The dualism in
the portrayal of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women in art and literature is remarkable in
that, although it has taken many forms through the ages, it never varies in
substance. We see it from the Virgin Mary/Eve opposition in the Bible to the
‘good wife’/bunny boiler in the 1987 movie Fatal
Attraction. In every case, ‘good’ is the pure, the constant, the
self-denying; ‘bad’ is the seductive, the sexual, the temptress.
Nowhere do we
see this contrast played out more sharply than in the world of 1940s American
cinema, in the genre specifically known as film
noir. It’s a genre that I love, and which I had occasion to examine more
particularly in researching my non-fiction investigation of the Black Dahlia
case: the shocking murder of a 22-year old Hollywood would-be starlet called
Elizabeth Short, whose bisected body was found tossed on a pavement in suburban
Los Angeles in January, 1947.
Film noir’s particular
incarnation of the temptress came in the form of what is now considered the
iconic female emblem of the genre, the femme
fatale. Of course, the femme fatale
made her first appearance well before the 1940s: as far back as Circe and the
Sirens, who bewitched Odysseus’ men; in Morgan Le Fey, the seductive temptress
of Arthurian legend; in Keats’ belle dame
sans merci; and in Sheridan Le Fanu’s lesbian vampire, Carmilla. But the
witty, dark, clever and faithless femme
fatales of American cinema of the 1940s brought the ‘dangerous woman’ into
a league of her own. We see her in the bewitchingly beautiful and wily Brigid
O'Shaughnessy, who murders Sam Spade’s partner in The Maltese Falcon (1941); the beguilingly lovely Alice Reed, whose
portrait seduces a married man off the beaten track in Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944); and the
alluring Phyllis Dietrichson, who leads a young man to murder in Double Indemnity (1944) – to name but a
very, very few amongst dozens of examples. Whatever her name, hair colour, or
particular catch phrase, the femme fatale
of film noir is always three things: devastatingly attractive, sexually
provocative, and dangerous to men. Her rejection of conventional feminine
traits – obedience, docility, and especially wifeliness and motherhood – mean
that she is always morally ambiguous, disruptive to the plot, and ultimately,
deadly.
Why, one might
ask, was 1940s cinema so obsessed with the figure of the femme fatale? Well,
the War and its immediate aftermath were a period of immense upheaval and
change in the role of women. For the first time, a whole generation of
middle-class women rolled up their shirtsleeves and went to work. Hollywood
became deluged with unprecedented hoards of young females, all seeking the
elusive road to stardom. There was moral panic as, in the words of the
journalist Walter Lippmann, “external control over the chastity of women is
becoming impossible.”
Elizabeth
Short’s murder tapped straight into these anxieties. Here was a young,
beautiful woman from a lower middle-class suburban Boston family, come to
Hollywood to be a movie star. Like so many others, she had a free and easy
lifestyle: she had many boyfriends and would stay over with a man for a meal,
or carfare. What better femme fatale
could there possibly be? And so Elizabeth Short acquired posthumous glory in
the newspapers as a real-life Brigid O'Shaughnessy, a temptress whose breaking
of the norms of womanhood acted as a stark warning to other young women who
might be tempted to stray from the path of the light.
Of course, not
all intelligent and beautiful women in film noir are femmes fatales. One of the most positive and inspiring portraits of
a new kind of post-war woman is Betty Schaefer in Billy Wilder’s classic 1950
movie Sunset Boulevard, the young
female scriptwriter who aspires to work behind the scenes as opposed to the
spotlight-seeking, ageing diva of the film, Norma Desmond, sublimely played by
an equally ageing Gloria Swanson. And so, too, in the real-life story I
researched, I met Betty’s counterpart in the form of the intrepid female
journalist and crime beat reporter Aggie Underwood, who, with her raggedy
clothes and steely determination to solve the case, presented a vivid contrast
to Elizabeth Short. Aggie and Elizabeth were both female migrants to Los
Angeles, part of the city’s “woman problem.” But unlike Elizabeth, Aggie did
manage to carve out a role for herself, reaching stardom to become one of the
first female city editors of a newspaper in the country. The dichotomy between
Elizabeth and Aggie presented a real-life parallel to the fictional Betty/Norma
distinction, and so – as with Wilder’s classic – my book also presents a
tragic, but ultimately hopeful, vision of the post-war women’s dream.
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