Film Noir’s Femme Fatale: The Original ‘Cool Girl’?
Rita Hayworth as Gilda, Gilda (1946)
Released almost a decade ago in 2014, what has come to be known as blockbuster movie Gone Girl’s ‘Cool Girl monologue’ is a continuing object of fascination for female audiences worldwide.
From the cool girl to the scorned wife, author of Gone Girl Gillian Flynn’s protagonist Amy Dunne traverses a plethora of identities associated with tropes of female victimhood; but in a twist that would catapult the novel and subsequent movie adaptation to fame, Dunne subverts audience expectations to emerge as the veritable villain of her story.
Having previously gone underrepresented in both literary and cinematic spheres, Flynn’s unapologetic portrayal of feminine rage and vengeance resonated deeply with contemporary audiences. In the ‘Cool Girl monologue’ now-notorious online, Dunne reclaims her autonomy to orchestrate her disappearance and frame her unworthy husband for her own violent death, shedding in doing so the oppressive image of the Cool Girl. As Dunne rants bitterly on her fruitless attempt to embody the Cool Girl (ultimately rendered moot by the failings of her husband), Flynn essentially reveals the patriarchal dynamics from which the trope, seen as exceedingly in the media as in society, was derived:
- Gone Girl (2014)
Rosamund Pike as Amy Dunne, Gone Girl (2014)
Highlighting her growing disillusionment towards the women protagonists at the forefront of popular media in the earlier years of the 21st Century, Flynn, in a 2019 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, describes the inequalities inherent in the complexities that male characters, unlike their feminine counterparts, were allowed to embody:
“In a way there’s an inequality here that men are allowed to be all these things. Male characters can be good. They can be nasty. They’re interesting [in] both ways and it really pissed me off. It really felt like women were being kept in these particular types of pretty boxes. I really didn’t appreciate that.”
- Gillian Flynn, 2019
It was through her bid to see how far she could push the female anti-hero that Flynn essentially opened a Pandora's box of writers and audiences alike who would no longer accept to see women relegated to ‘pretty boxes’. In a seismic genre shift dubbed ‘the Gone Girl effect’, the success of Gone Girl catalyzed a bounteous marketplace for tales centering unreliable women, pioneering the host of female-oriented domestic thrillers, from The Girl on the Train (2016) to Midsommar (2019), that would ensue from the latter-half of the 2010s.
But is Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne really the first of her kind?
Contemporary films with leading women akin to Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne are increasingly being categorized under the “Good for Her” label in popular online discourse. However, in a 2022 analysis of the subgenre (defined as the depiction of unhinged female protagonists regaining autonomy, often through nefarious means, to enact revenge upon patriarchal structures and prompting the audience to state, “good for her”) Heimberger argues that these gratifying depictions of female rage are not a 21st century phenomenon.
Indeed, Heimberger highlights that the defining aspects of the "Good for Her" genre emerged decades ago. Typically classified as Horror/Thrillers, the films which typify the “Good for Her” genre today (such as Gone Girl and Promising Young Woman (2020)) were preceded by 70s and 80s hits Carrie (1976), Suspiria (1977), and Heathers (1989), all of whom initially exemplified these notions of female villainy and vengeance. The emergence of “Good for Her” as a subgenre in popular online discourse is therefore primarily a reflection of today’s cultural zeitgeist, wherein the shadows of the #MeToo movement and fourth-wave feminist ideology have taken hold. In Heimberger’s article, she emphasizes how the “Good for Her” subgenre’s increased cultural relevance is a symptom of contemporary audiences’ desires to experience a sense of vicarious revenge on patriarchal oppression: in witnessing on-screen women boldly reclaiming their autonomy and rejecting the ‘Good Girl’ ideals that have historically been projected onto them, female audiences can experience catharsis in seeing their repressed fantasies come to life.
Sissy Spacek as Carrie White, Carrie (1976)
However, just as feminist revolution is not a 21st Century phenomenon, nor are representations of morally reprehensible women (as leading characters) on-screen. Representations of the ‘deviant’ woman have existed for centuries: though the Femme Fatale, who is commonly understood to be an attractive and seductive woman who uses her sexuality to manipulate (and ultimately destroy) men, is generally attributed to the classic noir films of the 40s and 50s, scholars trace her roots as far as the ancient mythology of Judeo-Christian and Greek tradition. It is widely acknowledged that Eve, from the book of Genesis itself, represents the first archetypal Femme Fatale: Eve brought about the ultimate peril of humankind by eating the forbidden fruit (whether understood literally or figuratively) and tainting humanity with the Original Sin, but it was the offering of the fruit to Adam, and his subsequent implication in this divinely forbidden act, that defined Eve as a Femme Fatale. In all her iterations, the
Femme Fatale is underpinned fundamentally by her characterisation as a dangerous temptress, and the cultural undercurrents of sexual, societal and ideological unrest from which this is imbued.
Indeed, the Femme Fatale of classic noir films is regarded a timely indicator of wartime and post-war misgivings surrounding gender roles, marriage, and sexuality. The late 1940s and 1950s were a period marked by great economic and societal turbulence: changing views of sexuality and gender roles were generated as women were encouraged to enter the workforce during the Second World War, and the postwar ‘return to normalcy’ and the subsequent resistance to women's gainful employment resulted in the complicated ambience of economic insecurity and general malaise that can still be observed in the gritty cultural products of the noir period today. It’s thus no coincidence that the rise to prominence of Hollywood’s lethal seductress, the Femme Fatale, concurred with this period of societal unrest.
Popular second-wave feminist critique of the Femme Fatale argues that, in focusing on creating a flashy outward appearance through ostentatious, often revealing dress and an inclination to perform, the Femme Fatale is a primary example of how film has constructed society to view women primarily as objects (and vice versa). Alongside the implication that these women are deserving of punishment (or, in rarer cases, reform in the form of marriage), with films such as Too Late for Tears (1949) depicting their protagonists meeting their ultimate demise as a consequence to their daring and their greed, the Femme Fatale can be interpreted as a cautionary tale warning the women of post-war America to return to traditional family values - or else.
Jane Palmer meeting her end in Too Late for Tears (1949)
However, the feminist condemnation of the Femme Fatale archetype is perhaps misplaced, overlooking the significance that this feminine role model had even for women of the 20th Century. Despite the misogynistic implications implicit in the trope, the Femme Fatale offered women one of the few representations that deviated from the intense expectations for women at the time, combining freedom with fascination and erotic intrigue.
“By imitating the Femme Fatale, women could imagine that they acquired more than her attractions: her freedom, her sexual independence - and considerable enjoyment.”
Indeed, it is the Femme Fatale’s weaponization of her sexuality itself that not only poses her as a threat to patriarchal structures but, crucially, also allows her to be subverted and reinterpreted as an empowering role model. Following the period of second-wave feminist critique of the Femme Fatale, scholars began to recontextualise the archetype under a contemporary feminist lens, arguing that, by intentionally using the language of the patriarchal structure (her image as a spectacle and object) the Femme Fatale redirects power to herself, therefore no longer occupying the role of passive object, but of active participant.
For example, in Charles Vidor’s 1946 film Gilda, the respective Femme Fatale projects a false image of her promiscuity to make her ex-lover Johnny Farrell jealous, performing in a culminative scene a striptease that, though traditionally regarded as a male fantasy, subverts gender norms in that it can derive him no pleasure. Though she had always been faithful to her partners, Johnny’s frustration at his inability to distinguish Gilda’s performances from reality redirects the power of the patriarchal structure to her. By preventing Johnny, the male subject that objectifies her, the satisfaction of his desire to control her, Gilda successfully uses her objectification to produce an entirely pleasureless experience for her subject - what she’s doing is teaching him (and the viewer) a lesson: that their relationship is not one of subject versus object, active versus passive, but an equal one.
Rita Hayworth as Gilda, Gilda (1946)
And just as the Femme Fatale offered women a reprieve from oppressive patriarchal structures and gender roles in her most iconic iteration as a character trope in classic film noir, so does the “Good for Her” protagonist today. In this regard, the “Good for Her” protagonist, rooted in a collective societal response to the 21st Century resurgence in conservatism, rape culture, and systemic oppression, may be conceptualised as a contemporary evolution of the Femme Fatale archetype - a timely rebellion against tradition.
The popularity of films like Gone Girl therefore reflect the burgeoning desires of viewers to confront the unfortunate realities of their circumstances in a sense of fantastical vengeance upon on-screen symbols of hypermasculinity. The ‘Cool Girl Monologue’ expresses for women the repressed desire to be liberated from the pressures of performance: in the monologue, Dunne essentially recounts the ways in which she performed for the male gaze, thus rendering herself an object, in an attempt to embody the Cool Girl that would ostensibly lead to her happiness. The dualities depicted in the character of Amy Dunne, as performer and liberated agent of her own destiny, therefore reflect those found in the innumerable interpretations of the Femme Fatale.
Like the Femme Fatale, however, there are many valid criticisms for the “Good for Her” protagonist. Indeed, the subgenre’s biggest pitfall is for its confinement to a predominantly white-feminist lens: the “Good for Her” protagonist tends to be white, cis-gender, and conventionally attractive, adding nuance to the attributes that these contemporary Femme Fatales are able to weaponize - regarding Gone Girl specifically, it is her white privilege that allows her to leverage her image as a victim. However, it is perhaps exactly this that leaves a dimension of intrigue concerning the future of the Femme Fatale archetype - the Femme Fatale of tomorrow may well provide the complex portrayals of women embracing all facets of their intersecting identities that we’re still searching for.
In any case, what remains clear is that the legacy of the Femme Fatale, as an empowering figurehead for women, lives on. Though she may have been shot and jailed, the perpetual subject of the whims of her oppressors, both doomed seductress and fully-fledged villain, the Femme Fatale brandishes a mirror against the patriarchy, exhibiting enduring strength and wicked intellect, audacious and without shame.
By Elodie Davies
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