A clip from "Double Indemnity" (1944) directed by Billy Wilder, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson.
In the classic noir plot, the hero quite coincidentally meets the alluring femme fatale—in Double Indemnity he happens to pass by her villa and enters to ask her husband to renew a car insurance policy. Yet their meeting follows the fateful logic of a love at first sight. As Mladen Dolar notes, what seemingly happened unintentionally and by pure chance is belatedly recognized as the realization of an innermost wish: 'the pure chance was actually no chance at all: the intrusion of the unforeseen turned into necessity.'
From the moment the hero catches sight of the femme fatale, both find themselves caught in a sequence of events which can go only one way. Both are tragically framed within a narrative of fate and can only come to accept the law of causation.
As Joan Copjec argues, in order to indemnify himself against the dangers of sexuality, the noir hero treats her as his double, to which he surrenders the fatal enjoyment he cannot himself sustain. On the other hand, the femme fatale is more than simply a symptom of the hero’s erotic ambivalence. She sustains his selfdelusion, but also gives voice to a feminine desire that may include him in order to attain its aim, but also exceeds his fantasy realm. In her insistence that “it’s straight down the line for both” of them, she can be understood as moving towards an ethical act meant to radically undercut the blindness of self-preservation her lover seeks to entertain at all costs.
Owing to this function of duplicity within noir narratives, Slavoj Zizek suggests that the femme fatale functions as a symptom of the noir hero’s fatal enjoyment in such a way that, by destroying her—Walter Neff will shoot Phyllis Dietrichson in the heart—he hopes to purify himself of the desire she inspired and the guilt this entailed. In so doing, however, the noir hero not only does not recognize her as separate from him (thus denying her humanity), but also remains blind to the encrypted message about the fragility of his existence that she embodies for him.
Double Indemnity has come to figure as the prototype of film noir, not least of all because it performs the rhetorical duplicity connected to the femme fatale, staging Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) both as the symptom of Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and as a female subject who will not give way and thus exceeds his narrative of the fatal consequences of their mutual transgression.
We only hear the confession he makes to his superior Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) after having shot his partner in crime; a self-justifying narrative, establishing the tragic code of failure. It begins with the statement, “I killed Dietrichson. I killed him for money and for a woman. I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman. Pity isn’t it,” and continues as a voice-over throughout the film. Yet, at key moments in the fatal sequence resulting in the production of two corpses, Wilder also offers close-ups of Phyllis’s face, visually articulating a different perspective than that of her noir lover.
“No, I never loved you nor anybody else. I’m rotten to the heart. I used you just as you said, until a minute ago, when I couldn’t fire that second shot. I never thought that could happen to me.” One could read this as a gesture of abdication, because at this moment she actually stops her seductive game to see both her lover and herself. She acknowledges him by directly acknowledging how she had used him, and, in so doing, she asks for him to attend to her. By killing her rather than putting himself in her presence, he hopes to repress both his own desire for destruction as well as his complicity with her. That she, in turn, willingly accepts the death he is giving her not only renders visible the incompatibility of their two fantasy scenarios. It also allows us to decide whether we will privilege Walter Neff’s misogynist description of the femme fatale in his voice-over narrative, or recognize her as a separate human being, exceeding his appropriation of her and, in so doing, exhibiting an agency of her own.
According to Janey Place, film noir should be read as a “male fantasy” and the femme fatale, as the mythic “dark lady, the spider woman, the evil seductress who tempts man and brings about his destruction” and who has been haunting our image repertoire since Eve and Pandora. So that, even though she is punished in the end, her transgressions against masculine authority —killing her husband, cheating the insurance company, bringing about the demise of her disloyal lover— is what tarries in our memory. As Sylvia Harvey notes, “Despite the ritual punishment of acts of transgression, the vitality with which these acts are endowed produces an excess of meaning which cannot finally be contained. Narrative resolutions cannot recuperate their subversive significance.” Within feminist film criticism, the femme fatale has thus emerged as a fundamentally unstable figure.
Not only will she not allow herself to be dominated by the men who fall for her charms, but also the meaning she assumes in any given text refuses to be fixed. In the same manner that she will not assume an unequivocal place in the fantasy life of the noir hero, no single interpretation can be imposed on the disturbance posed by her resilient feminine power. -"Femme Fatale — Negotiations of Tragic Desire" (2004) by Elisabeth Bronfen
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