Women in Film Noir

'Woman [in film noir] as elsewhere is defined by her sexuality: the dark lady has access to it and the virgin does not. That men are not so deterministically delineated in their cultural and artistic portrayal is indicative of a phallocentric cultural viewpoint: 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...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 intelligent and powerful, if destructively so, and derive power, not weakness, from their sexuality.' (Place, 'Women in Film Noir,' in Kaplan (ed) Women in Film Noir, p. 35)

''The scenario of the duplicitous woman as femme fatale affords as well as the pleasures of passivity which arise from being in thrall to her promise of love, pleasures which are no doubt also masochistic. The violent retribution so often enacted upon the femme fatale by the plot and/or the male hero bears witness not so much to patriarchal ideology as to the man's inverse desire to control and punish the object of desire who has unmanned him by arousing passive desire...The male hero often knowingly submits himself to the "spider-woman" - as Neff does in Double Indemnity - for it is precisely her dangerous sexuality that he desires, so that it is ultimately his own perverse desire that is his downfall.' (Cowie, in Copjec, Shades of Noir, p. 125)

'What is really menacing about the femme fatale is not that she is fatal for men but that she presents a case of a "pure", nonpathological subject fully assuming her own fate. When the woman reaches this point, there are only two attitudes left to the man: either he "cedes his desire," rejects her and regains his imaginary, narcissistic identity (Sam Spade at the end of The Maltese Falcon), or he identifies with the woman as symptom and meets his fate as a suicidal gesture (the act of Robert Mitchum in what is perhaps the crucial film noir, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past).' (Zizek, 'Two Ways to Avoid the Real of Desire,' in Looking Awry, p. 66)

The representation of women in the film noir genre seems to provide a sifficiently in depth research unit with an abundance of secondary sources. The fact that the 'femme fatale' characters are not as progressive a representation as other more contemporary stereotypes means that there will be more pattern in my research. This may also mean that my research may have more of a stronger conclusion.