The Femme Fatale: Manipulator or Survivor?

Merriam-Webster Definition of femme fatale:
 1 a seductive woman who lures men into dangerous or compromising situations 

2 a woman who attracts men by an aura of charm and mystery

The Harvey Weinstein tragedy is prompting a lot of discourse about sexuality, politics, power, media, society, law and money. The lid's been blown off the Great American Value System. Social media is exploding even more than usual with opinions, arguments, trolls, supporters and lots of women, and even a few men, opening up about their tales of harassment and abuse. Woody Allen just publicly sided with Weinstein. (surprise!) While Weinstein's wife, his company and the Academy have all severed relationships with him. 

Rose McGowan and her #rosearmy quit Twitter for one day after they shut her down for publicly posting a phone number. A Twitter stranger replied to one of my tweets supporting McGowan, calling her public statements "hypocrisy" and "doxxing." Meanwhile Mayim Bialik got crucified for writing a piece on how her own personal choice for physical modesty has prevented sexual advances and abuse. Many took her essay as an irresponsible blaming the victim approach. Alyssa Milano started a #metoo campaign and within 24 hours 49,000 women have come forward as victims of harassment or sexual assault. And that's just on Twitter.

Several people on my own Facebook wall have brought up the topic of women who use their sexuality to gain advancement. I know I have - wearing just the right kind of clothes and hamming it up with a few teachers, TAs and professors over the years. (My bosses were mostly women and promoted me on skill and accomplishments.) Because as a student, I quickly assessed the classroom and realized, on several occasions, that only men or pretty women received the kind of instructor in-class attention that could boost one's grade. I drew the line at looking the part. Never anything else. And yet it's no revelation that plenty of women took their sexuality much further, to the get to their desired outcome. I know at least one such woman.

Is this hypocrisy? To use your physicality to aim for what you need and then to call out the men who force you to do more than you had planned? I don't think so. Not when from your teenage years as a young woman you begin to understand that you're living in a world designed by and for men. Where the barriers to entry of success, short of having the powerful father or the wealthy husband, ensure you must do so much more to get even close to the playing field. How much more you're willing to go, well, that's a very personal moral code. It's a lifelong opportunity cost.

What does any of this have to do with film noir? Everything.

You can't have film noir without the femme fatale. She's the vixen, the mystery, the seductive force that enters a man's life and his is never the same, again. By the end of the story, he's much, much worse off. The femme fatale? She's the Eve, offering the most forbidden apple.

Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity set the standard for this character. The first time Fred MacMurray meets her, she's on the top of the stairs, wearing a sunbathing towel. Within a few seconds she assesses the insurance salesman, excuses herself to go change and returns in a conservative dress, but the camera focuses only on her legs and her shiny ankle bracelet - the Pandora's Box for this no-going-back straight-man. She has marked him.

My Cleveland script also features a femme fatale. Her name is Esti and she first started as the mother figure. But then I became a mother and I realized with clarity that this is her story. Her journey. Her path. And just like every mother had a life before she realized she was responsible for the life of a child, the idea of her being a mystery is something many can identify with: How many of us really know our mothers? How many of us mothers will really be known by our kids? 

Esti is quiet, but fierce. She's seen tragedy. She's come back. She's much more than a mother, but her son Jacob doesn't know that side. Very few do. There's things she's done that will shock her family. They will shock the entire City of Cleveland. But she's had to do these things. Just like every femme fatale, she does what she must because in this world, she's not in charge. But in her world? She exists because of the very choices she's made. 

Perhaps there's a femme fatale in all of us women? Because as long as there's the teachers who give preferential treatment to boys and only the prettiest of the girls, and as long as there's the Harvey Weinsteins out there, literally determining, like a Roman Emperor in the Colosseum, which careers live and which careers die, we females prepare to walk out our front doors by carefully curating our public wardrobes, our lipsticks, our sunglasses, our shiny ankle bracelets and, mostly, our psychology, putting on the suit of armor underneath, knowing full well that the world first sees us before it hears us. It judges us before it knows us. And when threatened it will manipulate us only to make it look like we were the ones asking for it. 

image: Promotional Still. photograph by Paramount Pictures (no photographer credited) - Life magazine, Volume 17, Number 2 (page 55)