Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Laura (1944)

Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) is a classical film noir. The genre of film noir is known to contain a femme fatale, or a character archetype of a mysterious, seductive and beautiful woman who eventually causes, or accelerates, the protagonist’s problems. However, what makes Laura (1944) atypical of the genre is Laura Hunt is not the kind femme fatale who leads her man to destruction, but instead her presence indirectly leads to death without any intentionality. This ties into concepts spoken by Julie Grossman in her paper Rethinking the Femme Fatale. Grossman argues that contrary to popular critical discourse about the film noir genre, a large number of so- called bad, sexy and mysteriously seductive women — or femme fatale’s — have not been demonised in the films in which they appear but have been shown to be a victim. In fact, one can argue that Laura is the kind of femme fatale woman who has been used in the story as more of a red-herring to mislead the audience, than a red-herring who seductively leads the protagonist, detective Mark McPherson, to his doom. To elucidate this idea further, right at the end of Act Two, the audience is convinced that she murdered a model Diane Redfern, perhaps on the suspicion that she was sleeping with her playboy boyfriend, Shelby Carpenter. However, when our protagonist Mark McPherson arrests her, he is shocked to learn that she didn’t love Carpenter. As the plot gets muckier, it is revealed that Waldo Lydecker, an affluent columnist who was in love with Laura, murdered Redfern confusing her for Laura when he saw Redfern in the apartment with Carpenter. In the last scene, McPherson falls in love with Laura, they kiss, and Lydecker attempts to shoot Laura

saying that if he cannot have her no one can. Laura deflects his shot and escapes, and Lydecker is finally shot down by McPherson. This is a very clever twist in the plot, making Laura an unconventional femme fatale whose very character serves to mislead the audience into believing that she was the murderer of Redfern, only for the audience to realise that she has no intentional role to play in the murder except for her unparalleled beauty. In the film, her character is less of a wicked, sly, seductive, powerful woman — or a vamp — but instead a victim of patriarchal systems that falsely accuse her of a role in a murder in which she had no involvement. This makes her a complex character with nuanced emotions and experiences, breaking the stereotype of the femme fatale in the 40s.

According to Grossman, this institutionalized stereotype of the femme fatale has not only led to the misreading of many film noir movies, but also “fed into cultural and critical obsessions with the bad, sexy woman, which inevitably become prescriptive and influence cultural discourse about female agency in counterproductive ways” (Grossman 5). Grossman argues that, in the end, instead of celebrating powerful, independent, free women, this stereotype of the femme fatale is a symbol of fears of absolute female power. It subtly plays into the conservative, patriarchal narrative that a strong woman eventually causes the doom of our hero, which influences culture and further reinstates the patriarchal hierarchies. Grossman further argues that this isn’t necessarily a problem with film noir films itself, but instead the way they have been looked at my critics, who overemphasise the stereotypical femme fatale trope. Since art informs culture, but is also influenced by it, there is no doubt in Grossman’s mind that the stereotypical femme fatale trope is a product of cultural ideation, born sociohistorically from the fantasies men had of women. However, in Laura (1944), this stereotype is broken. She is not just beautiful and independent, but naive and worldly. But mostly, she is a complex enigma. In the film, nobody knows who anybody is. Which is what distinguishes her from the archetype.

 

Works Cited

Preminger, Otto, director. Laura. 1944.

Grossman, Julie. Rethinking the femme fatale in film noir: Ready for her close-up. Springer, 2009.