Fatal women

When women get power, men get scared. You can see this in the evolution of the femme fatale, the mysterious and dangerous woman who lures men into doomed affairs and deadly obsession. It’s one of the most influential and enduring cinematic archetypes, which can be traced back to Theda ‘The Vamp’ Bara in A Fool There Was (1915) and Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box (1929). But it’s far older than even cinema’s silent era, going back to Cleopatra, the sirens of Greek mythology and the biblical stories of Delilah and Jezebel. Using her sexuality and intellect to manipulate, control and co-opt power, these treacherous beauties often reflect prevailing attitudes to women and men’s anxieties.

In the 1920s, the prototypical ‘vamp’ wore the chic bob, slinky ensembles and crimson lip of the Jazz Age flapper. After World War I, people could finally afford consumer goods and cars, while telephones and the silver screen connected people and led to trends going global. After the war, people were in the mood to party – it’s called the Roaring Twenties for a reason. While prohibition was established in America, it didn’t stop the celebration. Speakeasies and nightclubs sprung up in secret. Behind the password-protected doors, you’d find the flapper, a carefree, self-assured modern woman who embraced the frenetic upheaval of the time. Sexually liberated, wearing short skirts and make-up that projected a playful disregard for Victorian-era modesty, the flapper was emblematic of the era. She often smoked, which was almost as scandalous as the length of her skirt. Though embraced as a symbol of freedom and sexual liberation, the flapper was also seen by older generations as indicative of moral decline and a threat to traditional values.

One of the most famously rebellious women of the era was Marlene Dietrich, who established herself in Berlin’s cabaret clubs before taking Hollywood by storm. In 1932, she brought an early incarnation of the femme fatale to the screen in Shanghai Express as the “notorious white flower of China”, a renowned courtesan nicknamed ‘Shanghai Lilly’. When she boards the Shanghai Express with the mysterious Hui Fei (Anna May Wong), the prim and proper passengers are scandalised. “One of them is yellow and the other one is white, but both their souls are rotten!” decries Reverend Carmichael, reflecting the moral opposition (and racism) towards these ‘immodest’ women. The film establishes some of the cinematic tropes that would come to define film noir: moody chiaroscuro lighting, dangerous and sensual women, violence. When the train is captured by Chinese militants, those snide and self-righteous passengers are lucky the femme fatales are aboard. Using their charms, along with a healthy dose of courage and sacrifice, they save the passengers from anti-government rebels. In Shanghai Express, the femme fatale is an agent of vengeance and salvation. In the scene featured in Goddess, they’re impossibly elegant but deadly. Anna May Wong is unsheathing a knife while Marlene Dietrich tells her not to do anything foolish until they can leave. Their apparent saviour, Captain Harvey, is upstairs negotiating with the warlord Chang. When he can’t secure the train’s release, Hui Fei is shown as steely, determined and dangerous when she unsheaths a knife. Though she’s stopped by Shanghai Lily the first time, eventually she is the one to take the knife to Chang, saving the passengers and avenging her rape.

An associated trope of the femme fatale is the deceitful, exoticised and hypersexualised ‘Dragon Lady’, which Anna May Wong played throughout her career. In Limehouse Blues (1934), Wong plays nightclub singer Tu Tuan. Costume designer Travis Banton signified Tuan’s villainous nature by snaking a dragon motif down her body, a visual motif established in 1931’s Daughter of the Dragon. In both films, Wong possesses a slithering sensuality and her characters’ stage personas – nightclub singers – hark back to the Jazz Age flapper. While opposition to the flapper may have been on moral grounds, the framing of Asian actors as dragon ladies reflected racist attitudes of the era. In a 1933 interview, Wong questioned why “the screen Chinese is always a villain… murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass!” It was partly due to the anti-Chinese sentiment fuelled by the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited Chinese migration. The oriental symbolism of snakes and dragons is still associated with antiheroes in Hollywood.

While Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong were laying the cinematic groundwork for the femme fatale in the 1930s, Depression-era writers were refining her deadly allure in hard-boiled fiction. Down on their luck, they needed an outlet for their frustration, a villain that could embody all the unfairness of the world: women were their answer. While men were fighting World War II, women entered the workforce and gained newfound freedom and independence. When men returned in the 1940s and wanted to re-establish traditional gender roles, the femme fatale started appearing on screen in shadowy silhouettes, silk and cigarette smoke. These manipulative women often took aim at their husbands, who symbolised patriarchal power. In Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), adapted from James M Cain’s novel, Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) uses her sexuality to lure a man to ruin and murder her husband. She’s a scheming black widow, but on the surface she’s the perfect wife. In the scene featured in Goddess, she plays the dutiful wife, unbeknown to her husband that his murderer is lurking in the backseat, waiting for her signal. When she first meets her lover, there’s a scene of Phyllis applying lipstick in a mirror, a recurring visual motif that symbolises her duplicity that’s become a common framing device to signal a femme fatale. It can be seen in modern films featuring a femme fatale like Under the Skin (2013), The Dressmaker (2015) and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020), the latter of which stars Taylour Paige as a Jazz Age flapper, alongside Viola Davis as the titular Ma Rainey, who rules the men and women in her orbit through sexuality and strength. Wilder returned to the femme fatale in Sunset Boulevard (1950), this time portraying her as faded film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) who has been driven mad by the memories of her past glory. In the scene featured in Goddess, she’s just delivered an unhinged monologue about getting her name back in lights. One side of her face is lit by a projector and she turns slowly, embracing the darkness through a veil of smoke that captures all the gloominess of film noir. Her obsession leads to a man’s death.

As we’ve seen, throughout the 1940s, men didn’t stand a chance. Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner) might sing seductively in The Killers (1946) but it’s a deadly siren’s call. When Rita Hayworth says “I’ve heard a lot about you” in Gilda (1946), it sounds like seduction and a scheme. In La Otra (1946), Doloros Del Rio is shot at a low angle, firelight flickering across her face, the shadows moving sinisterly. The film takes the duplicity of the femme fatale literary – Del Rio plays identical twins, one good and one bad.

The period also saw cunning women manipulating other women, such as the spoiled daughter in Mildred Pierce (1945) and the titular Eve in All About Eve (1950). As Broadway star Margo Channing (Bette Davis) says during a party when she realises Eve has eyes for her lover, “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night”. In Mildred Pierce, also based on a James M Cain novel, the use of light and shadow to contrast the good and bad aspects of Mildred’s (Joan Crawford) life firmly establishes the film’s noir tendencies and can be seen in Goddess when the characters peels out of the shadows in a critical scene.

In Arabesque (1966), the femme fatale moves onto the world stage. As the women’s liberation movement was in its infancy, women on screen gained more agency. Sophia Loren’s Yasmin is a prototypical femme fatale and the bumbling Harvard professor drawn into an espionage channels the ordinary-man-lured-into-deception-and-doom spirit of film noir. Again, she exudes glamour and sensuality. When asked about what happened to a servant, it’s no surprise when Yasmin answers in a purr, “Dead, I’m afraid.” Jane Fonda in the 1971 thriller Klute also may know where a missing man is. In her Oscar-winning performance, Fonda plays Bree Daniels, a sex worker who guides a private eye through the underbelly of New York City. These neo-noir films took the crime, corruption and moral ambiguity of their 1940s predecessors but incorporated new themes that reflected the women’s liberation movement, such as the changing role of women and the sexual revolution. Bree Daniels has depth and nuance. She’s not just a deadly woman, though her ethical ambivalence is still suggested by the use of tightly framed close-ups and shadow.

After women secured better jobs in the 1980s and 90s, the femme fatale began to embody men’s fear of financially secure and sexually assertive women, like Glenn Close eyeing her pray at the bar in Fatal Attraction (1987) and Sharon Stone unfazed by police questioning in Basic Instinct (1992). As Anna Boguteskya outlines in Goddess: Fierce Women on Film, the femme fatale was the prototype for the ambitious woman trope, which features in many of the films from this era. “While the femme fatale is manipulative, treacherous and faithless, she is defined by the downfall of a male character, not by her own ambitions. The Ambitious Woman has a richer interior life than just men,” Boguteskya explains, referencing Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman) in To Die For (1994), who manipulates men to murders to advance her TV journalism career.

Fear of sexually assertive women seeped into 2000s teen dramas. Bridging the decades was Cruel Intentions (1999), a millennial version of Dangerous Liaisons. The machinations of the femme fatale take place in New York’s wealthy upper east side and return to the intimate, domestic sphere – the bedroom, where so many femme fatales are shown wielding their power. After Kathyrn (Sarah Michelle Gellear) uses her sexuality and intellect to manipulate her stepbrother Sebastian (Ryan Phillipe), forcing him to destroy his chances at true love with Annette (Reece Witherspoon), she reveals that she’s been toying with him for her own amusement, icily declaring, “And I think that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.” The ice-cold explanation sets off a chain of events that leads Sebastian to an early grave and like many femme fatales, Kathryn is punished when Annette reveals her true nature publicly. After seducing her family and friends alike, she represents fear of unchecked female sexuality. Like the Jazz Age flapper, who embraced smoking as rebellion and edginess, Kathryn and many of the other femme fatales in this list are captured smoking. It’s a sign of danger and disregard, indulgence and recklessness.

Ten years after Cruel Intentions, the teen femme fatale was depicted as truly grotesque. In Karyn Kusama’s cult horror-comedy, Jennifer’s Body (2009), the titular cheerleader played by Megan Fox is possessed by a demon who uses sexuality to literally feast on men. She’s so monstrous that she doesn’t smoke, she can withstand holding an ignited lighter to her tongue.

This representation of female sexuality as not only dangerous but monstrous has also been used to represent fears of the exoticised ‘Other’. Salma Hayek’s snake charmer in From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) – who happens to be a vampire – channels Anna May Wong’s ‘dragon lady’ dance in Limehouse Blues (1934). While Wong’s dragon lady characters echoed the discriminatory discourse towards Chinese migrants during the 1930s, Hayek’s hypersexualised Latin dancer upholds the ‘spicy Latina’ stereotype and the racist attitudes some Americans have towards Mexicans.

In Goddess, Wong is also juxtaposed with The Girl (Sheila Vand) dancing in Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014). Shot in film noir’s signature black and white, the film borrows the genre’s visual palette and nighttime locations to heighten the horror and fear induced by The Girl, a vampire who skates the streets of Tehran in a billowing chador. Arriving in the midst of the War on Terror, the femme fatale in this film represents the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment of the 2000s. Yet, as Amandas Ong writes in “Seeking revenge, choosing redemption” in the associated Goddess publication: “The wearing of a garment commonly associated with vulnerability and oppression is subverted here, as she sucks the blood and life out of morally questionable male characters, including a local pimp and an elderly drug addict who is a constant source of trouble for his industrious son.” So while Amirpour mixes the vampiric with both film noir and the western genre, the result positions the femme fatale as an avenging spirit fighting the patriarchy.

The Girl also shows how the iconography and cinematic characteristics of the femme fatale have been used to empower traditionally marginalised woman, in this case Muslim women. Another example is Elektra Abundance’s (Dominique Jackson) steely glamour in Pose. Rather than portray Abundance as a femme fatale to represent anxiety towards trans women, in Pose the character’s fierceness and power is represented by her deadly glamour, manipulative nature and beauty.

One of the most recent and iconic femme fatales peels back white beauty standards and gender expectations to satirise the picture-perfect, picket-fenced domestic goddess. In Gone Girl (2014), Amy Dunne’s (Rosamund Pike) bloody destruction of her husband’s reputation exposes the illusion of the perfect wife and woman who can have it all. However, it ultimately proposes that we cannot trust what a woman is thinking, that they’re unknown even to their intimate partners and capable of carnage. The scene that appears in Goddess opens and closes the film. In the beginning, her husband’s voiceover calmly explains how beautiful she is – and how he’d like to smash her head open. The final frame mirrors the opening after she’s forced the couple to reconcile. She turns and silently peers up at him, but the suggestion that she’s the dangerous one, not him, is clearer than her ice-cold eyes. It suggests that men can never trust women, even their wives.

The ever-evolving femme fatale is one of cinema’s most enduring characters for a reason. Their outward beauty and inner complexities make them eternally alluring and their chameleonic symbolism can fit almost any story and any era. We may be scared of them but we love to watch (and love) them. One thing is certain: they’re no damsels in distress.