From ice-picks through battle sass to morning sickness: women have come a long way in noir, baby. Shot in East London, 2009.
Image credit: Lexia Snowe © 2014. All rights reserved
Enough Already?
Personally, I’d rather press my face against the glass of a Xerox machine for 90 minutes than watch a Nicholas Sparks adaptation. As for your darned vampires, you can keep them. That’s right. I’m a woman who wants more on the silver screen than has traditionally been made for and about me. Reheated rom-coms. Tearjerkers about long-lost soldiers/cancer. Sorority bitch-up comedies. (Pass, no thanks, and maybe on a slow day.) Am I alone? The box office is suggesting otherwise. Male-female audience share for recent assassin movie Red, for example, was 53%-47%.
I can’t speak for all forty-seven of those percent, but I’ll tell you about me. I shed my twenty dollars for slick tales of betrayal, rivalry and hubris between morally ambiguous men and women who see six million dollars in a stray attaché case and a way out. I like sleight-of-hand with a 9mm Glock. I like sultry urban settings. I like contoured women who refuse to apologize and quick-witted men who’ve heard it all before anyhow. What that makes me in the eyes of the Hollywood marketeers who devise beelines between butts and cinema seats, I don’t know. But the word for those movies is film noir.
Do You Noir?
Shake down your nearest film-school hipster for a definition of “film noir”, and what’s likely to tumble out is more French: femme fatale, film soleil, The French Connection. Words that could get you laid in Williamsburg, stared at in Pennsylvania and slapped in Alaska – and they aren’t necessarily going to help you with a definition. Seriously now, what is film noir?
“Noir” is French for “black”. This can be misleading. Film noir does not mean downer film, Goth film or black and white film. The Addams Family isn’t noir. Se7en most certainly is. Nor is the nationality of the word significant to its meaning. Don’t brace yourself for subtitled fare about philosophical drug addicts, featuring crazy-long silences and full-frontal nudity. The word is French because the critic who coined it was, not the movies that started it.
Trace film noir back to its roots, and you’ll arrive closer to home than you might expect. Film noir is cinema’s elaboration on American hard-boiled crime fiction. Many of the early classics of film noir were written by crime fiction novelists (Raymond Chandler) or adapted from their work (James M Cain).
Like many of those detective stories, film noir is: sex, death, and a very particular kind of loneliness that may in fact be a symptom of a Godless age. Chances are, it’s set in Los Angeles, or somewhere like it: a place in which a big city’s celebrated potential to live anonymously or start over is turned on its head. Film noir reminds us that you can die anonymously in that sort of place too, or as a result of deception by someone who adopted a new identity for bad reasons.
Film noir hurts. Good men die in it. Good men make evil choices. If there’s a happy ending, we generally have to smear the blood off first. Film noir is a paradox: it illuminates the light in life with darkness. It notes just how transient and treacherous this light is, whilst rarely being neat little foldout morality maps in which we can trace a pat aphorism for our own lives. As the line goes in Raising Arizona, “Today is the first day of the rest of our life… and already you’re fucking it up.”
La Femme Noir
Here’s another thing you might conclude from history. Film noir is as masculine as aftershave. These are movies that, with very few exceptions, men have written and made (Insomnia, by Hillary Seitz, is the single example I found of a landmark American film noir penned by a woman). And yet they invariably revolve around women, in some of the most searing and unforgettable roles ever unspooled. Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard? Noir. Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct? Noir.
“I’ve got a feeling she’s very bad news,” Racine is warned by a male buddy in Body Heat, “Take some incredibly intelligent advice and stay away from her.” Are noir movies veiled warning tales from one man to another about women? Let’s go closer…
The Analysis
In the analysis that follows, I pick out five seminal American film noir movies, from 1940s through present-day, and profile the women in them.
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