“The dark lady, the spider woman, the evil seductress who tempts man and brings about his destruction is among the oldest themes of art, literature, and mythology in Western culture. She is as old as Eve, and as current as today’s movies…” (Place 35). It is the movies that have given us some of the most memorable images of these women, modern Circes who trap men, use and ultimately destroy them. The beautiful and treacherous woman of classic film noir, the femme fatale, and the equally dangerous and deadly silent vamps are creations of threatened men’s imaginations; they are fantasies of destructive female sexuality as seen through male eyes, but they also become figures of female empowerment. They are strong, independent, self-serving and deceptive women removed from their “proper place” and submissive role in a patriarchal society, and thus challenge the social order. But while the silent film seductress, played most famously by Theda Bara, was a type, her cinematic descendant, the femme fatale, developed a fuller, sometimes ambivalent, more clearly drawn and individualistic personality. The women of films like The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice or The Lady from Shanghai were not caricatures of male fear projected unto the collective consciousness of the screen like the vamps, but fully blown, empowered women.
Like
the femmes fatales would after them, the vamps deprived men not only of their
discipline, but of their home, financial security, and social status. Although
she unleashed men’s sexuality, the vamp was always in control, with not enough
feeling to lose herself and her cold calculations. She sought not pleasure in
her interactions with hapless victims, but power, and the amusement and
gratification of having power over another’s body and soul; “the vamp was a
woman gone astray, a parasite woman who could feed off the solid stock of
America, destroying the vital future it should have” (Staiger 147).
Theda
Bara’s sensuality and destructiveness as a siren would rival the Griffith image
of imperiled white womanhood (Higashi 55). This virginal ideal of womanhood contained
female sexuality within the institutional framework of marriage and the family.
Pure, pious, submissive, and domestic, these characters posed no threat to masculinity. In
contrast, the vamp was dark, sultry, dangerous; “she was a beautifully coiffed
cave-girl. No matter how much lipstick she wore or how marcelled her hair,
there was something essentially of nature
about her, about her demands and devastation” (Burchill 15). The vamp was firmly placed on the other end
of the spectrum from the soft-focused, back-lit, all-American virgin epitomized
by actresses like Lilian Gish, Mary Pickford, and an onslaught of imitators of
varying degrees of effectiveness.
“Girls
changed their names to Blanche Sweet, Arline Pretty and even Louise Lovely in a
bid to become the kind of kindergarten cutie in whose mouth money wouldn’t
melt. But somewhere in Hollywood, another extra from the mid-West… was
changing, with the help of a team of power-mad publicity boys, into another
kind of girl altogether—a girl literally and purposely the exact opposite of
the Pickford posse. A girl to be the female equivalent of the anti-Christ; the
anti-Madonna. For the first time since Fatima had shimmied silently in Chicago,
sex raised its head on screen. And what an ugly head it was!—Theda Bara, who
looked like the Loch Ness Monster in a ton of mascara… She represented the
dirty Old World of sex and, like DeMille’s disaster epics, her function was to make
America’s future look even brighter” (Burchill 13-14). The vamps of the teens
and twenties, played by Bara, Nita Naldi, Lya de Putti, and Pola Negri either
emanated from Southern or Eastern European countries or were given biographies
that suggested their foreignness. The vamp, as ethnic and cultural Other, was a
personification of fear not only over female sexuality, but also the economic
and social anxieties of increasing immigration. A charged figure, the vamp was
capable of upsetting gendered relations of power as well as articulating social
tensions in early twentieth-century America (Negra 379).
Born
Theodora Goodman in Cincinnati, Ohio, Theda Bara was the first movie star to
have her personality wholly manufactured by Hollywood moguls, her name an
anagram for “Arab Death.” According to the studios, Bara was born on the sands
of Sahara or in the shadows of the pyramids to a French painter or Italian
artist, or a desert sheik and an Egyptian princess, Arab mistress, or French
actress—they could never keep their stories straight. The publicity surrounding
the young actress stressed the sinister and the macabre, spinning tales of
suicidal lovers, reincarnation, a diet of raw beef and serpent’s blood. She
happily complied and took to wearing Arabian robes, pretended she didn’t speak
English and was attended by Nubian footmen, posed next to skeletons and victims
and gave interviews in black velvet rooms with incense burning.
A Fool There Was, the first Fox
hit, released a month before the premiere of Birth of a Nation, introduced
the world to Theda Bara. The film was based on the Porter Emerson Browne play,
in turn based on Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Vampire,” which had been inspired
by a Philip Burne-Jones painting
(Higashi 55). A husband, ensnared, paralyzed, and ultimately ruined by a
temptress, abandons his wife and child, wreaking the social order based on
marriage and family. The vamp becomes a symbol of chaos, destruction, and
death. “In the end, the virtuous wife was left with little besides her virtue
and the erring husband completely devastated” (Higashi 71). The vamp of the
1910s was triumphant to the very end, unlike the femme fatale. “Fallen women
might have fallen morally, but they might also have risen financially, carried
to a higher monetary status through their alliance with their lover… One of the
aims of the post-1934 censors was to lessen the narrative disjunctions between
the pleasures of the successful rise and the requisite punishment… Had the
1930s censors regulated the 1916 A Fool There
Was, the movie might have never been released—for the vamp pays no
penalties for her crimes” (Staiger 147).
Bad
women meant good business. Theda Bara went on to make over 40 films for Fox,
with titles like The Eternal Sin, The Blue Flame, The Soul of Buddha, Purgatory’s
Ivory Angel, Carmen, Destruction, Cleopatra, Salome, The Forbidden Path, Gold and the Woman, The
Eternal Sappho, The Tiger Woman, Madame Du Barry, Her Double Life, The
She-Devil, Her Greatest Love, The Rose of Blood, and The Serpent. Needless to say, she never
transcended the limitations of a caricature of overpowering sexuality, and the
public loved to hate her. Moviegoers could live vicariously and voyeuristically
through the adventurousness and wickedness of the vamp and still feign righteous
indignation and moralize, reinforcing the stereotypical equation of woman with
sex and sin (Higashi 62).
A Fool There Was locates the
vamp’s behavior in psychological terms, but only superficially. Although the
film is subtitled “A Psychological Drama,” the financial motivation behind the
woman’s acts is not enough to justify her need for destruction. In the first
scene we see her, she smells and then crushes some roses, her irrational
cruelty on full display. Her black-and-white vertically striped, tightly
fitting gown spells entrapment, and when the dutiful wife, Kate (Mabel
Frenyear), ignores her and pulls her child away, she swears, “Some day you will
regret that.” Her entrance into John Schuyler’s (Victor Benoit) life is
accompanied by lightning storms, darkness, accidents, and bad omens, including
her lover committing suicide when he is cast aside for John. With every fallen
woman in silent film, as in noir, there had to be a fallen man, a male
character who could not resist her temptations. Like a spider sucking out its
prey’s blood, Bara’s vamp takes away John’s strength, his hair turning white
and his body becoming frail. His friends and business associates abandon him
one by one, and he descends into alcoholism. He loses his family, and eventually
the woman who seduced him as well. As Kipling poem states, “Some of him lived,
but most of him died.”
By
the twenties, however, the industry was gaining increasing sophistication, and
the portrayals could not be as crude. The vamp’s allure was starting to show
signs of wear, as men either resisted it or, having fallen prey to it, eluded
her in the end. The vamp was slowly becoming less dangerous, if not less
deadly. In Blood and Sand (1922),
Nita Naldi seduces Rudolph Valentino. The first encounter between the
characters, Valentino’s acclaimed bullfighter and Naldi’s widow, appropriately
takes place in the ring, where she throws him a snake ring wrapped in her
handkerchief. Gallardo begins to visit Dona Sol (Naldi) in her luxurious
apartment furnished in an opulent Moorish décor of drapes and divans, but at
first resists her attraction. Injured in the ring, after having given in to his
desire, he dies, but addresses his last words to his dutiful wife, swearing he
loves only her, and tosses the snake ring away. If only in death, he escapes
from the vamp’s clutches. (Higashi 72). In DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1923), the husband character not only escapes
Naldi’s temptress, but kills her in the process.
There
were more nuanced, less caricatured portrayals of the vamp in films like
Murnau’s famous Sunrise and Flesh and the Devil (both 1927),
starring John Gilbert and Greta Garbo. “Although there is an affinity between
Theda Bara’s Vampire and Greta Garbo as temptress, the bad woman ceased to be
depicted in the blackest colors in the intervening decade between A Fool There Was and Flesh and the Devil. Filmmakers showed
an increasing sophistication in portraying her psychological motivation… Sex
continued to be illicit but lost its sinister aspect and became more
pleasurable… The sensual woman still posed a dangerous temptation for man and
she had to be anesthetized to prevent the repeated collapse of male ethics, if
not supremacy” (Higashi 78).
“The
vamp was a beacon and a blessing in the cinema, the apex of what a woman on the
screen can be. The vamp was beautiful and
strong; she made helplessness, which previously had been the desirable norm for
girls on film, look insipid and uninspiring. She came from nowhere and walked
alone. The vamp was a rhapsody and a revolution” (Burchill 15). But if the
vamps of silent film were fundamentally inhuman, caricatured types of
threatening female sexuality, by the 1940s the addition of sound, as well as a
changing social climate and shifting views of female sexuality allowed for more
complex and sophisticated visions of the spider woman. Silent cinema, through
its very nature, denied women a voice, the right to be heard as well as seen.
Women could not be intelligent, witty, funny, or good conversationalists—not through
title cards—so the vamp announced herself through images, dressed in satin and
inhaling a cigarette, rather than vocally. While the vamps looked daring
without actually doing anything, the femmes fatales developed more fully drawn,
individualistic personalities.
Film
noir appeared at a historical moment of crisis, brought about by post-WWII
feelings of disillusionment, the influence of German expressionism and the
hardboiled tradition of writing of the twenties and thirties. The dominant
world view expressed in noir is one of paranoia, claustrophobia, hopelessness,
doom, a sense of predetermination, and a lack of clear moral or personal
identity. “Man has been inexplicably uprooted from those values, beliefs and
endeavors that offer him meaning and stability, and in the almost exclusively
urban landscape… he is struggling for a foothold in a maze of right and wrong.
He has no reference points, no moral base… Nothing—especially woman—is stable,
nothing is dependable” (Place 41). Everything is relative, and values, like
identities, are constantly shifting and redefining themselves. The classic noir
era (for the purposes of this paper, the period between 1941 and 1947) is of
direct significance to the female characters of these movies: the fear of loss of
identity, stability, and security reflect the dark and pessimistic post-war
social climate. Like the vamp, the femme fatale appeared at a time when
masculinity was being challenged—this time not by a relinquishing of Victorian
values, but by mass entry of women into the workforce during the war.
The
steely, beautiful woman of noir, her voice honed to a sexy, low cutting edge,
is independent, ambitious, in search of wealth and freedom, and oftentimes
confined to a marriage or relationship form which she wants to break free, with
violent results. But it is not the demise of the femme fatale that we remember
after the end credits roll, but her strong, dangerous, exciting sensuality. The
style of these films thus “overwhelms their conventional narrative content, or
interacts with it to produce a remarkably potent image of woman” (Place 36).
These
women are dislocated from their ‘proper place’ in a patriarchal society, a fact
which is frequently represented visually. They dominate the men in many of the
frames, reflecting the danger and threat they pose because of their
overpowering sexuality (Kaplan 3). Often, the femme fatales are introduced in
occasionally disquieting low angle shots, placed above the heroes, their power
over men apparent from the first glimpses of the characters. They occupy the
center of the image and/or the foreground, and even when in the background
generally pull the focus to themselves. They direct the hero’s gaze, as well as
our own through the camera as they move. As the film progresses, and they are beginning
to feel symbolically or actually imprisoned, the compositions become static and
lean towards closeups more often than medium or long shots. The composition
exerts control over the femme fatale in the third act, and their strong
sexuality in contained within these shots, often behind bars (The Maltese Falcon), in the protection
of a relationship with the male hero (The
Big Sleep), or dead (Double Indemnity,
The Lady from Shanghai).
The
femme fatale emerges from deep shadows, her face turned a harsh white by the
high-contrast lighting, and filmed in ways that will emphasize her sexuality,
often being introduced as a pair of long, elegant legs (Double Indemnity, The Postman
Always Rings Twice). Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) wears a golden
bracelet around her ankle that becomes a much discussed recurring subject of
conversation. Fittingly, it is her own name she has engraved on the jewelry, a
sign of her self-centeredness and self-serving interest. The femme fatale
either wears provocative dresses or simple, square, padded-shouldered suits
with bold patterns which further underline her independence and aggression (The Big Sleep’s heroine switches
constantly between the two extremes). A symbol of man’s fear of female sexuality
and his need to repress it, the dark woman of noir is not far removed from the
silent vamp. She becomes, to a lesser degree than the predatory and not fully
human vamp, a mask, a symbolic idea, often trailing wisps of cigarette smoke
behind her, the cue of a dark and immoral sensuality. In Lady from Shanghai, a cigarette is the pretense for the lovers’
meeting, and, appropriately, a habit Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth) picks up
only later in the film, after she has planned her manipulation of Michael
(Orson Welles). 
As
with the silent vamps, it is always the femmes fatales that are in control in
the noir, while the men are passive, bland individuals living regular,
self-contained lives. By becoming infatuated with these luscious, deceitful
women, giving way to violence and obsession, the noir heroes unleash their own
sexuality and become capable of fierce crimes of passion, which plunges them
into irreversible calamity (Hirsch 2). For the women, “sex is only a means to
an end. The end is money. Greedy and selfish, knowingly using their bodies as
destructive weapons,” these spider women emerge somehow less harmed than the
men, because they were always in it of their own accord (Hirsch 3).
The
men—when not played by Bogart, it seems—are helpless to the woman’s attraction
as she strings them along to their destruction. “I didn’t get the woman and I
didn’t get the money,” Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) announces in the beginning
of Double Indemnity, and the heroes
of The Postman Always Rings Twice and
The Lady from Shanghai could say the
same. Noir is the product of men, and the recurrent image of women as
“ravenous, castrating, demonic bitches” is nothing more than a fantasy, a
figment of male anxiety. Femmes fatales are created and seen through the eyes
of men, and the power they wield is of “disorienting the male object” (Dickos
156).These films are part of a male dominated genre, in which a hero, generally
through voiceover or flashback (or both) tries to tell the story from his
perspective, in the process searching the truth about an event that has already
happened or is on its way to completion. In a way, the story is over before it
begins, amplifying the pervasive sense of hopelessness.
The female character
can produce a fractured image, as seen from different perspectives or the same
point of view at different moments in time. Her identity is never whole, instead
shifting with each new discovery of the plot. In The Postman Always Rings Twice, Cora (Lana Turner) changes and
transforms, according to Christine Gledhill, at least eight times: she goes
from sex-bomb, through hardworking, ambitious woman, loving adulteress, fearful
girl in need of protection, victim of male power, hard, ruthless killer,
mother-to-be, to rightful sacrifice to law (Gledhill 18).
Women
in this detective/thriller narrative fit into one of two categories: the femmes
fatales, spider-women who work “on the fringes of the underworld”—bar-flies,
nightclub singers, mistresses, gold-diggers, murderesses, who sometimes help
(as in The Big Sleep) the hero, but mostly bring about harm
and destruction, and the marrying type, the good women the (anti) heroine is
contrasted with, those who have no place in this world—wives, long-suffering
girlfriends, would-be-fiancées, young girls who are vulnerable and in need of
protection (Gledhill14). In detective noirs like The Maltese Falcon or The Big
Sleep, the women become central to the hero’s investigation, its object and
often the central problem in unraveling the truth. But the investigation need
not be carried out through the agency of police or private eye; it can take the
form of confession (Double Indemnity,
The Postman Always Rings Twice). All
of these stories are dominated by questions about female sexuality and
relationships involving patterns of seduction, deception, and revelation.
The
shift form the studio-bound, cynical, romantic private eye bound by a strict
code of honor, who travels into the heart of darkness, murder, gambling, or
blackmail (or all of the above) and emerges unscathed to more realistic,
feverish criminals hopelessly entangled in the webs of their crimes signals a
transformation in the noir (anti)heroine as well. Bogart’s investigators needed
a woman that would tempt them but one which they could ultimately elude (The Maltese Falcon)—or, the opposite,
redeem from their corrupt, chaotic world through a relationship (The Big Sleep). The Maltese Falcon, directed by Huston in a more sedate manner,
with minimal use of visual pyrotechnics and only occasional use of
expressionistic lighting or low/slanted angles is more romantic, and less
psychotic in nature, the closest noir could come to an objective account of the
action. Sam Spade (Bogart) never fully gives in to Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s
beautiful, dangerous liar. Similarly to the plot, Mary Astor’s femme fatale
poses less of a threat; she is less psychotic and more sedate herself. Lauren
Bacall in The Big Sleep does not
constitute a typical femme fatale in that she actually ends up helping the
hero, but along the way, still exhibits the same independent and rebellious
will, and remains closed-off and dishonest, if only to save Marlowe (Bogart)
–sometimes from himself—and love him. Their relationship, a low-key mutual
baiting based on wisecracking and innuendo as a metaphor for both sexual
attraction and romantic feelings, is one of the healthiest and happiest
relationships of the genre.
But
while Astor and Bacall’s female characters didn’t bring about the destruction
of the heroes, the seemingly mundane, “innocent” hapless victims of films like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, seduced by the promise of sex and
money, needed the coldest of all femmes fatales. Phyllis Dietrichson of Double Indemnity is “a figure of
Machiavellian evil, chilling and reptilian,” who’s made a career of killing
people who get in her way; she is “a castrating Eve in a nightmare inversion of
the Garden of Eden myth…, a contemporary Circe luring unsuspecting men with her
siren’s song” and the poisonous sexuality of a character “conceived by men who
hate and fear strong women” (Hirsch 4, 152). Stanwyck’s performance makes for
the quintessential femme fatale of the forties, her face frozen as her mind
calculates coldly, her expressions and movements icy and rigid, “like a
painting of a recognizably real scene in which nature, on closer inspection,
looks too neat and still and poised” (Hirsch 7).
The Lady from Shanghai, by far the
most stylized—and most psychotic and least romantic—of the films mentioned, gives
in to baroque theatricality, a looming, restless, hyperactive camera, a barrage
of titled, disfiguring angles, complex patterns of shadows and oblique patches
of light forming shapes that convey chaos, and surreal, exotic settings like
the Chinese theater and the funhouse. Rita Hayworth’s character, a woman of
ambiguous origin and impenetrable motives, is characterized not by menace as
much as mystery. The vagueness of the plot and, indeed, the film’s title, runs
throughout the movie, rubbing off on Hayworth’s femme fatale. The actress lacks
the hardness and authority of Stanwyck, but her character, if more feminine, is
no less dangerous or duplicitous. We are not sure until the end just quite how
to read Elsa.
While
the vamps of silent cinema played out their stories as cautionary tales set in a
cinematic landscape resembling the cultural, social, and physical reality of
their time, the noir is a closed world of the imagination from which all sense
of “reality,” of the everyday flow of life has been rigorously excluded, “a
sealed-off environment of airless rooms, and of threatening, lonely streets”
(Hirsch 6). The femme fatale becomes, then, like the vamp, an unreal, stylized,
mythical archetype. But in her world, she is fully and utterly alive,
realistic, belonging. Because the vamp stands out in films’ recreation of
reality, she cannot become more than a type. The femme fatale, on the other
hand, as a product of and agent in the noir environment, transcends the
limitation of a stereotype and becomes a person.
“There
is misogynistic intent, to be sure, in many portrayals of such women… But the
search for female identity in noir extends beyond simply [mystery and
temptation predicated upon sexual desire], and it delineates the emerging
female character as she struggles to hear her voice in a rupture of the role
women have conventionally played” (Dickos 156) The femme fatale is a bad woman,
a desperate, wicked woman, but she is also fascinating, because she does not
fit into the “traditionally imposed travails of her subordinated function” as a
woman in a male-dominated society
(Dickos 156). Even though the femme fatale is filtered completely through male imagination,
her female consciousness is a form to be reckoned with when it escapes the
suppression of a patriarchal order. The femme fatale must pay for her
disruption of the status quo, her biggest crime being against the healthy image
of society’s female; the femme fatale almost always dies, gets arrested for her
crimes—the implication in the arrest as much a moral as a legal one—or is
brought back to her proper place in society.
Perhaps
the best way to summarize the vamp and femme fatale’s enduring power as
independent, strong female characters comes in the words of Theda Bara herself:
“Believe me, for every woman vamp there are ten men of the same… men who take
everything form women—love, devotion, beauty, youth and give nothing in return!
V stands for Vampire and it stands for Vengeance, too. The vampire that I play
is the vengeance of my sex upon its exploiters. You see,… I have the face of a
vampire, perhaps, but the heart of a ‘feministe’” (Higashi 61, Staiger 160).
----------------------------------------------------
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