I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never seen the series “Supernatural”. However, an article by Suzette Chan for the Sequential Tart webzine talks about it in the wider context of film noir. Whether or not you’ve watched the show, this excerpt explores how the character of the femme fatale has endured in art, literature and popular myth, and focuses on how dangerous women have become a recognisable trope in the film noir genre:
‘…While the concept of woman as temptress is older than Eve, the term “femme fatale” was coined during fin-de-siècle France, capturing a host of significations of Woman as filtered through Christian iconography, neoclassicism and the nascent modern commercial-industrial era. She was associated with the moral decadence that was seen to accompany shifts in material wealth and its effects on society.
“The femme fatale has come to be known as an archetypical woman whose evil characteristics cause her to either unconsciously bring destruction or consciously seek vengeance,” writes Elizabeth K. Menon in Evil By Design: The Creation and Marketing of the Femme Fatale. Menon’s primary argument is that Salon painters and populist illustrators alike were fascinated by the image of Eve. They spun her role in response to emerging ideas — and fears — of feminism as well as attendant concepts such as individual responsibility, free will and destiny: “[C]ritical facets of the Creation story were questioned. Was Eve destined to sin or did she sin by choice? Was she a femme fatale because she succumbed to destiny or because she brought about the downfall of mankind? Did Eve have a greater responsibility than Adam or the serpent?”
Menon goes on to note that some of the same questions were associated with Pandora, the Greek box-opener who was another favourite subject of French artists. Painter Gustav Adolphe Mossa produced a piece called “Eva-Pandora”, featuring a knowing, mysterious temptress casually handling the accoutrements of trouble-making sexuality: the open box (the womb), the apple (the testes), the serpent (the penis). Eve and Pandora symbolized twin threats to men: sexuality and curiosity. Although the bible describes Eve and Adam’s mutual curiosity about the tree of knowledge, the imagination of the 19th century blamed Eve’s sexual curiosity for the Fall of Man. Men who couldn’t resist them (the women, what they symbolized, etc.) were doomed. This combination of sexuality, morality and danger constituted an idea of woman that film critic Barbara Creed would dub the “monstrous-feminine” in 1993.
In the wake of the economic boom and attendant social upheaval in post-War America, the mid-20th century film noir constructed its own version of the femme fatale. She could be seen as exploiting the moral malaise of men weakened by the times, but scholar Janey Place sees the femme fatale as a figure of great agency. In “Women in Film Noir” (published in a 1978 anthology of the same name, edited by E. Ann Kaplan), Place wrote: “Film noir is a male fantasy, as is most of our art. Thus woman here as elsewhere is defined by her sexuality: the dark lady has access to it and the virgin does not …. [Film noir] does not present us with role models who defy their fate and triumph over it. 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…”‘
Full article here.
