Chin up, fellas—your women want to love you.
A hot woman with a gun is a cultural icon—in film noir she is a hot tip that some gentlemen had it wrong. More a silhouette of men’s fear than interest, our beloved femme fatale always was a dark contrast to true femme subversion.
{Film noir primer: 1930s dispensed blow after blow upon men: war, economic crises, job displacement and, by the 1940s, a weird mixed-gender workforce. It’s believed that while women muscled up and manned up in their place, men were increasingly more rattled by their own futility. Thus, film noir and its sexy push-pull relationship with fated doom. And the most potent catalyst for a man’s demise? That dubious creature, woman.}
It’s true I love these terrible people. Phyllis Dietrichson, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Vera, Kathie Moffat, Elsa Bannister, Lorraine Minosa, Kitty Collins, et al. I rewatch them, and I marvel at their audacity—faces that know how to be gorgeous and brains that conceive strategies I can barely follow.
But context is the catch. As a girl I took them as symbols of female empowerment. The more accurate inference was a hard little pill to swallow. These examples of female strength functioned to ruin the hero—that tastes a bit like shame.
This possibility that we were objects to be feared was a disturbing thing to reconcile. I know now the stereotype was a miss.
Women love their men too much. We’re famous for it. We love you too many hours in the day, too frequently during the week. Your mothers, lovers, daughters and sisters are probably calling and writing you more than you deem necessary.
The fallout of the femme fatale is when our odd ways confuse you and you perceive the attention as manipulation. Don’t play that hand; you may never know if you’ve overestimated what you have to offer. We are simply wired for adoration. We love you before you love us, and very often, long after you’ve stopped.
However, I never said we weren’t dangerous. We are killers.
If you think I wouldn’t kill you, lay a hand on my child or my man and let me clarify. I’m not special; those soft-skinned adoring ladies in your life could cut a throat to protect you.
In cinema we appear far more true to form when depicted as protectors. The sexy con artists of film noir have nothing on the woman as a defender. Evelyn Mulwray, Beatrix Kiddo, Shoshanna Dreyfus, Violet Venable, Ree Dolly, Lisbeth Salander, Sarah Conner, Ellen Ripley, and even the crazy Peyton Flanders. Those are the empowered women you need to know. It’s a woman with a gun done right.
When we subvert a man, we don’t con him. We turn him monogamous. We turn him into a birthing coach. We make him fat with our cakes. And we catch him off guard by smiling at him.
That is what we are when we kill.
“He liked me, so I loved him.”
—Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
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