| No Place for
a Woman: The Family in Film Noir Pro-Family Messages in Film Noir
Many critics have argued convincingly that film noir follows much the same pattern of rewarding "good" women and punishing "bad" women as conventional Hollywood films. The rewards and punishments for women (and men) in film noir are especially serious — characters who willingly play their proper roles tend to survive beyond the end of the film, while characters who resist playing these roles often die violently or, less commonly, go to jail. On rare occasions, these films even deliver a Hollywood happy ending, when a family or a relationship that was threatened or torn apart during the course of the film actually is restored in the final scene. Meanwhile, critics who find a conservative message in film noir point out that these films endorse the family not only in their narrative content, but even in their visual style, which creates a negative contrast between the noir world and the world of traditional family life. Claire Johnston argues that film noir reinforces the male-dominated status quo family by destroying characters who threaten the established order — particularly women. She points out that noir films like Double Indemnity (1944) often depict transgressions against the family that involve a discontented wife who murders her husband. But rather than casting doubt on the traditional nuclear family, these female transgressors exist only to be beaten down and destroyed. This pattern is repeated in classics of film noir such as The Postman Always Rings Twice (1945), Out of the Past (1947), The Lady from Shanghai (1948), and Dead Reckoning (1948). The wife who achieves independence through murder inevitably dies violently — sentenced to death by a film that supports the status quo as represented by the law against murder. Film noir therefore provides an affirmation of the dominant social order and a warning against disturbing it:
Janey Place agrees that film noir tends to destroy the independent woman as a moral lesson to the audience and to the male characters who fall under her spell:
This view of film noir emphasizes the danger that independent women represent for men by tempting them to venture beyond the safety of the family, if only temporarily. Women in film noir tend to express their independence in sexual terms — they use their sexuality to manipulate men, rather than submitting it to the moral code of a traditional family and the control of a husband. Their sexual independence threatens the men and the family relationships around them by providing a dangerous alternative to the traditional family unit. The sexually independent woman serves to reinforce the status quo family because it is through her that the hero learns his "proper place." Thus, in a film such as Pitfall (1948), according to Nina Leibman, the errant husband learns that the only appropriate and indeed safe place for a man or a woman is the nuclear family:
The same lesson can be found in D.O.A. (1950), a film in which the hero's attempt to escape from a family relationship leads to even graver consequences. Frank Bigelow (Edmond O'Brien) takes an out-of-town vacation in order to break free of his fiancée's grasp and to have one last sexual fling, but soon learns that he has been "murdered" with a dose of incurable poison. Deborah Thomas notes that the film makes a clear connection between Bigelow's infidelity and his "murder" — his rejection of marriage leads directly to his death: "Significantly, it is while Frank was trying to pick up another woman in a bar that the poisoned drink . . . has been substituted for his own." 22 Although the characters of film noir often are doomed to suffer severe punishment for their nontraditional behavior, a significant number of noir films might appear to take a different approach to reinforcing the status quo. These films borrow their endings from conventional Hollywood melodrama and romance by allowing the hero and his love interest to overcome obstacles to their relationship and emerge from the noir world into the world of successful marriage and family life. This type of conventional "happy ending" occurs in such noir classics as Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), I Wake Up Screaming (1941), Laura (1944), Murder, My Sweet (1945), Gilda (1946), The Big Sleep (1946), The Lady in the Lake (1947), and Dark Passage (1947). Noir films' visual representation of these characters and their surroundings also can be interpreted to show support for the nuclear family and disapproval of independent women and unsatisfied husbands. Traditional women typically appear in daylight or high-key lighting, exist outside of the city's corruption and danger, and live contentedly in the family home. In contrast, the anti-traditional femme fatale, according to Janey Place, "is comfortable in the world of cheap dives, shadowy doorways and mysterious settings." 23 Nina Leibman writes that noir films such as Pitfall and The Big Heat endorse the traditional family by creating a visual distinction between the world of the family home and the noir world outside:
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| First posted: January
1996 Last updated: April 1999 All text is copyright (c) 1994-1999 John Blaser. E-mail: blaserj@ada.org. Permission is granted to link to this material from other World Wide Web or Internet sites with notification to the author, but please do not reprint or redistribute any of these pages without prior written permission from the author. Photos and audio files provided courtesy of Terri's Film Noir Home Page (no longer online). |
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