Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

1.3 Trouble With Girls: The Femme Fatale
Perhaps the feature of noir which has attracted the most attention in the last thirty
years or so has been the femme fatale. These women represent a subversive view and a
direct challenge to traditional womanhood and family life, contrasting with the “good girl”.
Sylvia Harvey argues, however, that as alive, independent and defiant as these women are,
they “exert a much more powerful hold on our imagination” when compared to traditional
females:
(...) the ideological safety valve device that operates in the offering of women as
sexual commodities breaks down in probably most of these films, because the
women are not, finally, possessed. Walter Neff, in Double Indemnity, summarises
the position of many of the film noir men when he concludes: ‘I didn’t get the
woman and I didn’t get the money.’ The same statement would be true for the men
of Scarlet Street (1945), They Live by Night (1949), Sunset Boulevard (1950), The
Lady from Shanghai (1948) and Gun Crazy (1949). (Harvey 1998:40)
Harvey draws attention to one of the major hallmarks of noir being the
characteristic treatment of sexual desire and sexual relationships and a distinctive range of
male and female character types which help to define noir. These elements, she adds, can
be related directly to contemporary social and cultural trends, and many of these sociocultural
themes are actually recurrent in noir ideological significance. As Neale notes, they
“include the wartime mobilisation of women and men, with its subsequent disruption of
gender roles, and post-war cultural readjustments. Much critical discussion of film noir’s
socio-cultural meanings finds parallels in these contexts in noir’s representation of gender
and sexuality” (in Hanson 2007:2). In a patriarchal culture, persistent anxiety about the
modern woman created the femme fatale as a central figure and it has been interpreted as a
symptom of male sexual unease. Sylvia Harvey points out that:
In the world of symbolic searches, exchanges and satisfactions created by these
movies, women are accorded the function of an ideological safety valve, but this
function is ambivalent. Presented as prizes, desirable objects, they seem to offer a
temporary satisfaction to the men of film noir. In the (false) satisfactions that they
represent, they might be seen to prevent the mood of despondency and loss,
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