And here's part two in my mini-series on the evolution of the Femme Fatale in Film Noir:
The Femme Fatale In The Interim: Becoming A Cliche
However, while the Fatale served as a way for Hollywood to write "strong" female characters (bleh, I feel dirty just typing that) back in the day, there were still some undeniable downsides to her typical portrayal. For one, the potentially gender-progressive undertones of the archetype were undermined by the overt negativity of the overall characterizations, as such sexy, assertive women were almost always portrayed as antagonists, with their sexuality being so transparently manipulative, some of them might as well of had Venus Fly Traps for privates, as their deceitful, murderous impulses inevitably landed them and the men they ensnared in a jail cell if they were lucky, or an early grave if they weren't.
As a result, rather than being portrayed in any sort of positive light, the Fatale's boldness as a character was inevitably connected with her fundamental immortality, and, even with the plausible deniability of the Hays Code demanding that all "immoral" behavior had to be explicitly punished onscreen, it's still telling of the patriarchial values of Classical-era Hollywood that such bold women were constantly portrayed as evil, as opposed to say, Humphrey Bogart in
The Maltese Falcon, whose assertive nature was an
indication of his role as the hero, at least, as much of a hero as Noir protagonists could be (speaking of Humphrey, it's also telling that when Nicholas Ray's
In A Lonely Place did a gender-flipped version of the Femme Fatale, it also afforded him a deep, contradictory depth of character that so many of his female counterparts in the genre had been denied).
Therefore, while the Fatale initially challenged gender expectations with her unmatronly behavior, she still ultimately
reinforced those norms in the end, as a reflection of the anxiety that World War II's creation of a nation of "Rosie The Riveters", and its potential upending of traditional gender roles, brought with it (ignoring the fact that it was obviously still men who were engaged in the vast majority of frontline combat in that conflict). As a result, the dark fates the Fatale was inevitably punished with serving as implicit messages for both the men and women watching the films, cautioning the former not to become involved with such bold women in the first place, while also warning the latter not to break society's unwritten rules for women as well.
And, despite the occasional attempt to subvert the expectations of the archetype (such as Vivian's moral turn halfway through
The Big Sleep), the most depth that many of these characters were afforded was to be initially portrayed as good or trustworthy, before the inevitable revelation of their "rotten" moral natures, a kind of twist that may have been shocking at first, but became increasingly predictable as the genre went on. This had the effect of placing Fatales onto a simplistic moral binary of being either "good" or "evil" overall, which further denied them a deeper depth, and made a lot of them feel more like plot devices than three-dimensional characters. And so, as a result, by the time Noir's Classical period had ended with the 50's, a characterization that was once refreshing in its defiance of societal norms had, by virtue of sheer repetition, begun to seem like a fairly stale cliche of a mostly dead genre, one that was in need of some serious shaking up. Fortunately, just such a change was on its way...