When She's Not the Femme Fatale, She's Disposable
So what about these other women in Noir? The ones who aren't threatening to destroy men's lives or trying to manipulate the situation or run away with all the money? What about them?
By the end of The Usual Suspects, Edie gets killed. In Mildred Pierce, it's not Joan Crawford's character that depicts the Femme Fatale, but, rather, her cruel and cold daughter Veda. Mildred gets stepped on by her one surviving child and by Monty, the lover who hooks both of them into their own beds. In Double Indemnity, as Barbara Stanwyck's Phyllis orchestrates her killer plan, it's her stepdaughter Lola, who's already lost her mom and soon after acquiring an evil stepmother, then loses her dad. She is then left completely on her own.
Unfortunately all these secondary women don't just play second fiddle to the lethal blondes and brunettes who turn their worlds upside down, they also become disposable characters within the narrative of each story. Throw-aways into the dark alleys of survival.
In Cleveland City, Marianne is that character. A waitress in Downtown Cleveland, she lost her mother in childbirth and shortly after her father, a man names Joseph, mysteriously vanished. No body was ever found. An Irish Catholic, he ran with both the Irish and Jewish mafia of Cleveland. A bridge between the cultures, he was supposed to be the heir apparent to Danny Green, but when Danny was murdered just outside his dentist's office in 1977, the mafia of Cleveland - both the latke and the boxty eaters, from both sides of the Cuyahoga River that lit up in smoke and fire back 1969, lost its momentum and never regained it.
Marianne grew up within the foster system of Cleveland. Some homes were almost nice. Some were straight out of Dickens. Hopping all those homes and cultures and neighborhoods the one consistency she witnessed was poverty. People who took her in were typically right on the edge of eviction and simply needed the extra government money to live on.
Marianne celebrated her 18th birthday at the MetroHealth hospital. A local kid she knew knocked her up and then asked Marianne what she was going to do about it. She said she planned on keeping the baby, and the two of them planned on getting married. This news actually gave this young man motivation to hustle, so he approached his Uncle Patrick about getting into the business.
But right before the clock struck 18, as Marianne was feverishly packing all her belongings to get the hell out of her last foster home and to begin a life with her childhood love, she couldn't reach the suitcase at the back of the shelf of her closet and with no chair in sight, instead stacked some books that she's held onto from home to home to reach it. As the books gave out, she fell, felt a sharp pain in her stomach, saw blood leaking from her pants and passed out on the floor. By the time she woke up in the hospital bed, the doctor told her she'd be fine, but that she lost the baby. The young man was there in the room with her, crying. Their plans died that day.
In 2007 Marianne's life didn't really grow or prosper much. None of her foster parents stressed education. Or self esteem. Or even the power of withholding sex from a man until you knew he genuinely liked who you were out in the world and not just in the bedroom.
Thirteen years since that miscarriage, she still sleeps with the father of their unborn child. He's since gotten married and become a parent. But he always returns to Marianne's downtown studio apartment and the only large piece of furniture she has: her bed. Each time they make love, it's much less a celebration of two bodies in ecstasy and much more so a ritual of mourning for what they could have had.
That one summer night in 2007, dressed in the restaurant waitress uniform complete with black pants and a white polo shirt, as she was rushing to get to work, Marianne saw the fire down the street on Euclid Avenue and to avoid being late, she took a shortcut through the old cobblestone alley that connects Euclid and East 9th street.
She heard the sound of footsteps, suddenly felt a sharp pain in her shoulder blade and with red blood spreading all over her white shirt, she collapsed on that cobblestone. Before she passed out, the last thing she heard was, "So long, Marianne."
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