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Brother, what's my name?
I wrote the following around six in the morning, sparked by finishing my writeup of Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross (1949) and then showering and trying without much success to shut my brain off enough to sleep. I figured I would look at it when I woke up and see how much it resembled dreaming Dorothy Parker. Nothing in here rhymes with "passes" or "glasses," so it seemed safe to post. All of this is thinking out loud.
It is not that I don't believe in the archetype of the femme fatale. Film noir is full of dangerous, duplicitous women, as it is frequently full of dangerous, duplicitous men. I've met some examples already; I'm sure others exist. I just feel increasingly that the femme fatale, like the private eye, is a much more significant and frequently employed character in neo-noir—and film criticism—than in film noir itself. I would love to know when the term was coined and/or first applied within film noir, whether it happened during what I think of as the first wave of the genre (1940's), the second (1950's), or if it was even later, looking back from the neo-noir years. Most things look simpler in reception than in reality. Athene is not the goddess of wisdom.
I may have come to regard the term "femme fatale" in much the same way as I regard the term "Mary Sue"—I don't argue with the utility of a shorthand label for a class of fictional characters, even negative ones, but when I start seeing it misapplied to any female character at the center of a narrative, I start to side-eye its motives.
It is possible that I am skeptical of the concept of the femme fatale because I am approaching these movies from the perspective of a culture that no longer quite so uncritically accepts as a real factor in human interaction the irresistible attractiveness of women that absolves men of bad behavior committed while under its spell. This paradigm most often turns up in contexts of sexual consent, but I see no reason it shouldn't apply to crime. Probably for this reason, I really notice when noir filmmakers take care to point out the culpability of men as well as the incentive of women. It happens much more frequently than, even a few years ago, I might have thought.
If the deception isn't deliberate, if the seduction isn't part of the strategy, if she isn't using men to make up for the agency she can't otherwise obtain within the gendered confines of her society—or just for the fun of it—I don't think she's a femme fatale. She may be a bad idea, but so are a lot of romances that aren't La Belle Dame Sans Merci.
Tagged for Patreon by virtue of really being an extension of the previous review. I wouldn't have been able to fit it into a footnote.
It is not that I don't believe in the archetype of the femme fatale. Film noir is full of dangerous, duplicitous women, as it is frequently full of dangerous, duplicitous men. I've met some examples already; I'm sure others exist. I just feel increasingly that the femme fatale, like the private eye, is a much more significant and frequently employed character in neo-noir—and film criticism—than in film noir itself. I would love to know when the term was coined and/or first applied within film noir, whether it happened during what I think of as the first wave of the genre (1940's), the second (1950's), or if it was even later, looking back from the neo-noir years. Most things look simpler in reception than in reality. Athene is not the goddess of wisdom.
I may have come to regard the term "femme fatale" in much the same way as I regard the term "Mary Sue"—I don't argue with the utility of a shorthand label for a class of fictional characters, even negative ones, but when I start seeing it misapplied to any female character at the center of a narrative, I start to side-eye its motives.
It is possible that I am skeptical of the concept of the femme fatale because I am approaching these movies from the perspective of a culture that no longer quite so uncritically accepts as a real factor in human interaction the irresistible attractiveness of women that absolves men of bad behavior committed while under its spell. This paradigm most often turns up in contexts of sexual consent, but I see no reason it shouldn't apply to crime. Probably for this reason, I really notice when noir filmmakers take care to point out the culpability of men as well as the incentive of women. It happens much more frequently than, even a few years ago, I might have thought.
If the deception isn't deliberate, if the seduction isn't part of the strategy, if she isn't using men to make up for the agency she can't otherwise obtain within the gendered confines of her society—or just for the fun of it—I don't think she's a femme fatale. She may be a bad idea, but so are a lot of romances that aren't La Belle Dame Sans Merci.
Tagged for Patreon by virtue of really being an extension of the previous review. I wouldn't have been able to fit it into a footnote.
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My OED lumps all the "femme" constructions together, which is extremely annoying.
ETA: the new edition 3 online has a citation from 1879, which is better, and dates it back to "1800 or earlier" in the French French (rather than the English French) usage.A 1954 citation seems to be in the context of a film noir type of thing being reviewed.However, with only four citations, it is difficult to track nuance and application.
I have no real expertise in this area, whatever it is, but it's a very old concept (Eve) aimed at pushing off responsibility for misdeeds onto women. But it's also crossed with sirens of various styles---irresistibly sexually attractive women---and thus the woman herself is not a person, really, she has no control over her magick sexiness either. The better appearances of the trope in film noir are the ones with agency, motive, and purpose, and that sets the cardboard ones at a disadvantage.
I think I have a book about this in a box somewhere.
ETA2: The Google ngram viewer is not particularly helpful, but does peg some uses in French to the 1820s and shows English usage racing upward from the Roaring '20's. But given the quality of their scanning, and the 1800 cutoff, not so useful.
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Thank you for the citations! I am not surprised to hear that the term originates in the nineteenth century or earlier; it feels like a very Romantic concept to me. Absolutely agreed on the antiquity of the idea and that it is a way of characterizing women as malign forces than people (which I suspect is another reason it reminds me of the concept of the Mary Sue). I will try to track down the entry of the term into film criticism. It seems to have become a default way of looking at women in noir and it is so hopelessly generalizing that it's useless.
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ETA: yet another trope subverted by Jessica Rabbit.
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Don't forget the jazz-age, silent film vamp. I am not sure if the two terms are synonymous, but Theda Bara has to be in the DNA of this archetype somewhere.
[edit] yet another trope subverted by Jessica Rabbit.
Very much so. Now I have "Why Don't You Do Right?" stuck in my head again.
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Thank you, alas. At least I like this thing where I can think in the shower again.
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What an interesting question! I will have to think about it, because off the top of my head I don't know. It's not a quality I read for consciously, although I agree that I notice when it's missing—the absence of physical description is one of the things that can make even a well-plotted, well-spoken book feel thin. I think I tend to fold it into my requirements for an enjoyable prose style. I take it you don't mean just blocking or a visual summary of a character's identifying features: you want something about the character's behavior as described to tell you something about how they work internally as well as what they look like doing it? (I am reminded of Edward Petherbridge as Newman Noggs. Speaking of prose styles, mine in that entry is six years out of date and I can't read it without wanting to rewrite it, but these things happen. So did a lot of weirdly placed semicolons, apparently.)
You've got this wonderful talent for coming at that from an oblique direction that somehow winds up amazingly on point
At the risk of dropping out of this conversation like a cartoon character who's just looked down at the plain air under their feet, may I ask for an example? I'm not sure I can actually separate what you're asking for from the gestalt way I think about characters. (I can pinpoint when I started watching it in actors, though: Gussie Fink-Nottle, 2002.)
and then there's the over-the-top line in the cricket match in Murder Must Advertise where it talks about Peter "opening up wrathful shoulders" and going to town on the game
"Nothing makes a man see red like a sharp rap over the funny-bone, and it was at this moment that Mr. Death Bredon suddenly and regrettably forgot himself."
I have always loved that scene despite not actually understanding anything about the workings of cricket; it is so energetically described that I've always assumed I could diagram it if I had to to and construe at least a provisional version of the rules thereby. (Obviously, I've never tried.)
Dunnett can do it; Sayers can do it; I need more authors to study and think about how they can evoke such a vivid image in such a brief space, while using descriptors that are (for me, anyway) wholly unexpected.
I will try. Peter S. Beagle might be a good starting point; he has a knack for improbable-sounding similes that really work. And I have always loved the introductory description of Schmendrick: "a tall, thin man with an air of resolute bewilderment. He wore an old black cloak, and his eyes were green."
[edit] While out of the house, I also thought of M. John Harrison, Mary Gentle, Elizabeth E. Wein, Ysabeau Wilce, sometimes Patricia McKillip, sometimes A.S. Byatt, Jane Gardam, Margery Allingham, Sarah Monette writng as Katherine Addison, Frederick Nebel on a wholly unpredictable basis, and, perhaps not oddly, a bunch of the mid-century female suspense writers I was reading over the winter—Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Dorothy B. Hughes, Helen Eustis, Vera Caspary, Charlotte Armstrong, Dolores Hitchens. Barbara Hambly, especially in the earlier books of the Benjamin January series. I can't tell if it's significant that most of the authors I've mentioned here are women.
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Yes, exactly -- that plus the ability to find the odd-but-telling angle. So, I can say that a character sat down, but some writers (you included) can find a phrase that will not only convey the movement but something more; or you'll skip the sitting-down part entirely and instead say something about a hand gesture or a shift of the shoulders that's way more interesting to begin with. I especially want to be better about describing body language, because it rivets me onscreen when I see an actor who uses it well, but so far I don't have the knack for conveying it efficiently . . . and if you use too many words, the effect is lost.
It's been a while since I've read any Beagle, but "resolute bewilderment" is in line with what I'm thinking of, so I'll go take a look. Improbable-sounding similes are indeed one of the tricks; I'm not sure anybody can explain how to make them work.
At the risk of dropping out of this conversation like a cartoon character who's just looked down at the plain air under their feet, may I ask for an example? I'm not sure I can actually separate what you're asking for from the gestalt way I think about characters.
That's a fair response, given that I have a hard time picking out individual lines rather than gesturing at an entire review and going "what you did there." :-) I'll post samples from your more recent reviews in another comment (because length limits), but your description of Loki in Thor is one I liked enough to save:
I love how he has a habit of appearing in mirrors, how you can almost never tell what is calculation and what he really feels; how, black-haired, blue-eyed, feverishly pale, he's a callback to the icy dark of Jötunheim, but the dusk-blue that burns up through his skin at its touch, hel-blár, is the one mask he never knew he was wearing. He has a thin-skinned, transparent look about him, a raw edge under glass. It makes him an effective deceiver: he looks as though you should be able to read him with one level stare, which will only show you what you want to see. And it makes him vulnerable: the incredible, child's desolation in his face as he lets go of everything that has been his life and falls into Ginnungagap like a collapsing star. Like a good trickster, he is never a single, quantifiable thing.
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Gloria Grahame as an epically unimpressed moll with the fanciest gloves this side of the Suez
surmounting her froth of skirts like Aphrodite arising from the sea
She can't use Charles himself as a reason not to cheat, not as he is, her dull, loyal, maladroit husband who wouldn't know how to be Byronic if you handed him a translation of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage with diagrams.
I don't blame him for scratching his head like he's trying to find his phrenological area of reality check
His dry voice reinforces the character's cynical edge, which a surfeit of love and tulips never quite succeeds in sanding off; his knack for vulnerability means that while it's in the script that his native New Yorker is utterly confounded by the rural sweetness of Little Delft, it's from Heflin's off-rhythm delivery and tight reflexive smile that we suspect that even in his natural habitat the reporter isn't totally the smooth operator he'd like us to believe.
the self-conscious efforts of adults to make contact run off her like rain
His face is always having an argument with itself—the mouth is cynical, but the eyes are concerned.
Girls come and go, but Johnny's "stooge" stays, as permanent a fixture as the streamlined furniture or the modern sculpture by the door, headachily wincing his way through love-talk at the breakfast table between Johnny and his latest imminent ex.
Jeff, who has been drinking steadily throughout as if trying to drown his bullshit detector, finds that he can't do it and puts down the glass with a sourly muttered "That sure went down the wrong way."
She was a singer, a political activist, and a politician, with an astonishing face—broad-mouthed, lion-eyed—a mane of heavy, Helen-fair hair and a voice so deep and husky, it sounds like the earth itself growling when it drops even further with emotion.
He has the lean height of an archaic hero; his eyes are white and dark as a bronze statue's glass.
He's been waiting fatalistically his entire life to prove the worst of himself and simultaneously kicking hard against the town's opinion of him: what the viewer can't tell is whether he believes there's redemption for him any way he turns or only different ways of going to hell.
He has brushy dark hair, quick-drawn brows at a troubled tilt, a mouth that folds tightly over its own pain; the actor was about ten years older than his character at the time of filming, but the effect is poignant rather than artificial—at twenty-five, Danny Hawkins already looks bitter to the bone.
She has a cat-eyed expressiveness that makes up for the shortcomings in her dialogue
He drags one leg with an audible rasp, a snakelike signature. Disembarking in idyllic Santa Lisa, he halts briefly at a crosswalk while a Memorial Day parade passes by, all proud brass and flags; he is the war's unwelcome shadow, cutting through the celebratory ranks at his own disruptive, disabled pace.
He returns to Santa Lisa a changed man. Something has been skinned off him: the gleaming confidence of the future-bright '50's he seemed to embody, perhaps. He sweats. His smile is too tight. His eyes are too wide. Drawing the shades, switching out the lights, canceling dinner plans to eat at the kitchen table by a minimal third-degree glow, he plunges his house from shining postwar optimism into the cross-barred darkness of noir.
Mary Astor's Pat is the Mehitabel of L.A., a weathered alleycat of a former beauty in broken heels and chipped nail polish; she's seen it all, done it all or had it done to her, and her face is disdainful with preemptive disappointment, but the nervous generosity that flashes out of her is real, if not always well-aimed.
the room of mirrored closets, each containing a previous generation of beautiful, imprisoned, girl-shaped AI, sullen as a heart in the red lights of a power outage
It is correct that David Bowie should be almost impossibly beautiful as the alien who goes by the name of Thomas Jerome Newton, with his translucent face and his luminous clementine-peel hair; he can look dangerous and desperately vulnerable in the same breath, too thin-skinned for this planet of overwhelming mental noise and wasteful wealth.
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I don't know if I ever thanked you for selecting these. I am glad they worked for you.
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That is a good simile. What was the context?
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Nice. It is probably pretentious to point to my own reviews, but it was really neat to see the Lovecraft Reread point out how sea-soaked the language of "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts" is, because that is the kind of thing that matters to me in the texture of my own writing. Similes and other figurative language bring in all the echoes it would be clunky to drop directly into the text. I don't want to make it sound too clinical, because often for me it isn't, it's just what feels right, but without that dimension I know my prose feels thin to me, and it's something I like to see in the writing of others as well.
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I'm now wondering what would happen if I chose a particular constellation of imagery for a story and ran with it into the wild blue yonder.
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I think you should and I'd like to read it.
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Did this experiment ever happen?
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The "yes and no" is not at the level of description, but rather worldbuilding: in Rook and Rose, the trilogy I'm writing with
But then the "yes again" is that I just wrote a short story in that setting, and partway through I realized it's a very good candidate for trying to take that setting-level motif and work it into the prose more directly. (Not least because the short story is 3300 words long instead of 226,000.) I figured that out about halfway through writing the story, so it goes on the list of things I need to fix when I revise, but yeah -- I may use this as a direct experiment in what happens when I list out all the verbs and nouns and adjectives that evoke textiles, and see how often I can work them into my -- wait for it -- text. :-P
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I approve of all levels of this project and look forward!
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Do you find it easier to describe in characters you've read or watched than ones you've invented?
Improbable-sounding similes are indeed one of the tricks; I'm not sure anybody can explain how to make them work.
You want to look especially at A Fine and Private Place (1960), The Last Unicorn (1968), and The Folk of the Air (1986), then. The last especially has some of the weirdest and yet most precisely evocative descriptions in Beagle's prose, of which the only examples I can remember without the book on hand are "neat as a new ice cream cone" and, a goddess speaking of herself, "I am a black stone, the size of a kitchen stove . . . I am rut and flood and honeybees. Since you ask." (The first chapter also contains some of the best-written action comedy I've read in a novel, detailing a totally unsuccessful carjacking. Some of it is over the top, but I will respect the line "A Winnebago the size of a rural airport filled the windshield" until I die. And the fact that Farrell is worrying so much about whether the reckless driving entailed in scaring the bejeezus out of his attempted carjacker is going to get his lute broken that he fails to notice for quite some time that he is driving recklessly against traffic, which basically does tell you everything you need to know about Farrell right off the bat.) The first memorably describes the air on one of those hot, still summer afternoons as "a block of warm copper fitting neatly around the earth." The Last Unicorn is just full of lines that went into my head so young, I can't calculate how they affected the ways I think about language. "The tide was out, and the bald beach had the grey, wet gleam of a stripped shellfish, but far down the strand the sea was bending like a bow, and Molly knew that the ebb had ended."
I'll post samples from your more recent reviews in another comment (because length limits), but your description of Loki in Thor is one I liked enough to save
Thank you!
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Do you find it easier to describe in characters you've read or watched than ones you've invented?
. . . neither? This particular aspect of writing is something I've only just started paying close attention to, so I haven't experimented much. I expect I would do better, though, with describing something I've seen, because then I don't have to decide what the body language is before I figure out how to describe it. (Also, I taught myself how to integrate dialogue with the surrounding text by transcribing movie scenes, lo these many years ago.)
"a block of warm copper fitting neatly around the earth."
This reminds me of the line in Dunnett about Lymond's skin being "neatly tailored over his bones," which is another one I always liked.
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Okay; that's fair. May I ask what your physical sense of your characters and scenes is usually like?
I expect I would do better, though, with describing something I've seen, because then I don't have to decide what the body language is before I figure out how to describe it.
I would try that as an exercise, then. If nothing else, I think it would help isolate what kind of information you find essential to movement and personality vs. what can be conveyed by other narrative means. Also, I would enjoy reading it.
This reminds me of the line in Dunnett about Lymond's skin being "neatly tailored over his bones," which is another one I always liked.
That is good.
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It varies depending on the story in question, but I'm most aware of blocking on a broad level, and the least aware of facial expressions, with body language somewhere in the middle. But all of those are secondary to my sense of the characters' interiority; that, not what their bodies are doing, is what drives the words I put down. I will sometimes have a very vivid detail in mind, but not all of the time, and it's relatively rare for that to pervade a whole scene, instead of being a single moment. I probably do the best with action scenes because I was a fight choreographer for theatre, so I'm accustomed to making myself stop and think through the movements on a finer-grained level than I ordinarily do. Probably my best-sustained effort at really getting the physicality of a character on the page is Dead Rick in With Fate Conspire; I have no idea how much that's due to me having a firm casting for him before I even started writing the book (Burn Gorman, owing a lot to his Torchwood role), and how much it's to do with the nature of the story, because it got down into the grittier side of London and that made my brain think more physically.
I have no idea if that's what you meant when you asked that question, but if not, let me know and I'll try to clarify.
If nothing else, I think it would help isolate what kind of information you find essential to movement and personality vs. what can be conveyed by other narrative means.
I suspect it's owing to my dance background that I tend to be drawn more to the action of bodies than of faces -- though it may also have to do with the way that lots of actors can use their faces, but a smaller percentage of them really understand how to make that go down to their toes.
But really, I think it's the step where I find a non-mechanical description for what I'm seeing where I most fall down. To take a single, very specific example: in the first episode of the Sherlock series ("A Study in Pink"), there's a moment where Sherlock's listening to the cabbie, the camera in a very tight close-up, and his lip twitches ever so slightly -- a movement that would be a sneer if he let it go further. I see that; I like it; I need to experiment more with ways to describe it other than "his lip twitched slightly" or "not quite a sneer."
My difficulty with this is probably related to my complete ineptitude at poetry. :-P
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That's neat. Do you usually cast your characters?
a movement that would be a sneer if he let it go further.
See, I think there is nothing wrong with that description at all: it signals emotion, potential, movement, restraint. It's much more evocative to me than either of the two—admittedly inadequate—suggestions you offer in quotes.
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Not often, no, and when I do, it usually comes after the fact. Having a casting in mind from the start is rare.
. . . and now that I think about it, one other case where I know I had a casting from the beginning was Paul Bettany as Jack Ellin (In Ashes Lie). And I also feel like I have a better physical sense of Jack than I do of many other characters, so I may be on to something here.
(I also had Amr Waked cast as Suhail before I wrote him in Voyage of the Basilisk, but that came via a Google Image search, not via seeing Waked in a lot of roles. I wanted a good visual reference when I described Suhail because, quite frankly, Arabic men are not common in my daily life, and I wanted to be sure my description didn't slide back toward my usual defaults. So I don't feel like that contributed to physicality in the same way.)
See, I think there is nothing wrong with that description at all
I thought of that after I posted it. Mind you, that's a phrasing that only works in some contexts -- which is likely to be true of any of the more evocative approaches, because not every perspective is going to work with a given metaphor or analytical distance or what-have-you. But if I were writing that scene, I know my instinctive approach would be more interior: if I'm in Sherlock's perspective, I'd be more likely to describe the emotional reaction he's controlling rather than its outward manifestation, and if I'm in the cabbie's perspective, the lip twitch might be in there, but as a side note in the cabbie's perception of the fact that he's managed to needle Sherlock (the lines around it are "you're just a man, but [Moriarty] is so much more"). "If he let it go further" is a judgment that might fit into the cabbie's pov, but not Sherlock's, and it feels most natural to say that when I'm speaking from a more exterior perspective.
I'm also coming around to the opinion that omniscient is vastly underrated and needs to be used more in modern fiction, but that's a separate discussion. :-)
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AMEN. Yes.
"Things are going badly in my life. Must be the fault of the woman I'm involved w--" NO. Stop.
Since the directors are taking the time to show that the women *aren't* culpable (in the examples you've talked about), and that the men make bad decisions all on their own, is it maybe that that's what the directors are trying to show? --the blame-others tendency when clearly your own bad choices are actually what got you into the situation?
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It didn't even work for Adam! You still got blown out of the Garden, buddy. Own it.
is it maybe that that's what the directors are trying to show? --the blame-others tendency when clearly your own bad choices are actually what got you into the situation?
In the cases of Double Indemnity and Criss Cross, definitely; it's part of what makes the movies work. There's a lot of real fatalism in the genre, but there are also a lot of characters who want to pass the moral buck. It's easier to be foredoomed, because then it's not your fault. If there was never any way out, you can't be blamed for not finding one. I really need to rewatch The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) to see how that movie apportions its blame and complicity. I remember it being a two-person job.
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If you get to it before I do, please provide a report!
Afterthought to the conversation above: Joseph Losey's The Prowler (1951) also features a noir protagonist who can put the blame anywhere but on himself, and whom we are not in the slightest meant to believe.
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Thank you! That matches what I remember, but I have not seen the film since high school, so I figure a refresher course is in order.