Brother, what's my name?

[sovay]

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.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Other examples:

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.

[sovay]

Other examples

I don't know if I ever thanked you for selecting these. I am glad they worked for you.

[swan_tower]

I think I assumed at the time that your "thank you!" below was in response to the list of quotations as well as the single Loki one, but I don't object to you coming back to respond more specifically; it means I've re-read this discussion, and now I'm thinking about the question again. (Was co-writing something with a friend recently where she described a man's laugh as "creaking like a gallows rope," which works excellently in context and is exactly the kind of thing I was chewing on here.)

[sovay]

(Was co-writing something with a friend recently where she described a man's laugh as "creaking like a gallows rope," which works excellently in context and is exactly the kind of thing I was chewing on here.)

That is a good simile. What was the context?

[swan_tower]

Fortune-telling scene; the pov character knew from the cards that the querent had seen the beginning of a terrible (magical) plague, but had reasons not to say that outright, so soft-pedaled it as him having seen the beginning of something, she wasn't sure what. The responding line was: “The end.” His laugh creaked like a gallows rope. So it evoked both the type of laugh that is not melodious and not really a laugh, and the association with death (turned out his brother was the first one to die of that plague).

[sovay]

So it evoked both the type of laugh that is not melodious and not really a laugh, and the association with death (turned out his brother was the first one to die of that plague).

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.

[swan_tower]

Hey, tooting your own horn is legit, and even welcomed when the discussion at hand involves me going "that thing you do, you do it really well, and I'd like to learn it myself."

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.

[sovay]

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.

I think you should and I'd like to read it.

[swan_tower]

It would need the proper home, of course. But I'll keep it in mind.

[sovay]

But I'll keep it in mind.

Did this experiment ever happen?

[swan_tower]

Yes and no and yes again. :-)

The "yes and no" is not at the level of description, but rather worldbuilding: in Rook and Rose, the trilogy I'm writing with teleidoplex, there's a pervasive setting motif of textiles: threads, knots, embroidery, weaving, things being tied together, etc. Both in the sense that the region is known for good lace and embroidery and in the sense that when things get named, the images often come from that direction -- we got some impetus in that direction from the fact that "knot" is an old slang term for a gang. So it's a common refrain there, but not quite on the level of descriptive imagery like we were discussing.

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

[sovay]

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.

I approve of all levels of this project and look forward!