I. Introduction
The noir tradition in film and literature offers a singular perspective on the power struggle between men and women in a patriarchal society. The femme fatale, an icon of the genre, is often an ambiguous figure, seeking control over hard-bitten male authority figures who often have little more to recommend them than their masculinity. Being male, they hold the upper hand by default but circumstances render them vulnerable, eroding the de facto power they hold as men and giving their female counterpart an opening. The femme fatale uses that vulnerability to gain leverage and play the angles. But being female, she must play according to the dictates of Nature and a patriarchal society, regardless of the strength of the hand she holds. In Gilda and The Killers, the female protagonists in this gender equation assert themselves powerfully but are constrained by the bounds of patriarchal authority. To borrow a tried phrase, they “ply their feminine wiles,” using sexuality to exploit men. Gilda and Kitty Collins seek to challenge patriarchal authority power but, by employing their sexuality, they merely reinforce the sexist expectations of the patriarchal order. In the end, the femme fatale is a weapon serving the interests of a male-dominated ideology.
II. ’Gilda’ and the sacrifice of moral integrity
In Gilda, Rita Hayworth’s character eventually comes to terms with her own sexuality in a complex situation. Having driven a wedge between Johnny and Ballin, who have developed a friendship with vaguely homosexual overtones, she seeks to restore the “norm,” the monogamous heterosexual couple, a role she wishes to reprise with Johnny. She symbolically purges herself of the femme fatale persona with a strip tease, which Kaja Silverman describes as “ritual self-humiliation,” in which female subjectivity is represented by spectacle (Silverman, 1983, pp. 233-35). It is as though she’s declaring that, since her feminine influence has restored Johnny to himself (and to her), this aspect of her personality can be cast off and sublimated to the patriarchal ideal. “At the end, when Mundson’s real death leaves Johnny and Gilda free to begin a new life, Gilda is curiously unsensual. Dressed in a traveling suit, she has lost her allure. She is no longer femme fatale – only femme. While Gilda humanized Johnny, he disempowered her” (Dick, 1995, p. 155). Having done so, the male-female status quo is reaffirmed and patriarchy reinforced.
Yet Gilda’s behavior is challenging to the notion of male eminence. Fully aware of her effect on men, Gilda flaunts her sexuality by dancing with multiple partners in Johnny’s presence. His response to this sexual power struggle is to become physical, to demonstrate his superiority by exerting his strength and locking Gilda away. For her, it is a matter of playing on Johnny’s jealousy by manipulating other men. Her message to Johnny is that she has the power to be with any man she chooses. In her strip tease, she takes her protest to a much higher level. When Johnny refutes her claims of innocence by enumerating her infidelities, the strip tease serves as a kind of self-sacrifice, as though Gilda insists that the only person with the right to flout and condemn her promiscuity is herself. She is exercising a form of power by maintaining a degree of personal sovereignty, though she knows it means subjecting herself to the leers and comments of other males enjoying her dance. She makes a forceful point, but it means coming to terms with the dark side of her character. It also means that she has, for all intents and purpose, thrown herself on the altar of patriarchy.
Gilda is an especially dark film, even by film noir standards. As such, a number of disturbing elements are present in the story, such as misogynism and masochism. Gilda, as spectacle, embodies both of these. She flays herself, simultaneously wielding and scorning her sexuality as she sacrifices her moral integrity, which she needs intact if she were to deal with men on equal terms. But the prevalence of male dominance won’t allow it because, as a woman, she is held to a profoundly different standard. Even before we reach the strip tease scene, Gilda “has earlier made a toast to her own destruction, referred to herself as ‘the dirty laundry,’ married someone who frightens her, and encouraged Johnny Farrell, the man she loves, to imagine her a whore” (Silverman, 1983, 233). From a social standpoint, she is not on par with the men in the story, though as an individual with skills and resources of her own she may well be every bit their equal. If she wants Johnny, it’s going to cost her and she knows she must pay the price. Her consequent actions are in line with traditional, gender-based expectations that Gilda intuitively understands.
Gender roles in film noir are elemental and conservative, but sexuality is often much more of a gray area. Men are invariably tough and hard-boiled types, but women are also formidable in their way. A misogynistic strain among male protagonists can be seen as a reaction to the hard woman who challenges their patriarchal authority. In film noir, there is little variation among female characters. Men face the choice of a drab, suburban life with a non-threatening hausfrau, or risk being symbolically castrated by a beautiful but mysterious “woman with a past.” “Because of an underlying misogynous attitude, females are not suitable objects, except for the women that make the noir male dull, and who offers an existence without emotional and sexual commitment” (Hordnes, 2010). In this construct, women occupy a position of sexual power that threatens to undermine the assumed patriarchal order. Gilda is more complex than many other female portrayals from the genre, but she exudes a sexuality and forceful personality strong enough to emasculate. As such, Johnny perceives her as a threat and reacts accordingly.
As Scott Snyder explains in his treatise on personality traits among femmes fatale, film noir is one milieu in which aggressive females routinely challenge patriarchy. “It is not the eventual destruction of these women that we remember as much as their potency, drive, and compelling ability to manipulate men through the power of their sexuality” (Snyder, 2001). Gilda is one such woman, a force to be reckoned with, though one that cannot transcend society’s patriarchal ideology.
III. ’The Killers’ and the predatory femme fatale
In The Killers, Ava Gardner’s Kitty Collins is a more overtly predatory type than Gilda, somewhat more in the tradition of the classic designing femme fatale. She is the double-dealing deceiver, using her beauty and sexual allure to ensnare a hapless male victim. As such, her character “represents the ultimate misogynistic fantasy. These women are to be feared while simultaneously scapegoated for society’s problems. She controls her own sexuality, setting her apart from the patriarchal system” (Snyder, 2001). In The Killers, Kitty’s sexuality is calculating and, above all, results-oriented. A lethal siren, the threat she poses to the patriarchal order “is a
fatal embodiment of treacherous fortuna” (Krutnik, p. 122). But she is ultimately thwarted by the “civic fraternalism” of Riordan and Lubinsky, two male authority figures whom she cannot maneuver around (Ibid, p. 122). In spite of her reptilian treachery, she is unable to confound the patriarchal authority that Riordan and Lubinsky represent.
Riordan and Lubinsky are on hand when Kitty’s duplicity is foiled. Having undone the Swede, she has set her sights on Riordan, whom we are led to believe may also be succumbing to her sexual power. She lures him to The Green Cat, where a trap has been set. The scene that unfolds is a virtual blueprint of the classic femme fatale modus operandi. After placing Riordan in a vulnerable position, she gives the signal for his assassination then slinks off to safety, ostensibly to the women’s rest room. As femme fatale, Kitty is the film’s “principal locus of moral ambiguity,” and the scene and the surroundings in which it plays out are “metaphorical extension(s) of Kitty” (Silver, p. 1996, 182). It is here that Kitty shows us why her sexuality makes her such a threat to male supremacy. Riordan is a hard-bitten investigator who, presumably, has seen it all. Nevertheless, he finds it difficult to resist her.
Like Gilda’s strip tease, Kitty has her “spectacle” moment in The Killers. When she croons The More I Know of Love, she bewitches the already vulnerable Swede, who becomes ensnared in her web of seduction. But for all her seductive power, Kitty has her Achilles heel as well. Her “ace in the hole” is Colfax, the man who orchestrated the robbery, to whom she is secretly married. As long as he is alive and maintains his power, Kitty will have power. She is the lever moving so much of what occurs in the story, but only insofar as the patriarchal source of that power, namely Colfax, remains extant. When he perishes in a burst of gunfire, Kitty’s time is up. The true futility of her position plays out in Colfax’s death scene, in which Kitty pleads with her dying benefactor and protector to save her from prison (Schwartz, 2001, p. 32).
Without her patriarch to support her, her feminine power is of little avail. It is reasonable to assert that her femininity was itself a weapon wielded by a powerful male figure, as deadly in its way as any gun (this is a lesson Swede found out the hard way).
In Framing Faust, Inez Hedges describes Kitty in grandiloquent terms, characterizing her as an agent of darkness who’s come to collect on a moral bill that has come due. Noting that in film noir most Faustian bargains end badly, Hedges says Kitty’s appearance marks the beginning of the end for Swede, “who refuses to defend himself because he realizes that he cannot escape the terms of his pact with the film’s demonic femme fatale, Kitty Collins” (Hedges, 2005, p. 162). Having sold his soul, he must now deliver it up to Kitty, who acts as an agent for a greater power, that of her patriarch and husband Colfax. Colfax, the hidden mastermind, plays Satan to Kitty’s Mephistopheles (Ibid, 162). She is powerful enough to exert power over men but must remain merely an imp of Satan, the agent of a higher (male) authority.
The complexity of gender relations after World War II added an interesting wrinkle to the personality of the femme fatale and her role vis a vis the men in film noir. The intensely close bonds forged between men during the war enter into the equation, placing the mysterious woman of power in direct conflict with a kind of redefined patriarchy. In this sense, Gilda and Kitty Collins are undermining agents since they do not fit into the neatly constructed box post-war women were expected to inhabit. Not only was it sacrosanct to challenge the “buddy” paradigm forged in the fires of war, it was practically anti-social for a woman to rebel against the patriarchal concept of woman as wife/mother/homemaker. In fact, one can, without much difficulty, discern a patriarchal reaction to the potential threat posed by women in the workplace, where jobs were expected to be the exclusive province of returning GIs (Snyder, 2001). Gilda and Kitty ultimately reinforce patriarchy, despite their outré feminine personalities, because the power they wield is part and parcel of a male-dominated society that expects women (contradictorily) to be sexual, beautiful and mysterious. Acting as sexually aggressive women, they play into an entrenched role model.
Under such circumstances, when a woman pushes the envelope too far and seeks social equality on her own terms, things start to go wrong. Like Kitty, she is pulled down, as Kitty falls to ruin along with her patriarch, with whom she is inextricably linked. Or she must “come clean” as Gilda was compelled to do in order to have Johnny, admitting her transgressions against the patriarchal ideology. Of course, it is no coincidence that the predominantly male perspective on The Killers and Gilda (and other products of the genre) proceeded from the patriarchal Hollywood film studio power structure. In the end, Gilda sheds her siren’s garb and assumes her rightful place next to Johnny. Kitty, the sexual predator, gets her just deserts and is sent to prison thanks to the exertions of Riordan and Lubinsky. Men remain in control (but are somewhat wiser for the experience), patriarchal authority is affirmed and society proceeds as it always has. The Killers, Gilda and other films noirs tantalize us with illusions of feminine autonomy that only serve to reinforce patriarchy.
References
Dick, B, 1995, Columbia’s Dark Ladies and the Femmes Fatales of Film Noir, Literature and
Film Quarterly, vol. 23, 3, p. 155.
Gilda, 1946, motion picture, Columbia Pictures, DVD.
Hedges, I, 2005, Framing Faust: Twentieth Century Cultural Struggles, p. 162, Southern Illinois
University.
Hordnes, L, Does Film Noir Mirror the Culture of Contemporary America, Retrieved 14 June
2011 from <http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/E/noir/noir07.htm.>
The Killers, 1946, motion picture, Universal Studios, DVD.
Krutnik, F, Un-American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, p. 122.
Schwartz, R, 2001, Noir, Now and Then: Film Noir Originals and Remakes, p. 32, Greenwood
Press.
Silver, A, 1996, Film Noir Reader, p. 182, Limelight Editions.
Silverman, K, 1983, The Subject of Semiotics, pp. 233-35, Oxford University Press.
Snyder, S, 2001, Personality Disorder and the Film Noir Femme Fatale, Journal of Criminal
Justice and Popular Culture, vol. 8, 3, Univ. of Georgia, Retrieved 15 June 2011 from http://www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol8is3/snyder.html.
