game, in which it is as yet unclear who will win and who will lose. She allows Ballin to kiss her, while focussing Johnny with her gaze, because she is only too aware that the marriage she had entered upon in the hope of finding an easy life, has suddenly transformed into a dark love intrigue. The casino, in which Gilda will aggressively display her charm, emerges as the stage for a dangerous competition. She chooses to don the role of the infamous femme fatale Johnny takes her to be, ostentatiously flirting with other men. But she also uses this nocturnal stage to attack her former lover with her wit, and in so doing displays an intimacy from which he can not withdraw. Significant in this version of the femme fatale is the way Gilda is driven by a mixture of courage and despair, given that in this nocturnal world she is utterly alone. She has appropriated feminine guile as her form of masquerade, believing this to be her only viable weapon in the ménage à trois her suspicious husband has involved her and her former lover, testing his wife by testing how Johnny will deal with his hurt pride.
    Gilda's strategy consists in consciously calling forth her former lover's anger. She hopes that by forcing him to recognize his passion for her, hate might again turn into love. The casino sets the perfect stage for a world in which Gilda can only trust her luck, giving herself up completely to a game of deception, in which she can shamelessly exhibit her feminine charms, because all else lies beyond her control. This love comedy is noir not only because the backdrop to the lover's quarrel is a sinister battle for the global market of tungsten light, but also because of the logic of love it unfolds. Gilda seeks to perform the darkest fantasies Johnny has of the deceptive femme fatale, so that having come to the heart of darkness of his jealousy, he recognizes his hate to be the result of his heated imagination. If Gilda requires the artificial light of the casino to sparkle at the roulette table and the  dance floor,  she also requires his blind rage as the dark backdrop, from which she can emerge as his true love. At the height of a carnival night, she will finally get Johnny to give in to her seduction. That same night her husband will feign an airplane accident in order to disappear. But Johnny is not yet ready to wake up from his jealousy. Although he marries Gilda, he still wishes to punish her.
    She, however, knows how to retaliate, turning their noir romance into parodic excess. During her infamous strip-tease, Gilda appears on the dance floor of the casino dressed in a tight, sleeveless satin gown. Her song invokes the figure of an originary femme fatale, mother of all catastrophe. "Put the blame on Mame," she repeatedly declares, while reducing all the wickedness of the world to the sensual body movements of a night-club dancer. Cinematographically, the charm of the scene resides in the fact that Rita Hayworth is clearly enjoying her celebration of the erotic power of the femme fatale. Her Gilda ironically smiles at the camera, as the spot light tracks her across the dark stage, signalling to us that she knows she is holding our attention. Impersonating feminine fatality, she is fully confident that she knows how to unleash her lover's jealousy. During her performance she slowly takes off only one glove, but once she is finished with her routine, she quickly throws the second one into the audience and follows this up by asking whether anyone can help her with her zipper. She knows that Johnny will intervene in this scandalous spectacle, staged to force him to confront the truth of his dark fantasies about her.
    Illus 3. Gilda
    The violence, with which he pulls her from the stage and slaps her may encompass an act of humiliation. Yet Gilda is everything but passive, and Johnny is not forcing her to wake up from a state of uninhibited sensual display. Rather Gilda has consciously provoked him, seeking to force him to recognize that at the heart of his violent outbreak of passion lies true love. In this noir spin on the classic sophisticated comedy of the 30s and 40s, the femme fatale successfully corrects the deluded gaze of her lover. The tears with which she responds to Johnny's violence renders visible the complexity of her nocturnal charm. She has taken upon herself the seductive power of the night in part, because she felt she had no other alternative, in part, because erotic self-display is what she enjoys. Like Billy Wilder's femme fatale, she is willing to risk everything, even if this means she will get hurt herself. But in contrast to Phyllis – and therein lies the significant difference between the tragic and the comic noir tone – her performance of feminine infamy has actually opened the eyes of her faithless lover. Faced with an enactment of his worse fantasies, Johnny has not only utterly lost control. He resorts to a slap in the face not a shot in the heart, and is thus able to wake up from his dream of an all-encompassing jealousy. When they meet for the last time in the casino, Gilda is no longer wearing a glamorous evening gown. She is soberly dressed for the quotidian life in America she is about to return to. Johnny humbly asks her to take him with her, and relieved, she accepts. No further excuses are necessary, because as they walk arm in arm into the lit corridor at the end of the hall, the film ends. The transition into the mutual everyday they are about to embark on remains beyond our sight, which means that perhaps a new carnival is about to begin in post-war America.
    Even if women only rarely work as police officers or detectives in the films Hollywood produced in the 40s and 50s, we find in film noir heroines seeking to light out the dark net of intrigue they find themselves embroiled in. Significantly they often find themselves at the navel of this fantasy scenario. Alone in her luxurious New York apartment, we once again encounter the actress Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), playing the hysteric invalid Leona, daughter of a wealthy businessman. Dressed in her elegant lace night gown she is waiting in vain for her husband Henry (Burt Lancaster) to come home. Resting comfortably on the bed she has not left for months, she tries one last time to call him at his office. Because the line continues to be busy, she is about to hang up, when she suddenly hears the voices of two strangers, telling each other that a woman will be murdered at a quarter past eleven that night. While the police, whom she immediately calls, can do nothing  with her meagre information, Leona persists in thinking about the strange conversation she overheard, not knowing that her husband has clandestinely left the city because he is, in fact, the man who ordered the murder and she the intended victim.
Her bed emerges as the control station in a double voyage of discovery, because in solving the mystery of Henry's absence she also solves the question of her own lethal desire. We see the first signs of fear as she begins to breath more heavily, while wiping beads of sweat from her brow with her lace handkerchief. Nevertheless she is, at this point, still able to get up from her bed, to fetch the note-pad from her desk, where her maid has written the calls that came in that day for her husband. There she finds the name of her former college roommate Sally and her face begins to beam. She proudly remembers how, many years ago, she used her charms and guile to steal Henry from her and marry him herself. Leona's ambition, we slowly discover, had always consisted in getting what she had imagined for herself, and in this unwillingness to cede her desire Barbara Stanwyck recalls her performance of Phyllis Dietrichson. Sally's voice, reaching out to Leona through the telephone, pits a picture of the collateral damage her friend's ruthless egotism has produced in her husband against this initial self-confidence. In order to gain  financial independence from his wife, Henry has gotten himself involved in the illegal trade of prescription drugs. Initially, Leona decides not to believe her former friend. Only when she receives the telegram from her husband, telling her that he will not be home for the next two days, does she fall into a state of emotional disarray, in which terror is mingled with masochistic pleasure.
As her perfectly coiffed hair slowly comes undone, her breath grows heavier and her face comes to be covered with pearls of sweat, Leona clearly enjoys the state of abandonment she suddenly finds herself in. Relying utterly on her own will power,  yet without leaving her bed, she uses the telephone to follow the lead Sally has given her, as though she were a detective in her own case. As the night breaks in, she is able to call forth confessions from her various interlocutors, which we are shown as flashbacks, so that we share with her the film unfolding before her inner eye. What this reveals, against the backdrop of a fatal night enfolding her with its darkness, is the story about her husbands criminal transgressions. He has not only been trading illegally with drugs stolen from her father's pharmaceutical company, but also with her life. Believing her to be suffering from a fatal heart disease, Henry had hoped to raise money on her life-insurance. Once he discovered, however, that her physical disability was purely hysteric, he decided to hire a contract killer, so as to cash in on her inheritance. Although this is a reversal of the scheme from Double Indemnity, it is still fruitful to read Leona as a femme fatale. While she is not the instigator, but rather the object of murder, her actions also have fatal consequences that hinge upon the question whether she is willing to acknowledge the fatality of her unyielding desire.
With the help of the voices she hears through the telephone, Leona is able to reconstruct not only her husband's crimes but more importantly her own egotistic blindness. She is forced to recognize that her hysteria not only called forth her husband's lethal desire to be rid of her. As in the case of Gilda, dancing her mock striptease, we can also call this enactment of the hysteric body noir, because it, too, focuses on the destructive side of feminine power. Leone is forced to concede that she had staged her own physical fragility in order to impose her will on her husband, regardless of the consequences. Her own vanity thus emerges as the origin of her tragic fate, since obliquely she is herself responsible for the murderous contract Henry committed himself to. If her unconditional egotism had always been nourished by her fear that Henry would leave her, she now experiences this fantasy to excess. She discovers that he is even willing to kill and thus rid himself of her, in order to cover up his shady deals. At the same time her husband was not alone in using deception in order to keep up the illusion of success. Leona's hysteria, after all, is also a form of life-sustaining deception, only one in which she has been using her illness to manipulate her husband and feed her egotistical ambitions. Like Billy Wilder's femme fatale, so brilliantly enacted by the same actress, Leona will pay with her life for the conviction that she must not cede her desire for self-determination.
The bitter irony of Litvak's film noir is that because his femme fatale insists on the fantasy of being ill, and thus entitled to force her husband to comply with her wishes, she not only signs her own death sentence but also his. During their final telephone conversation Henry begs her to leave her bed and call out for help, while she refuses. In this intense state of vulnerability she continues to be driven by her ruthless will for power. After all, to refuse to prohibit the murder her husband has designed for her is not a sign of resignation. Refusing to accept survival at the cost of giving up her self-image as the fragile, bed-ridden wife emerges as the grandiose apotheosis of a fanatic dream. Like other femmes fatales, Leona holds the thread to her life in her own hand, even while the voice of the contract killer signals the end of all noir dreams.  Having realized that the police has caught up with him, Henry had called back his wife, because her death was now unnecessary. The voice that answers his call replies "Sorry, wrong number," the code to indicate to him that the murder had been successfully completed. Only now this message is also a code for the fact that Leona continues to possess her husband even from beyond death. Henry will also not escape his due punishment, in this case not just for theft but for murder. As Litvak's Sorry, Wrong Number moves towards midnight, not only fate but also justice catches up with all the nocturnal players.
Illus 4 Sorry wrong number
The three femmes fatales chosen as paradigmatic examples for the way the noir heroine inhabits the nocturnal world allow one to draw the following typology. At one extreme we have Phyllis Dietrichson, ready to accept all risks in order to enforce her dangerous desire for self-determination. She thus comes to represent an inescapable necessity of fate born in and borne by the night. In the centre position we find Gilda, who stands for a for more mirthful game of deception and self-delusion. This queen of nightclubs trusts in the transformatory power of the night, in oder to force her blinded lover to wake up from his fantasy of jealousy. She plays for him the infamous seductress, for which he takes her, in order in the end, to disclose her spectacle of the femme fatale as the embodiment of an imaginary creature, drawn out of the darkness of the casino stage explicitly by a spot light, implicitly by her lover.  At the other extreme we find Leona, holding onto her dream of bodily incapacitation with such tenacity because her life is fatefully entwined with it. In all cases, recognizing the necessity of fate, and with it the demise of their dreams (even if not always their lives) these femme fatale insist on not ceding their desire. Even if – as in the two versions performed by Barbara Stanwyck – they prefer the freedom of death over a return to a new day. In all cases what is significant is that they know of the dark side of fantasy work, indeed are willing to respond to its lethal call, even while in so doing they are neither innocent nor blind. Instead they cultivate a vigilance in the night, which film noir casts as the dark side of modernity.