Women Who Kill

Gender and Sexuality in Film and Series of the Post-Feminist Era

David Roche, Cristelle Maury, David Roche, Cristelle Maury

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350115613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Women Who Kill explores several lines of inquiry: the female murderer as a figure that destabilizes order; the tension between criminal and victim; the relationship between crime and expression (or the lack thereof); and the paradox whereby a crime can be both an act of destruction and a creative assertion of agency. In doing so, the contributors assess the influence of feminist, queer and gender studies on mainstream television and cinema, notably in the genres (film noir, horror, melodrama) that have received the most critical attention from this perspective. They also analyse the politics of representation by considering these works of fiction in their contexts and addressing some of the ambiguities raised by postfeminism. The book is structured in three parts: Neo-femmes Fatales; Action Babes and Monstrous Women. Films and series examined include White Men Are Cracking Up (1994); Hit & Miss (2012); Gone Girl (2014); Terminator (1984); The Walking Dead (2010­); Mad Max: Fury Road (2015); Contagion (2011) and Ex Machina (2015) among others.

Part One

Neo-Femmes Fatales

1

The Femme Fatale of the 1990s Erotic Thriller

A Postfeminist Killer?

Delphine Letort

The femme fatale is an iconic figure of film noir, arousing both fear and fascination in the shady world of crime fiction. Drawing power from her deadly eroticism and sexuality, and often symbolized by an idealized female beauty captured in chiaroscuro, she is first and foremost a manipulative and calculative killer. However, the noir femme fatale is rarely depicted as violent, for she is never filmed in the act of killing. The screen goes black when Cora is about to hit her husband in The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946), while Ellen watches her young brother-in-law Danny drown without intervening in Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, 1945) and voluntarily falls down the stairs to end the pregnancy that makes her housebound.¹ Murder is most often a veiled topic of discussion in film noir, a dangerous threat surrounding the femme fatale, which translates into symbolic lighting. Richard Dyer observes that film noir exploits the contrast between light and shadow to express the femininity of evil: “There is a frightening, disfiguring darkness to the sexuality that, moth to a flame, yearns towards the pure light of desirability.”² The femme fatale’s deathly power resides in her mastery over her own sexuality outside patriarchal control; the knowledge of her sexuality endows her with power over the men who fall for her. This knowledge can only be alluded to in classical Hollywood cinema—through suggestive clothes such as Gilda’s (Charles Vidor, 1946) black satin split-skirt dress and gloves, metaphorical conversations between lovers in The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), shots of closed doors behind which intimacy is preserved in Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1946). However, sexuality is nothing but a means to an economic end for the noir femme fatale, and murder the path to her liberation from patriarchal authority. Chris Straayer remarks that “her sexuality per se was passive, limited to its allure. Although narratively she maneuvered the male protagonist with her sexuality, the specifically sexual desire and pleasure it served belonged to the male.”³ The focus on the femme fatale’s sexuality deviates attention away from her power to kill. Although Molly Haskell celebrates the untamed character of a “woman who begins as a victim of discriminatory circumstances and rises, through pain, obsessions, or defiance, to become mistress of her fate,”⁴ her inability to kill by herself entrenches rigid gender roles. The femme fatale rarely kills with her own hands—Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (Roy Del Ruth, 1931; John Huston, 1941) and Ellen Berent in Leave Her to Heaven are notable exceptions; rather, she conceives plots that she would have others (often subjugated males) carry out for her. Instead of acting on her own, she is the passive spectator of an act committed by another. The fetishistic spectacularization of the female body, spotlighting Barbara Stanwyck’s braceleted ankle in Double Indemnity or Lana Turner’s naked legs in The Postman Always Rings Twice, and its objectification for voyeuristic consumption undermine the subversive power of the femme fatale. The conspicuous spectacle of her body downplays her desire to break the interdictions of the Hays Code (“technique of committing murder by whatever method”) and the taboos of female sexuality, for she has to conform to cinematic codes of representation that limit her power to effects of mise-en-scène. The femme fatale is subjected to barriers that lay bare the ideological crisis triggered by a woman who will not restrain her ambition to the domestic sphere; her marriage, often her only route to economic comfort, is a source of frustration that breeds and fuels her desire for murder. The femme fatale does not aim for domestic bliss but for power in a society where she is a second-class citizen; her shenanigans, however, are bound to fail in the noir narrative. Although she does unsettle the male narrator’s position of authority by seducing him into crime, her final death or imprisonment serves to reinforce the morality of the tale and respect for the patriarchal order.

A wave of erotic thrillers emerged in the 1980s and 1990s that imposed a new figure of the femme fatale, which many scholars associated with a postmodern revision of noir conventions they described as neo-noir.⁵ French critic Michel Cieutat berated these films, which he accused of exploiting women’s sexual liberation for the spectator’s voyeuristic gaze through carefully constructed narratives. The new femme fatale asserted her sexuality in films that displayed more than her tantalizing figure; no longer restricted by the moral concerns underlying the Hays Code, neo-noir directors were more than willing to depict the spectacle of the femme fatale’s sexual audacity and murderous impulses. Cieutat observed that Hollywood producers introduced an erotic touch in all kinds of film genres, making sex a depoliticized act for women whose liberated sexuality translated into a sense of bodily empowerment.⁶ Geoffrey Nowell-Smith also noticed that a new film rhetoric emerged from the deployment of exciting sex and violence on screen, which eventually became normalized through repetition:

Nor does this apparently transgr essive rhetoric any longer have the power to shock, since what seems like excess has become a routine selling element to which regular audiences have become inured. Often, too, behind the sex-and-violence rhetoric and the occasional grotesquerie, the new Hollywood films turn out to be quite conventional in their narrative forms and even in their moral values.⁷

The erotic thriller epitomized the new trend; it displayed the woman’s body as a source of entertainment, using provocative sex scene adverts to entice viewers into indulging in soft-porn features. Nowell-Smith also underlined the exhibition of violence that undergirds the representation of sexuality in the genre. The erotic thriller shows women whose sexual drives have lethal consequences. While film noir made the link between sex and death an object of repression, the erotic thriller foregrounds the femme fatale’s deadly sexual power. Paradoxically, it is the essence of woman’s evil that is revived in these films, which portray the financially independent woman as an “orgasmic femme fatale ,”⁸ who draws pleasure from the act of murderous penetration. In neo-noir, murder is no longer a route to the woman’s social liberation; it clearly appears as its consequence in the conservative 1990s, a decade during which the AIDS epidemic was on the rise. Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) epitomized the new threat of the femme fatale, using Catherine Trammel’s book as a reflexive device that describes in details the killing scene that is investigated in the film. The suspected killer sardonically states: “I’d have to be pretty stupid to write a book about a killer . . . and then kill somebody the way I described it in my book” [26:00]. This ambiguous confession suggests the tortuous mind of a killer who has made a literary career out of writing about real murders that she treats on the fictional mode.

In her recent investigation into the contemporary femme fatale, film scholar Katherine Farrimond observes that the femme fatale remains a complex figure, a site of tension where contradictory desires are projected, for “the femme fatale can be read both in terms of conservative anxiety and feminist empowerment.”⁹ Indeed, it is striking to note that the figure of the femme fatale returned in the 1980s and 1990s cinema, when feminism was experiencing an ideological backlash and postfeminism was beginning to surface.¹⁰ The contradictory interpretations of the neo-noir femme fatale as either a hypersexualized figure of empowerment or an objectified sexual fantasy illustrates the fraught debates associated with postfeminism. This chapter examines how postfeminist theories may allow for a new understanding of the killer instinct of the neo-noir femme fatale, with special attention to Basic Instinct, Body of Evidence (Uli Edel, 1993), The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994), and Bound (The Wachowskis, 1996).

Sex, Money, Murder

The formula of the erotic thriller relies on three key terms: sex, money, and murder. Kate Stables identifies Basic Instinct as “the mother of all 90s fatale movies,”¹¹ suggesting that the film provides a matrix for all subsequent productions. Author of the seminal book The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema, Linda Ruth Williams scathingly critiques the erotic thrillers as “basic stories of sexual intrigue that use some form of criminality or duplicity as the flimsy framework to support on-screen sex which is as explicit as possible.”¹² The opening sequence of Basic Instinct illustrates the merging of sex and death, Eros and Thanatos, when a naked woman violently and energetically stabs an ice pick into a man’s neck during a sex scene [4:00]. She is straddling the man who is lying on his back, with his hands tied to the bed bars, like a sacrificial victim. A close-up of his head shows blood splashing out, merging the orgasmic climax with the act of killing. The murder is represented in an illustration to the book Catherine Trammel has authored (Figure 1.1), offering a mise en abyme of the opening sequence: the male victim lies in a bath of blood with his arms stretched backward as though on a cross, whereas the figure of a blond sexy half-naked woman occupies the middle ground contemplating the scene. The ice pick stands out in the foreground with a shining blade as a piece of evidence. The drawing conveys the self-satisfaction of an all-powerful woman killer who gazes at the scene of a murder she has committed in defiance of the phallic buildings looming in the background. The focus on the weapon in the illustration echoes the final shot of the film and evokes the deadly penetration that turns a sex scene into murder, thereby pathologizing and containing the sexual quest of a woman who does not content herself with submitting to male desire. Catherine Trammel leaves scratch marks on Nick Curran’s back when she has sex with him as evidence of the orgasmic violence, her fingers digging into his flesh being another sign of penetration and deadly desire [71:30]. Basic Instinct characterizes the sexually emancipated woman as a bloodthi rsty serial killer, whose pleasure is tied to the objectification of the man she physically dominates. Julianne Pidduck expressed some satisfaction as a female viewer, enthused by the sense of self-confidence conveyed by the neo-noir femme fatale, a powerful figure who steals narrative agency from the male protagonist:

Figure 1.1 Basic Instinct (Verhoeven, 1992) : the cover of Catherine Trammel’s novel provides a model for the real killings.

Where in our everyday lives as women we are bombarded by the evidence of our increasing vulnerability, poverty, and limited social power, the fatal femme’s embodied social, sexual, and physical powers offer an imagined point of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One Neo-Femmes Fatales
• Part Two Action Babes
• Part Three Monstrous Women
• Afterword: Women Who Kill After #MeToo
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright