‘I Can’t Tell Anymore Whether You’re Lying’: Double Indemnity, Human Desire and the Narratology of Femmes Fatales

Abstract

In The Film Studies Dictionary, Steve Blandford, Barry Keith Grant and Jim Hillier define femme fatale as follows: ‘From the French for “fatal woman”, a female character who uses her beauty to lure and entrap men, leading to their downfall and, usually, death’ (Blandford et al. 2001: 95–6). While gender-specific iconography, the femme fatale’s ‘beauty’, plays a part here, it is clear that aspects of narrative — a series of events, a set of agents and a process of transformation — are also involved. Motivations, actions and consequences — luring and entrapment, downfall and death — play key parts as well. Similar points are made by Mary Ann Doane, for whom narrative and knowledge, especially knowledge as to the nature of the femme fatale’s character and motives, are particularly important. ‘The femme fatale’, she writes,

is the figure of a certain discursive unease, a potential epistemological trauma. For her most striking characteristic, perhaps, is that she never really is what seems to be. She harbors a threat which is not entirely legible, predictable, manageable. In thus transforming the threat into a secret, something which must be aggressively revealed, unmasked, discovered, the figure is fully compatible with the epistemological drive of narrative, the hermeneutic structuration of the classical text. (Doane 1991: 1)