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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.
no subject
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
no subject
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.
no subject
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. :-)