Excerpt from Janey Place’s Women In Film Noir

As well as exploring some central – and no so central – film noirs I will also run a side-by-side series of articles exploring the representation of gender and sexuality in film noirs. Here is an interesting introduction of Janey Place’s evocative essay ‘Women In Film Noir’. I will explore this essay in the future however I thought this excerpt was interesting in it self.

The  dark lady, the spider woman, the evil seductress who tempts man and brings about his destruction is among the oldest themes of art, literature, mythology and religion n Western culture. She is as old  as Eve, and as current as today’s movies, comic books and dime novels. She and her sister (or alter ego), the virgin, the mother, the innocent, the redeemer, form the two poles of female archetypes.

Film noir is a male fantasy, as is most of our art. Thus woman here as elsewhere is defined by her sexuality: the dark lady has access to it and the virgin does not. That men are not so deterministically delineated in their cultural and artistic portrayal is indicative of the phallocentric cultural viewpoint: women are defined in relation to men, and the centrality of sexuality in this definition is a key to understanding the position of women in our culture. The primary crime the ‘liberated’ women is guilty of is refusing to be defined in such a way, and this refusal can be perversely seen (in art, or in life) as an attack on men’s very existence. Film noir is hardly ‘progessive’ in these terms – it does not present us with role models who defy their fate and triumph over it. But it does give us one of the few periods of film in which women are active, not static symbols, are intelligent and powerful, if destructively so, and derive power, not weakness, from their sexuality. (1.)

Janey Place, ‘Women in Film Noir’, in Women in Film Noir, (ed) E Ann Kaplan, London: BFI, (1989), pp. 35-68, p. 35.