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

characteristic of these films, from being translated into an understanding and
analysis of the conditions that produce the sense of alienation and loss. (Harvey
1998:40)
Harvey uses the expression “an ideological safety valve” for the role of noir women
since they represent an explicit challenge to postwar men by being assertive and selfassured.
In refusing to play the role of devoted mother and wife that mainstream society
prescribes for her, the classic femme fatale resorts to murder as a way to free herself from
an insufferable relationship with a man / husband that sees her as his own property or as a
“desirable object”. This brings the “ur-narrative” of film noir into the male exploration of
the femme fatale’s enigma, making it a matter of urgency and importance to all men. This
also challenges the unequal distribution of power within the heterosexual couple,
reinforcing what I have mentioned in the chapter on “Postwar Readjustment”, and bears out
the difficulty that the returning veterans had in patronizing movies that would show women
who gained so much social and economic influence in real life.
Returning to the idea of the “ideological safety valve”, it is worth noting that the
forties were an era of mainstream “women’s pictures” and it may be no coincidence that so
many cinematographic productions of that period exhibited the femme fatale with her
associated psychopathology as a counterpoint, as feminist criticism about the politics of
Hollywood representation and interpretation show. In a world of action defined in
masculine terms, the image of the femme fatale helps to project male anxieties about
women. Ideologically, the noir fatal woman represents a determined attempt by American
filmmakers to portray women in a new, if harsh, way. However, the Hollywood industry
seems to contradict this outlook, trying to reflect America’s elemental promise of
confidence, wealth, and social well-being. In this regard, Janey Place focuses upon this
division between the two poles of female archetypes, in which sexuality is the terrain of
both female agency and female threat:
Film noir is a male fantasy, as is most of our art. Thus woman here as elsewhere is
defined by her sexuality: the dark lady has access to it and the virgin does not (...)
women are defined in relation to men, and the centrality of sexuality in this
definition is a key to understanding the position of women in our culture. The
primary crime the ‘liberated’ woman is guilty of is refusing to be defined in such a
way, and this refusal can be perversely seen (...) as an attack on men’s very
existence. Film noir is hardly ‘progressive’ in these terms (...) but it does give us
one of the few periods of film in which women are active, not static symbols, are
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