I thought this article was pretty interesting, as well as relevant to our portrayal of the two Esmeés in our production. This artcile acts as evidence for how later, neo and modern Film Noirs have portrayed women in a less 'classic noir' way, and it is this post-boom noir portrayal that we wish to capitalise on.
The Progressive Portrayal of Women in Film Noir
The quintessential femme fatale of film noir uses her sexual attractiveness and ruthless cunning to manipulate men in order to gain power, independence, money, or all three at once. She rejects the conventional roles of devoted wife and loving mother that mainstream society prescribes for women, and in the end her transgression of social norms leads to her own destruction and the destruction of the men who are attracted to her. Film noir's portrayal of the femme fatale, therefore, would seem to support the existing social order — and particularly its rigidly defined gender roles — by building up the powerful, independent woman, only to punish her in the end.
But a closer look at film noir suggests an opposite interpretation. Even when it depicts women as dangerous and worthy of destruction, film noir also shows that women are confined by the roles traditionally open to them — that their destructive struggle for independence is a response to the restrictions that men place on them. Moreover, these films view the entire world — not just independent women — as dangerous, corrupt, and irrational. They contain no prescription for how women should act and few balancing examples of happy marriages, and their images of conventional women are often bland to the point of parody. It is the image of the powerful, fearless, and independent femme fatale that sticks in our minds when these movies end, perhaps because she — unlike powerful women in other Hollywood films of the '30s and '40s — remains true to her destructive nature and refuses to be converted or captured, even if it means that she must die.Out of the Past provides a classic example of film noir, especially in its portrayal of women. Kathie, the ultimate femme fatale, propels the action toward disaster, first by trying to escape from her relationship with Whit, then by manipulating the two men who would try to love or control her; Ann, on the other hand, acts as the idyllic but featureless traditional woman, standing by her man even when he tells her that he is mixed up with murder and another woman.
Although Kathie displays the worst characteristics of the femme fatale — greed, dishonesty, disloyalty, and a penchant for committing murder — she also is trapped in a confining, paralyzing relationship with a man who would try to control her. Indeed, the real action of the movie begins when Whit hires Jeff to retrieve Kathie after she has run away from him. One has only to see the way Whit gives orders to Joe to imagine how he is accustomed to treating Kathie. Whit even compares her at one point to a thoroughbred racehorse that he bought and kept in a pasture as a prize posession.
Sylvia Harvey points out that women in film noir often are "[p]resented as prizes, desirable objects" for the men of these films. Kathie's status as just another of Whit's possessions strongly suggests the film's questioning of traditional male-female relationships and the relative power within them. And Kathie is not alone among the women of film noir: Phyllis, in Double Indemnity, is married to a man who doesn't even like her; Cora, in The Postman Always Rings Twice, has no voice in her husband's decision to sell the diner and move to Canada — a decision that leads her to murder him; Elsa, in The Lady from Shanghai, was blackmailed into marrying her husband; and the list goes on.
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