Guilty Until Proven Innocent:

The In uence of Film Noirs Femme Fatale in the American Courtroom

Zoe Ferguson, Class of 2017
College of Arts and Sciences
Cornell University

Thesis Submitted in Partial Ful llment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts as
a College Scholar

May 2017
Ithaca, New York

Ferguson 1


Guilty Until Proven Innocent:
The In uence of Film Noirs Femme Fatale in the American Courtroom

Zoe Ferguson, Class of 2017

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 3

Chapter 1: Introducing Film Noirs Femme Fatale in the American Legal System 4
I. Opening Arguments 4
II. Visions of Desertion on the Home Front 10
III. Pathologizing Crime in America 12

Chapter 2: Double Indemnity, Nellie May Madison, and Barbara Graham 19

I. Introduction to Double Indemnity 19
II: Feminine Narcissism and Self-Surveillance in Double Indemnity 26
III. Voiceover vs. Image in Double Indemnity 29
IV: Staged Heterosexual Desire and Male Fetishism 33
V: Eyewitnesses, Experts, and The Legal Framework in Double Indemnity 44

Chapter 3: Pretty Little Liars 57

I. Postwar: Comparing the Femmes Fatales of World War II and 9/11 57
II. The Fiction of the Female Gaze in Pretty Little Liars 67
III. Girl-on-Girl Crime: Lawless Lesbianism 73
IV. Executing the Femme Fatale: The War on Terror Then and Now 77

Conclusion: Final Girls and the Continuing Life of the Femme Fatale in the 21st Century 79

Works Cited 84

Ferguson 2


Acknowledgments

First and foremost I would like to thank my parents and my whole family for always supporting
me in this unconventional, un-lucrative course of study. I am so lucky to have parents who
encourage me to do what I want to do and work on what is important to me, what I believe in,
whether or not it will look good on paper or provide a large starting salary. I literally could not
have done this without them and their money.

I also have to thank the College of Arts and Sciences for providing the opportunity to participate
in such a unique program as the College Scholar program. It has helped me carve an identity for
myself at Cornell and beyond as an individual thinker.

Thank you to my fellow Scholars, Joey, Tamar, Jack, and So a, for commiserating and
coworking with me and making this whole experience a little less isolating. Thank you to my
amazing friends at Cornell for listening to me ramble on about case law and psychoanalysis, and
for having the patience to continue to ask, Hows the thesis going? even when they know what
that question will unleash.

I cannot say enough how much the support of my committee chair Dr. Elisha Cohn has driven
this thesis. She made this possible for me, and even though she has classes to teach and a young
son, she has been available whenever I need comments or advice. She has been attentive and
thoughtful, and she has lent a dose of humor and perspective to even the most frustrating
moments of what they call the writing process.

Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Tracy McNulty and Dr. Kathleen Long, my two
wonderful committee members, whose classes and one-on-one discussions sparked my interest in
intersections of psychology, art, and law that I never knew existed.

Ferguson 3


Chapter 1: Introducing Film Noirs Femme Fatale in the American Legal

System

I. Opening Arguments

In 1934, Nellie May Madison became the rst woman to be sentenced to death in the

state of California. That year, Madison was accused of killing her husband, Eric Madison, in their

Los Angeles apartment. The state sought the death penalty. In the prosecutions closing

arguments, Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney George Stahlman appealed to jurors

shared values by referring to a piece of literary canon with which he knew they would all likely

be familiar: William Shakespeares 17th-century play Macbeth. Comparing the defendant

Madison with Macbeths villainous Lady Macbeth, Stahlman told the jury of Madison, Her soul

is cold and bloodthirsty. Like Lady Macbeth, she can scrub all that she wants, but the blood on
1
her hands wont come o . Stahlmans closing arguments were e ective: the jury convicted, and

a judge sentenced Madison to death by hanging. A year later, after Madison revealed alleged

spousal abuse by her late husband, her sentence was commuted to life in prison. Ultimately, in

1943, Madison was released from prison.

Though she was not executed, Nellie Madison plays a key role in the story of the death

penalty for women in the United States. Her sentence was the rst of its kind in California,

opening the possibility for women to be sentenced to death in the future in the state. Only ve

years after Madisons sentence, the U.S. became involved in World War II, and a new genre of

1
Kathleen Cairns, The Enigma Woman: The Death Sentence of Nellie May Madison (New York: Bison Books, 2009)
132.
Ferguson 4


American art began to take shape in Los Angeles: lm noir. California continued to sentence

women to death, but the sentences bore renewed cultural signi cance. D.A. Stahlman had had

only the centuries-old Lady Macbeth at his disposal as a widely-known ctional gure upon

whose image he could superimpose a female murder defendant. With the rise of lm noir, courts

in California and across the country were a orded a fresh crop of female villains with whom to

compare female defendants in high-pro le murder cases. Like Madisons trial, these criminal

trials used characteristics of a ctional literary gure to de ne, and execute, real-life women.

Film noir, a genre based in a legal framework, in turn became a part of the American legal

process, and ction still continues to in ltrate law.

De ning lm noir as a genre is no simple task. But though precise categorization may

elude de nition, as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said of hardcore pornography, I

know it when I see it.2 Elizabeth Cowie writes that lm noir is the genre that never was, as the

term was not used by lm creators to describe their products but was applied only post hoc after

the term surfaced in 1946.3 The term lm noir, meaning dark lm in French, describes certain

Hollywood lms produced in the 1940s and 1950s. These lms contain several recognizable

narrative and visual elements: a detective and an investigative crime narrative; chiaroscuro-style

lighting and mise-en-scne that plays with shadows, light, and dark; a witty and subtext-heavy

script, and a femme fatale character.4 Jo Labanyi emphasizes5 that the genre name is a label

applied only after the term surfaced in 1946, when French lm critic Nino Frank coined the term.

2
Concurring, Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964)
3
Elizabeth Cowie, Film Noir and Women, in Shades of Noir: A Reader (London: Verso, 1995) 121.
4
Richard Brody, Film Noir: The Elusive Genre. The New Yorker, July 23, 2014.
5
Jo Labanyi et al, Film Noir, the Thriller, and Horror, in A Companion to Spanish Cinema, ed. Jo Labanyi and
Tatjana Pavlovic (London: Wiley Blackwell) 261.
Ferguson 5


6
These lms noirs began appearing during World War II, during a time of new American

pessimism as the U.S., a land that had hitherto prided itself on its isolation, was roped into a

global con ict.7 James Damico writes that one important characteristic of noir is that unlike other

categories such as the Western or gangster movie, noir cannot be separated from its speci c

historical context: Film noir is not a category which can be enlarged to include an appreciable

number of lms before 1940 or after 1955.8 Taking care to place the narrative within these tight

time straits, Damico famously proposes the following model of the lm noir plot:

Either because he is fated to do so by chance, or because he has been hired for a job9
speci cally associated with her, a man whose experience of life has left him sanguine and often
bitter meets a not-innocent woman of similar outlook to whom he is sexually and fatally
attracted. Through this attraction, either because the woman induces him to it or because it is the
natural result of their relationship, the man comes to cheat, attempt to murder, or actually murder
a second man to whom the woman is unhappily or unwillingly attached (generally he is her
husband of lover), an act which often leads to the womans betrayal of the protagonist, but which
in any event brings about the sometimes metaphoric, but usually literal destruction of the woman,
the man to whom she is attached, and frequently the protagonist himself.10

This model, Damico notes, encompasses a number of lms considered lms noirs created

between 1944 and 1948, including Double Indemnity. Additional stylistic characteristics

distinguish noir, including investigation, voiceover narrative, and chiaroscuro lighting, a visual

style highlighting stark di erences between light and shadow. Place and Peterson write that

above all, it is the constant opposition of areas of light and dark that characterizes lm noir

6
Nino Frank, Laventure criminelle. Lcran franais no. 61, August 1946.
https://moncinemaamoi.info/2016/08/28/laventure-criminelle-par-nino-frank/
7
James Paris, Murder Can Sometimes Smell Like Honeysuckle: Billy Wilders Double Indemnity (1944) in Film
Noir Reader 4 (Pompton Plains, NJ: Limelight Editions, 2004) 10.
8
James Damico, Film Noir: A Modest Proposal, in Film Noir Reader 4 (Pompton Plains, NJ: Limelight Editions,
2004) 99.
9
In Shadow Play, Toby tells Spencer, This started out as a job. Its something else now, and you know it.
Shadow Play, Pretty Little Liars, Freeform, 07:56.
10
Damico 103
Ferguson 6


cinematography.11 Biesen posits this chiaroscuro style of juxtaposed light and darkness as an

expression of psychological threat, one that Manon writes is immediately recognizable to noir

viewers.12 Film noir also typically uses tight framing, close-up shots, and extreme high and low

camera angles.13

Mark Jancovich notes that historical context is critical in labeling noir and its stock

character, the femme fatale. A femme fatale proper, as a construction of this speci c historical

period, embodies wartime anxieties. Jancovich writes that noir women demonstrate American

demonization of women who are not merely independent, but who consider themselves

responsible primarily for their own homes and interests over national priorities and patriotism.14

These fatal women are more concerned with the domestic sphere than with their country at large,

positioning the femme fatale as the wartime enemy on the home front, an idea I examine in

Chapter 1, Sec. III. While the term femme fatale tends to be overused in popular reference to any

seemingly dangerous or deceitful woman, it is in fact a highly speci c term. One inappropriate

use of the term, questionable not for any misunderstanding of noir aesthetics but rather for the

nature of its application, is its use in criminal trials. The mystery I seek to solve in this thesis is

the question of why and how our legal system uses the ctional femme fatale archetype in its

supposedly fact-based, and fact-creating, processes.

11
J.A. Place and L.S. Peterson, Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir, Film Comment vol. 10, no. 1, Feb. 1974, 31
12
S.C. Biesen, Psychology in American Film Noir and Hitchcocks Gothic Thrillers, Americana: The Journal of
American Popular Culture, 1900 to Present, Spring 2014, vol. 13 no. 1,
http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/spring_2014/biesen.htm.
Hugh Manon, X-Ray Visions: Radiography, Chiaroscuro, and the Fantasy of Unsuspicion in Film Noir, Film
Criticism, 2007, 2.
13
Cowie 126
14
Mark Jancovich, Female Monsters: Horror, the Femme Fatale and World War II, European Journal of
American Culture, vol. 27, no. 2, 2008, 134.
Ferguson 7


In this thesis, I intend to combine elements of psychology, sociology, law, and lm

studies in my analysis of the gure of the femme fatale in the American legal system. This thesis

explores the relationship between lm and law that allows for a ctional archetype, the femme

fatale, to play a role in real-life courtrooms in real criminal trials. Using case studies, I intend to

argue that the distinction between ction and law is less clear than the American public at large

may believe it to be. Rather, ction in uences law, and law in uences ction, in both direct and

indirect ways. I set forth evidence for this claim by using case studies: two from the age of lm

noir in the mid-1900s, and one from today. While the femme fatale is a completely ctional

trope, she appears in the courtroom in high-pro le murder cases in which American women are

the defendants. When ction and law overlap, the construction of reality at least legal reality

changes. While one might expect that ction wouldnotinfluencelaw,dramaticpresentations

ofindividualwomentoAmericanaudiencesinbothspheresa dheretoadistinctivesetof

aesthetictropes.

This introductory chapter will describe the literary and historical elements that set the

stage for the current position of the femme fatale in modern America. The thesis itself centers

around two case studies examined alongside two on-screen examples of the femme fatale. In

Chapter 2, I analyze the iconic femme fatale of Phyllis Dietrichson in the lm adaptation of

James M. Cains novel, Double Indemnity (1944), a gure often considered the benchmark of

the femme fatale.15 In light of what Dietrichsons character reveals about the characterization of

this archetypal gure, I discuss the Southern California trials of Nellie May Madison and Barbara

15
Yvonne Tasker, Women in Film Noir, in A Companion to Film Noir (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2013)
355
Ferguson 8


Graham, in 1934 and 1953, respectively. In the 1930s, the femme fatales predecessors were

combining through social and lmic processes, including the onset of World War II, to solidify

into this character type. Madisons trial displays characterizations of women as possessing traits

inherently counter to the masculine-oriented criminal justice system. In the 1950s, when lm noir

and its fatal women had already been installed in the American publics consciousness, Grahams

trial demonstrates the ways in which the image of the femme fatale by this time a recognizable

gure permeated legal discourse. Both women, each on trial for murder, were convicted and

sentenced to death for their crimes.

In Chapter 3, I analyze the 21st-century TV show Pretty Little Liars and its depictions of

the modern femme fatale. In this section, I argue that although traditional lm noir may seem

obsolete, the e ects of the femme fatale continue to resonate in popular culture on screen and in

the courtroom when American women are on trial for murder. Here I elaborate on the

psychoanalytic argument, widely agreed-upon by scholars, that the femme fatale as she emerged

in the 1940s represented fear and emasculation of the American military during the onset of

World War II. Applying this foundational historical setting for the birth of the femme fatale to the

modern day, I consider whether Pretty Little Liars can, like Double Indemnity, be considered a

depiction of a postwar femme fatale. I conclude that indeed both the show and the 2007 trial

embody elements of American fear of violence and disempowerment that struck the country with

the 9/11 terror attacks and the onset of the American War on Terror, conditions that made

America ripe for a scapegoat like the femme fatale.

The original femme fatale represented a monumental, visibly dangerous, individual threat

Ferguson 9


that destroyed men with a single blow, analogous to the new and frightening threat of the atomic

bomb developed during World War II. Todays femme fatale as embodied in Pretty Little Liars

displays the highly contemporary American fear of terrorism that has plagued the country since

2001. Unlike the 1940s character, todays femme fatale represented in PLL by Alison

DiLaurentis and her double, A in ltrates every part of everyday life through consumer

technology, unseen and unwitnessed until the damage is already done, without much evidence of

who committed the crime or who should be blamed. I hope to show in this thesis that while the

femme fatale still permeates popular viewing and the specter of law, the largest dangers

recognized by the Western world shift over time and alter the ways in which this mediated

archetype lters into the American legal system.

II. Visions of Desertion on the Home Front

In 1954, the United States was in the midst of a Cold War and a Red Scare. Black

American children could not attend school with their white peers. On the surface, American

social life has changed in many ways. Yet women accused of murder continue to be framed in the

same rhetoric that de ned their public images in 1954, 1934, even in 1927. Unlike the ubiquitous

female victims of horror, and unlike other murder cases that have captivated the nations attention

in the 21st century Jon-Benet Ramsey or Natalee Holloway this enduring fascination is not

with the beautiful American victim, but the beautiful American killer.

Crucially, the defendants real and ctional described in this thesis are held responsible

not only for their own actions, but also for the actions of others speci cally, for the violent

actions of men. The principle of individual responsibility holds strong in these cases, the

Ferguson 10


principle that structures the American justice system, but with an extra modi cation: while a man

may be accountable only to himself, a womans responsibilities extend beyond her own self and

body to those around her, who depend on her to ful ll the normative feminine duties that

American concepts of womanhood set forth. When women defy their responsibility to others, to

the households that depend on them and the family structures that, according to political rhetoric,

hold America together, their decision to desert is perceived not as merely an individuals

decision, but as an individual womans decision. Her sexuality is integral to her o ense. Her

innate physiological instability, tempered by her domestic roles, rushes out with the

suddenly-visible display of her individual female sexuality, a weapon she deploys in her own

interest without regard for those she manipulates or leaves behind. As Harvey writes, Phyllis

Dietrichson in Double Indemnity and Elsa Bannister in The Lady from Shanghai are actively

involved in the violent assault on the conventional values of family life.16

This vision of desertion was thrown into high relief after the onset of the World Wars of

the 20th century, especially after the onset of World War II in 1939 forced American industry to

accept an in ux of female laborers. The spectacle of the woman deserting her home and all those

who depended on her, to do a job that placed her body in an inappropriately physical space, was

soon splayed across American screens. In news broadcasts and public service announcements,

psychologists explained the phenomenon and cautioned against womens complete abandonment

of their responsibilities at home, their seeming desertion of the heteronormative family structure,

the desertion and emasculation of their drafted husbands, who were ghting to the death abroad

16
Sylvia Harvey, Womans Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir, in Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan
(London: British Film Institute, 1998) 38
Ferguson 11


17
while women pursued their own goals. After the public service announcements and the news

clips, the feature lms including lms noirs came on screen, showing the drastic danger to

the American people should they allow this mass desertion to continue striking families one by

one.

Holding these women accountable for the lives they neglected and destroyed at home

became a matter of public safety, and as such, a matter for the legal system. Making an example

of real-life women who took this desertion to the extreme, literally annihilating the men who

upheld their American family structures, the courts and the news media tried female murder

defendants with the lust for the drama of public punishment that the big screen had introduced to

them. Their appetites whet with these images, the American people and by extension the

judicial system that, in theory, represents nothing but The People and their interests

prosecuted accused female murderers to the fullest extent of the law, executing them when

possible and annihilating their reputations regardless. The public spectacle of the trial hence

became evidence that seeing is believing. Art, which has always known this, continues to

produce and reproduce such images, facilitating a feedback loop between ction and reality that

still colors the way America puts women on trial.

III. Pathologizing Crime in America

The power of the femme fatale to overtake a mans consciousness and drive him to do

17
Instability of Classical Gender Roles in Postwar America, YouTube, 2015.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVrRBIspxhk.
Women Fill Mens Factory Jobs During World War II, YouTube, 2015.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX107VHMB1Q&t=149s.
Rosie the Riveter: Danger: Women at Work circa 1943 Vision Educational; World War II, YouTube, 2013.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pblYHQHBKSM.
Ferguson 12


things that he would not do without her in uence speaks to an association between female

violence and madness that sheds light on the way the cases in this thesis were tried in the court

and in public opinion. Just as the ctional Lady Macbeth implored her husband in Macbeth, But
18
screw your courage to the sticking-place, / And well not fail, over 300 years later, the ctional
19
Phyllis Dietrichson scolded her lover, Its not our heads, its our nerve were losing. The real

Judd Gray told a 1927 courtroom that Nellie Madisons eye ruled me. I tried to look away. I
20
couldnt. I was helpless to resist anything she bade me do. The real Ra aele Sollecito told his

legal team in the 21st-century prosecution of Amanda Knox that being with a beautiful girl he
21
allowed himself to be drawn into giving her an alibi.

Michel Foucault writes that the monster is a breach of the law that automatically stands
22
outside the law. Women are by default outside the law: without a say in how the law was

written, they are expected to abide by it, though they have not been included or consulted in its
23
creation or enforcement. Standing outside the law and yet subject to its rule, a woman is

automatically a duplicate: she has a public self and a private self, one subject to the power of the

law but standing outside it her place is still constituted by the law. When a woman

transgresses the law to commit a violent crime, that which is not normal is marked as

unlegislated and lawless, though it is in fact still designated by the law. As the side of her that

18
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7.
19
Double Indemnity, dir. Billy Wilder (1944), 41:54.
20
Stevie Simkin, From Pandoras Box to Amanda Knox: Cultural Constructions of the Femme Fatale (London:
Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014) 93
21
Simkin 154
22
Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collge de France, 1974-1975 (New York: Picador, 2007) 56
23
The large majority of judges and other legal authorities are male. A potent and relevant example lies in the fact
that the United States has never had a female president in 250 years, in large part because of archaic election
institutions implemented in the 18th century by an all-male cast of self-appointed legislators.
Ferguson 13


seems to be rooted only in nature, this hidden part of a woman the wild part ruled only by

the mysterious, unknowable inner workings of her bizarre body beneath the skin, existing outside

the law is considered especially feminine: as Foucault continues, the monster is the major
24
model of every little deviation. As such a major example, the monstrous woman so

deemed by the law models the little deviations that are inherent in every womans body by

nature of her physiology, threatening the legal structures intended to hold her body in place, in

preapproved spaces and activities, even while being constituted by those legal structures. But a

criminal womans body cannot be controlled by words inscribed on paper: her mental state and

subsequent activities can only come from the mysterious, unmappable chaos within that most

feminine of bodily systems: her reproductive organs.

Feminine madness has been theorized in varying models with varying solutions proposed

to the woman problem, yet the only component of feminine madness that seems common across

time and place is that it is rooted in the womans body. A biological understanding of insanity,

one that emphasizes the physical body, must emphasize gender as biologically inscribed. For the

femme fatale, this criminal madness is embedded in the body, but she is not exempt from guilt
25
because of her insanitys biological nature. Rather, along with the household duties and family

members to whom she is expected to tend, female madness lies under the purview of things

seemingly external to a womans own intentions for which she is responsible. Far from being

exonerated by the organic nature of her madness, a criminal woman whose un-rulable

24
Foucault 56
25
Typically, insanity would be considered a mitigating factor in both guilt and sentencing phases of a criminal trial.
In addition to a verdict of Not Guilty by Reason of Mental Disease or Defect, there is also the verdict of GBMI
(Guilty But Mentally Ill), which reduces or eliminates prison time.
Ferguson 14


monstrous feminine sexual drives take over her consciousness and control her actions is

viewed as especially responsible. The case studies in this thesis suggest that perceptions of

insanity, while a potential mitigating factor in a mans trial, constitute an aggravating factor in the

trial of a well-publicized woman defendant.

In his lectures on The Abnormal, Foucault discusses how expert medical testimony

creates a type of truth that is not only non-medical and non-legal, but actually non-speci c, not

necessarily related to the defendant or any facts of the case.

Weareenteringacompletelydifferentrealmthatisnolongerthatofthelegalsubject
responsibleforhisactionsandwhoismedicallyjudgedtoberesponsible,butrathera
realmofmentalabnormalitythathasanimpreciserelationshiptotheoffense(italics
26
mine).

Itisthisrealm,thisuncannyvalleythatthefemmefataleinhabits,inherimpreciserelationships:

totherealandtheunreal,thenaturalandtheunnatural,thehumanwomanandthemonstrous

feminine,thesystematizedmedicolegalworldandtheungovernable,hystericalwild.Though

Foucaultsrealmmayseemunrelatedtothelaw,itonlyappearsnonlegal:itisstillrelatedto

thelaw.Thissystemofdoublebelongingandshiftingidentitywithinandwithoutofthelawis

onethatiscomplicatedinmodernfictitiousconceptsofthecriminalwoman.

Other scholars have undertaken the study of the femme fatale in various contexts: the

femme fatale as a psychoanalytic projection, as a challenge to heteropatriarchal norms in

America; as a sexual threat; as a key gure of lm noir; as an arbitrary gure in noir. Stevie

Simkin analyzes the femme fatale as a cultural trope in the law in his recent Cultural

Constructions of the Femme Fatale: From Pandoras Box to Amanda Knox (2014). Simkins

26
Foucault 25
Ferguson 15


analysis centers on a handful of case studies, a similar structure to the one I use here. Simkin

considers three cases: Frances Howard, Ruth Snyder and Amanda Knox, inspired by Knox to do

a study of the femme fatale at di erent points in history, and the overlap between real life
27
cases and mediated representations of them. While Simkins analysis appears, at rst glance,

quite similar to mine, I have observed two key di erences that lend his analysis a signi cantly

di erent angle.

First, the early chapters of Simkins book are constructed as a lead-up to his preferred

subject, the main object of his exploration in Cultural Constructions: Amanda Knox. Though he

frames the book as a study of the femme fatale trope throughout history, in fact, his historical

overview serves mostly, in practical terms, to set up the reader for a highly in-depth look at the

Knox case. Simkin admits as much at points: The purpose of the study, he writes, is to assess
28
how Knox ts into the pattern of ideation and discourse around the femme fatale archetype.

His interest lies principally in the Knox case; his work is an exercise in attempting to understand

the cultural phenomenon that continues to unfold around one particular defendant. Simkin does

not express interest in the noir tradition as a foundational birthplace of the femme fatale per se.

He is much more interest in the historical groundwork Eve in the Garden of Eden, the legend

of the Medusa, Victorian England, Pandora and her box as a pedestal on which to place Knox

than he is on the femme fatale as a part of noir tradition. His tendency to equate a femme fatale

with a dangerous woman he de nes her as a conventionally beautiful woman who lures the
29
male hero into dangerous situations by overpowering his will with her irresistible sexuality

27
Simkin 4
28
Simkin 12
29
Simkin
Ferguson 16


is one that I nd reductive. Simkins analysis does not consider the historical conditions of the

20th century within which lm noir developed as a distinctly American genre with its own

traditions and archetypes.

This observation leads me to my second major point of di erence with Simkin, one that I

believe is crucial in understanding my conception and argument of the importance of the femme

fatale: unlike Simkin, I am focused on the femme fatale as an American construction, one

cemented into lm and the American legal system through its distinctively American cultural

elements and consequences. Simkin, a Brit, is neither interested nor ostensibly invested in the

femme fatale as an American woman. In fact he seems to consider her a global gure, one whose

history can be deduced from every corner of the world to create some form of perceived modern

woman that he seeks to understand through the Knox lens. I disagree. I believe Simkins failure

to attribute adequate attention to the American roots and consequences of the femme fatale gure

can be partially explained by his broad de nition of the term, one that includes nearly any

dangerous woman. This generalization clouds Simkins ability to examine the femme fatales

speci c physical, emotional, sexual, and above all historical components per se. Simkin has

pledged to study the femme fatale, but his work reads as a painstaking account of the Knox case

and some signi cant historical background on dangerous women in general. In my work, I

likewise often write with an eye for the transhistorical, but my focus is on the contemporary

situations in which American lms and the trials of American women interact.

American lm noir as it emerged in the 1940s, after the onset of World War II, features

the femme fatale as a central driving character. The femme fatale, in my understanding an

Ferguson 17


understanding drawn from extensive research and upon which I premise this project is a

woman whose extreme, unlawful sexuality is one that reveals her innate biological feminine

tendencies toward sel shness and recklessness. Such tendencies, once unleashed, lead to

violence. An essential component of the femme fatales personal history is cemented in noir: she

is always apprehended and punished for her reckless self-centeredness, considered an act of

violence in an era in which womens docility was considered key to an American way of life.

This punishment, exacted by masculine forces of the word of law, is aggravated depending on the

degree to which the femme can be shown to be mad, unruly, or otherwise demonstrative of any

essentially feminine traits.

Ferguson 18


Chapter 2: Double Indemnity, Nellie May Madison, and Barbara Graham

Same perfume, same anklet, same chair?

-Walter Ne , Double Indemnity (1944)

A deceptively demure young womanhas emerged as the most brazen femme fatale in recent
California crime annals.
-Monahan Case Femme Fatale: Story of a Girl Who May Die for Killing.
The San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 20, 1953

I. Introduction to Double Indemnity

In Billy Wilders Double Indemnity (1944), Barbara Stanwyck plays the quintessential

femme fatale in the role of scheming housewife Phyllis Dietrichson, opposite Fred MacMurrays

hapless insurance salesman Walter Ne . I intend to argue that by portraying Dietrichson as a

narcissist without real heterosexual desire for men, Double Indemnity organizes several generally

undesirable traits in women into a single personality that is harshly subject to the rule of law: the

femme fatale. The Dietrichson persona thus sets forth a gure and a narrative in which men can,

through use of the legal system, regulate traits in women that they would like to eliminate,

Ferguson 19


creating a cultural framework in which the law must annihilate undesirable elements of

femininity by executing the women who embody them. Thus, the femme fatale construct both

legitimizes and encourages the death penalty for women convicted of murder as a means of

preserving peace and normative gender roles. These rami cations are manifest in the 1934 and

1953 cases of Nellie Madison and Barbara Graham. In 1934, Madison was the rst woman to be

sentenced to death in California, though her sentence was later commuted. In 1953, Graham was

the third woman ever to be executed in California.

I argue that the femme fatale both constructs and is constructed by real life legal cases.

While other scholars have read Double Indemnity as a noir tale of Freudian castration, sexual

deviance, and legal retribution, I intend to contribute to the literature by providing an analysis of

how ction and law came to reinforce one another in postwar America, as lm noir conceptions

of the femme fatale created, and were created by, the law. Madison and Grahams cases,

especially Grahams, illustrate the profound power of ctional archetypes to e ect consequences

in the legal world.

The plot of Double Indemnity mirrors that of a real case, one that writer James M. Cain

followed as a young journalist working in New York City. The in uence of the real-life case on

the novel and lm, and the lms in uence on subsequent legal trials, demonstrates that the

purportedly objective legal process is profoundly a ected by the aesthetics of the period.

Wilders on-screen version follows Cains novelistic retelling of that trial (described in detail in

Chapter 2, Section V). Enlisting Ne in a plot to kill her husband and pro t o the insurance

money, Phyllis Dietrichson creates a scheme in which Ne assumes the blame for her husbands

Ferguson 20


murder while the intent remains entirely hers. As the lm progresses, Dietrichson and Ne enter

into a sexual relationship. Together they conspire to kill Mr. Dietrichson in such a way that will

allow Phyllis to collect double indemnity from her insurance company, where Ne works as a

salesman. Ne s suggestion is that Mr. Dietrichson die on a train so as to collect double

indemnity, and so the two kill Dietrichson before having Ne impersonate him onboard a train

and dumping the body on the tracks. As Ne s boss Keyes investigates the case to be sure that

the insurance collected is appropriate, Ne and Phyllis keep their relationship clandestine,

becoming more and more antagonized towards one another in the quest of each to absolve him or

herself of blame.

In the end of the lm, Ne confronts Phyllis in her home, accusing her of pretending to

care for him just so he would kill her husband and take the blame. She shoots and injures him,

but cannot shoot again. The ensuing dialogue is as follows:

NEFF: Why didnt you shoot again, baby? Dont tell me its because youve been in love with
me all this time.

PHYLLIS: No, I never loved you, Walter, not you or anybody else. Im rotten to the heart, I used
you just as you said. Thats all you ever meant to me. Until a minute ago, when I couldnt re
that second shot. I never thought that could happen to me.

NEFF: Sorry baby, Im not buying.

PHYLLIS: Im not asking you to buy, just hold me close.

30
NEFF: Goodbye baby.

Ne then shoots and kills her. Returning to the insurance o ce bleeding heavily from his

own wound, Ne records his confession on tape for Keyes. It is this tape recording that serves as

30
Double Indemnity, 1:39:44-1:40:26
Ferguson 21


the narrative voiceover for the lm. Keyes eventually catches Ne in the act of confessing, and as

Ne attempts to stagger out of the o ce, he collapses in the doorway, dying. In the nal scene of

the lm, Keyes kneels over Ne . Ne tells him, You know why you couldnt gure this one,

Keyes? Ill tell you. Because the guy you were looking for was too close. Right across the desk

from you. Keyes responds, Closer than that, Walter. In a striking contrast to Phyllis nal I

never loved you before her execution, in the nal line of the lm before his death, Ne replies
31
with a chuckle, I love you, too.

In Double Indemnity, Ne preempts the law: assuming that he will be convicted if he

does not kill Phyllis Dietrichson and constructing a mental plan in which he will never be

convicted for killing Mr. Dietrichson if he does kill Phyllis. By annihilating Phyllis, then, Ne

absolves himself of the guilt of killing his fellow man: killing the female Dietrichson is, to Ne s

eyes, eliminating the undesirable, even evil elements that remain while Phyllis lives. While his

killing of Mr. Dietrichson was not precipitated by any sin of Dietrichsons, only by sel sh

motives, his misaligned equation equates his motives for killing Phyllis (her liability to betray

him as part of a killing team) with those that the law would use in executing her (her

participation per se in the killing team). Considering his killing thus equated with legal

execution, though outside the o cial legal framework, Ne considers his actions morally, even

legally, justi ed. Acting out of anticipation of the law, Ne acts as an agent of the law.

In the American world of lm noir, the femme fatale must be executed in order to avoid

further destruction of the social order, and in order to preserve the sanctity of this social order,

she must be executed in a way that is built into the American legal system. In the 1930s and

31
Double Indemnity, 1:46:42-1:47:03
Ferguson 22


1950s, Nellie May Madison and Barbara Graham each captured the attention of the nation with

high-pro le criminal trials, accused in California of the murders of their respective husbands.

Each was sentenced to death after lengthy, heavily publicized proceedings that attracted

signi cant media attention, and each case presents large quantities of written evidence testifying

as to the public perception of each woman as a femme fatale. As the prototypical femme fatale in
32
a lm that many Americans, watching the trial for entertainment, would have already watched,

Dietrichson provided a character onto which the public, aided by the court and the media, could

map these real-life transgressive women. As the villain of Double Indemnity, Dietrichson

embodies the femme fatale in three critical ways: through her narcissism, her inability to love

men, and her provocation of the forceful triumph of masculine law over feminine disorder. The

aforementioned three characteristics make Dietrichson the iconic femme fatale and lay the

framework for a comparison of her character with those of the highly publicized trials of

Madison and Graham.

In addition to her narcissistic personality (examined in Sec. II), Dietrichson demonstrates

Sherwins assertion that in lm, as perhaps in life, female heterosexual desire is always staged.
33
The implication of Dietrichsons inability to feel true attraction for either her husband or Ne

is that any legitimate attraction she feels must not be for any man, and perhaps she reserves her
34
a ection for women. The hints of bisexuality and homosexual leanings in Double Indemnity

32
The lm took in $2.5 million in box o ce revenue in 1944, equivalent to over $34.6 million in 2017 dollars. S.C.
Biesen, Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir (New York: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) 97
33
Miranda Sherwin, Deconstructing the Male: Masochism, Female Spectatorship, and the Femme Fatale in Fatal
Attraction, Body of Evidence, and Basic Instinct, Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 38, no. 4, 2008, 176
34
In the novel version of Double Indemnity, Phyllis only true love is reserved for Death itself. James Cain, Double
Indemnity 23, as cited in Brian Gallagher, I Love You Too: Sexual Warfare & Homoeroticism in Billy Wilders
Double Indemnity, Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 4, 1987.
Ferguson 23


typify the bewildering nature of a femme fatales sexuality (discussed in depth in Chapter 2, Sec.

IV). The lm also shows the opposite of this feminine chaos in its guration of masculine

authority and investigation, notably in the gure of Barton Keyes, who relishes his position as

insurance inspector and considers himself not only an insurance man, but a surgeon, detective,

judge, and general man of facts.

Finally, the resolution of the lm situates it clearly in a legal context, making it an apt

candidate for transference onto real-life legal cases. The dual conclusions of the lm show that

law must be imposed over interpersonal relationships, no matter how private the nature of the

relationship (see Secs. V-VII). First, Ne kills Dietrichson for legal reasons, to avoid her giving

testimony in court that would implicate him. Ne shows an acute awareness of legal procedures

and the nuance with which guilt and innocence can be manipulated within the legal system. He

knows the law will show lenience to cooperative witnesses who provide evidence against a

coconspirator. It is his fear that Phyllis will become just such a witness that fuels him to kill her.

The murder itself is also highly planned: Ne details out loud the rationale behind his decision to

kill Phyllis, his fears of prosecution, his understanding that the authorities will likely accept

another man, Nino Sachetti, as Phyllis likely killer. This intricate planning around the law is

exactly what makes Phyllis and Ne s murder of Mr. Dietrichson so alluring: because the

immediate picture of what has happened to Mr. Dietrichson does not appear to be murder, no

laws appear to have been broken, making the murder an intelligent, if not seemingly perfect,

crime straight down the line.35 The smaller crime before the murder the insurance fraud

is also handled with delicate understanding of the law: Phyllis desire to access her husbands

35
Ne rst says this phrase at 0:31:21 in Double Indemnity, and Phyllis repeats it back to him.
Ferguson 24


money legally, within the established system, with his signature on an o cial legal form, drives

the fraud.

In its second conclusion, the lm again demonstrates an acute awareness of the applicable
36
law. Ne explicitly terms his verbal retelling of events a confession, a legal term, knowing his

boss will immediately consider Ne s actions and case in legal terms, as a man whose life

functions around legal contracts and investigation. Although he and Ne share an emotional and

even homoerotic bond, and although he knows well that Ne s actions were driven by a woman,

the misogynistic Keyes summons the police anyway, reinforcing the importance of law over all,

including those who fall victim to manipulative women and feminine chaos.

The imposition of male law over female disorder and criminality is the moral takeaway of

the lms story, making it, in the eyes of many viewers, a cautionary tale for real-life women who

attempted to break free of their husbands, whose fates were sealed in legal cases that, alongside

lm, re ected these concepts of violent femininity in performance. Such attempts at escape from

abusive husbands were viewed by adjudicators as unnecessarily violent and uncharacteristic of a

37
reasonable wife. While killing women as a means of social organization has a long history

36
00:05:04-05:24
37
The Encyclopedia of Business Ethics and Society de nes the reasonable person standard as follows: The
reasonable person standard is a test used to de ne the legal duty to protect one's own interest and that of others. The
standard requires one to act with the same degree of care, knowledge, experience, fair-mindedness, and awareness of
the law that the community would expect of a hypothetical reasonable person. The standard is objective in that it
compares one's behavior with that expected of a reasonable person, without regard to one's intention or state of
mind. The reasonable person standard plays a key role in negligence law, where behavior falling below the standard
triggers liability. The reasonable person standard also appears in contract law, criminal law, civil rights law, and
elsewhere. The reasonable wife, as imagined for the purpose of this thesis, is a variation of the reasonable person
standard, speci cally Naomi Cahns reasonable woman standard. Cahn writes that in rape law, the image of the
reasonable woman hurts women (Cornell Law Review, vol. 77, no. 6, 1992, 1402). Representing a defendant using
the battered woman defense requires consideration of the reasonable woman: what would she do in the face of
domestic violence? Cahn writes that the reasonable woman image ignores the complexities of the clients
situation. Once such a stock gure is developed, it is di cult to displace, to nd new language to think beyond it,
Cahn writes. While Cahns words apply to the reasonable woman, whom we may just as well call the reasonable
Ferguson 25


38
prior to the advent of lm noir, the lm noir enables men not only to kill women, but to execute

them with authority. As a femme fatale, the woman is a social evil that must kill or be killed. It is

the urgency of this message communicated in lm noir that both re ects and feeds the inclination

to punish and execute badly behaved women in real life, using the undeniable tool of the law.

II: Feminine Narcissism and Self-Surveillance in Double Indemnity

Dietrichsons narcissistic personality plays a vital part in the identi cation of her role as a

femme fatale, and the perception of narcissism as an essentially feminine personality trait makes

her femme fatale comprehensible and seemingly applicable to a real-world legal context. Ne

executes Dietrichson precisely because of the imagined outcome of a criminal trial: knowing the
39
jury would execute him and not her, he takes her execution upon himself, condemning her as

guilty not only of murder, but chie y of self-obsession. Blinkhorn writes, Narcissism may

capture the idea of the ultimate femme fatale, dangerous when being refused what she feels
40
entitled to. Snyder also writes of the narcissism of these fatal women, suggesting that the

femme fatales interest in her own fate as the only one worth contemplating can be witnessed in
41
her frequent consideration of her own re ection in the mirror. Double Indemnity presents

wife in domestic violence cases, her insight into the impact of the stock gure applies just as powerfully to this
study of the femme fatale.
38
Femicide, de ned by the World Health Organization as the murder of a woman, is manifest in nearly every culture
as a tool of social organization (WHO 2012). Two widely recognized examples can be found in the social
organizational use of woman-killing in the American 17th-century Salem Witch Trials and the honor killings of
Islamic cultures.
39
Dijkstra quotes a scene from A Fool There Was, in which a character describes the Vampires guilt in the death of
her lover: The worst of it is that she cant be held legally guiltymorally, yes, guilty as sin; but legally (Bram
Dijkstra, Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood [New York: Knopf, 1996] 32). A
mans self-preservationist instinct to preempt the law by carrying out execution himself is here perfectly
understandable.
40
Victoria Blinkhorn, The ultimate femme fatale? Narcissism predicts serious and aggressive sexually coercive
behavior in females, Personality and Individual Di erences, vol. 87, 2015, 222.
41
Scott Snyder, Personality Disorder and the Film Noir Femme Fatale, Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular
Ferguson 26


Dietrichson as just such a woman, obsessed with her own material possessions and physical

appearance, including a secondhand description from her stepdaughter of her own gaze at herself

in the mirror.

Considering social reasons for which women might be unable to avoid negative

judgments of narcissism, John Berger writes that women, born into a world constructed and

constricted by male expectations and masculine standards, exist inevitably in a world of a

re ected, dual self-image: while living, they are also constantly aware of themselves being

watched. While a woman performs any action, such as walking, she is truly performing it for an

audience, one that, if not physically present, has become embedded into her own image of

herself. A woman must continually watch herself, Berger writes. She is almost continually
42
accompanied by her own image of herself. Existing in tandem with her own image, a woman is

subject to exceptionally in-depth surveillance: aws in a womans conduct that may go unnoticed

if she is alone without an audience are never unnoticed with her embedded self-surveillance

mechanism in play. She is hyper-aware of her own behavior and appearance. The inevitable

result of this self-surveying mechanism, social in origin and individual in execution, is that any

antisocial or abnormal action is conducted with a heightened sense of awareness and intention:

that is to say, if a woman is always in a state of watching herself, she can perform no action with

the defense of pleading unawareness of her own conduct. Berger writes that self-surveillance can

thus be used as an instrument with which to control others: by modifying how she appears to

others, a woman can to some extent determine how those others will treat her. In order to obtain

Culture, vol. 8, no. 3, 2001.

42
This makes narcissism almost inevitable in women, therefore inscribing in every woman some aspect of
predetermined guilt. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Toronto: Penguin Group, 2009) 46.
Ferguson 27


43
this control, Berger theorizes, women must contain it and interiorize it.

In Double Indemnity, Phyllis Dietrichson is portrayed by the lms creators as a

self-possessed woman who has fully internalized this principle: that a woman can control

whether a man listens to her or treats her as she wishes by altering and using her visible

appearance. While a cultural perspective like Bergers might consider this an inevitable result of

her socially embedded self-surveillance mechanism, the audience is made to side with Ne ,

concluding instead that Dietrichson is no victim to the male gaze: she is a conscious manipulator.

Projections of victimhood to social or physical illnesses become cunning trickery, as the femme

fatale presents the same willfulness, self-indulgence, and narcissism that doctors (not
44
psychoanalysts) saw in hysterical women. She makes no mistakes and commits no accidental

acts: every part of their murderous plot, as she and Ne repeat to each other, is straight down
45
the line, no matter how small. As a woman Dietrichson is a performer, playing to an audience

of at least one at all times, conscious and in control of the messages any surveilling power might

43
Berger 46
44
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985) 207
45
In his exploration of fetishism in Double Indemnity, Hugh Manon dedicates signi cant analysis to the di erent
meanings embodies in this phrase when it is repeated by Ne and alternatively by Phyllis. When Phyllis says she
will go straight down the line, Manon writes that she verbalizes her commitment and desire to carry out the murder
plot. When Ne says this line, Manon argues that as a fetishist, Ne not as a road, or a pathway of desire leading to
a longed-for goal, but more of an endless checklist (Manon, Some Like It Cold: Fetishism in Billy Wilders
Double Indemnity, Cinema Journal, vol. 44, no. 4, 2005). Ruth Prigozy writes that Ne s eventual death is
foreshadowed by his failure to cede to a Stop sign in the lms opening scene, as he ignores all the warning signals,
passes the Stop sign on his way straight down the line (Ruth Prigozy, Double Indemnity: Billy Wilders Crime
and Punishment, Literature Film Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 3, 1984). Ne s repeated assurance that the murder will be
straight down the line shows that it has clearly become his murder, rather than Phyllis, Prigozy writes. There is
irony in Ne s assertion of control over the situation: in many ways, his signature phrase embodies a sense of
destiny, determined to unfold regardless of any obstacle any individual may place in its way. Pelizzon emphasizes
the sense of predestination in this phrase, paying special attention to Ne s characters real-life inspiration, Judd
Gray (V. Penelope Pelizzon, Multiple Indemnity: Film Noir, James M. Cain, and Adaptations of a Tabloid Case,
Narrative, vol. 13, no. 3, 2005)
Ferguson 28


receive. As Berger writes, self-surveillance is part of living in a male-dominated world. Yet in

Double Indemnity, a womans own self-surveillance mechanism is something that men must

isolate and capture, controlling it through the institution of the law in some way, because it
46
reveals a womans dangerous narcissistic tendencies, lurking beneath the surface.

III. Voiceover vs. Image in Double Indemnity

The simplest elements of a legal framework are visible in the classic lm noir framing

strategy of the male voiceover. These voiceovers narrate the story unfolding on screen,

explaining what happened in the past tense from the point of view of the male protagonist who

was most injured by the femme fatale of the lm. Catherine MacKinnon writes that the subject is

always male. The stance-that-is-not-a-stance, the point of view that is not a point of view but is
47
the truth, is male, MacKinnon writes. The power of truth-telling inherent in the male voice

authority in the noir voiceover. The mans word is true testimony, verbal evidence that can be

trusted. In lms noirs, including Double Indemnity, the male voiceover is quite literally the voice

of truth. It is also the only voice on o er: there is no presentation of dueling narratives nor any

plurality of possibility in the story of what happened, who the players were, or what motivated

them. With the self-satis ed certainty of a legal verdict, the voiceover chooses one version of the

truth over another in this case as in other femme fatale cases in lm and in life, the truth

chosen is the prosecutors over the defendants. The viewer hears Ne s voiceover telling a

46
S. Weir Mitchell, pioneer of the rest cure for hysterical women, wrote that the hysterical woman had, early in
life, lost her power of self rule (Smith-Rosenberg 205). Designating a womans self-rule as absent creates a space
for the physician/lawmaker to intervene, lling the absence with his own control (Smith-Rosenberg 211).
47
Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodi ed: Discourses on Life and Law (London: Harvard University Press,
1987) 55.
Ferguson 29


historical truth of events that, as the viewer can see for himself, already happened, providing a
48
cogent narrative. Though this voiceover is never clearly con rmed by visual aspects of the lm,

the viewer trusts Ne because he is literally the speaker, giving what he admits is likely to be

viewed as a confession, a guilty plea.

As Paula Quigley writes in Undoing the Image, referencing Thomas Docherty, The

voice over in lm noir is of course overwhelmingly male, and the gure that resists this
49
omnivorous discourse is almost without exception female. Just as the person who uses

language to narrate is inevitably masculine, the person whose existence is dictated and narrated

by this voice is overwhelmingly feminine. The di culty with the dark women of lm noir lies in

their subversion of this surveillance. John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing, Men survey women
50
before treating them. In lm noir, the female gure resists the male narrative in its incapacity

to be grasped, isolated or outlined. The visual duplicity and slipperiness of the femme fatale, her
51
tendency to slip in and out of the light and the shadows, make her a literal moving target for the

man to attempt to trap with his worded law, subject to endless rules and regulations, unlike the

boundless female form and her tendency to envelop those who encounter her unsuspecting.

On screen, the interactions between the male investigator and the femme fatale adhere to
52
Bergers simple assertion that men act and women appear. However, beyond the screen

that is, in the narrative world of the lm itself, considered apart from its relationship to its

48
Paula Quigley, Undoing the Image: Film Theory and Psychoanalysis, Film-Philosophy Journal, vol. 15, no. 1,
2011, 24
49
Quigley 25
50
Berger 46
51
Discussed in Ch. 1, stylistic elements of lm noir.
52
Berger 47, emphasis in original
Ferguson 30


audience women act, invisibly, in ways that subvert the typical rules of gender relations. What

is threatening about Dietrichson, as is true of Graham and Madison, is her utter failure to look

like a threat. Visually, Dietrichson and her real-life counterparts Graham and Madison present

themselves according to the laws of female self-presentation: they perform femininity in such a
53
way as ts near-perfectly the social standards of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Between

Grahams shapely thigh (discussed in Sec. IV), Dietrichsons anklet, and Madisons beautiful
54
brunette bride image, each woman projects an image of nonthreatening beauty and sexual

appeal to men, while subverting the power of male surveillance by executing plans of their own

unbeknownst to these men, who are distracted by their visual appeal.

The incident of Phyllis mirror-gazing comes into play in the protagonists nal

confrontation via Ne s retelling: he knows that she is guilty because he heard from another

woman, an eyewitness (see Sec. V), that Phyllis was looking at herself in the mirror in a widows

veil. Through the narrative structure of Ne s narration, the lm creates a portrait of a woman

who, while being taken down for her criminal acts and aspirations, must also be accosted for her

ability to use her awareness of her own sexual prowess to take down those around her. Ne s

position as narrator permits him to present evidence to the viewer that was communicated to him

only through verbal testimony from third persons, such as the oral revelation from Lola that

Phyllis has been spending time gazing at herself in a widows veil in the mirror. The climactic

nal showdown of Double Indemnity is thus portrayed not only as a confrontation between

Dietrichsons powers of persuasion and Ne s personal authority, but as a demonstration of the

53
Cairns (2009)
54
Kathleen Cairns, Enigma Woman Nellie Madison: Femme Fatales & Noir Fiction, Montana the Magazine of
Western History, 2004, 20
Ferguson 31


inherent moral wrongness of Dietrichsons sexual authority and its physical, material

presentation.

While the masculinized power of the voiceover undoubtedly steers the lm, its analysis is

incomplete if the nature of the narrative authority of Double Indemnity is left unexamined. In

fact, the deaths of Phyllis and Ne must be examined through two lenses of distortion: rst,

Phyllis death must be understood as an event dictated by Ne ; second, a full reading of Ne s

death scene must account for the homoerotic love for Keyes that he verbalizes once his voiceover

narration has ended. Phyllis side of the story is ltered through Ne s narration, which assigns

immoral values to her physical and sexual qualities and moral ones to his own capacity for

storytelling.

While Wilders protagonists spend the majority of the lm occupying the traditionally

demonizing and valorizing roles of the narcissistic woman and the heterosexual man, by its

conclusion, they display somewhat altered personality traits. In her gaze into the mirror

assuming the story Lola tells is true Phyllis Dietrichson seems to con rm her narcissistic

tendencies. The audience learns that Phyllis is unable to focus her object-love onto a man; rather,

all her capacity to love is directed solely towards her own image. Ne plays the fully actualized

heterosexual male to Phyllis stunted, autoerotic, mirror-gazing female.

The nal scenes of the lm, however, reveal that both of these portrayals are exible roles

played by the respective characters. In her nal scene before her death, Phyllis is partnered on

screen with Ne . After claiming she has never loved anyone, Phyllis tells Ne that, having been

unable to re a kill shot, she now thinks she loves Ne , something she never thought could

Ferguson 32


happen to me. This apparent confession of love, though, cannot be con rmed as a genuine

emotionin fact, Phyllis sudden willingness to admit to love once at gunpoint counters her own

attempts at earnestness, showing that she will perform any role that seems most convenient for

her at any given moment. Minutes later, in Ne s nal scene before his own death, he appears on

screen not with Phyllis as his partner, but with Keyes. Before his death, Ne tells Keyes that he

loves him, in a declaration of a ection considered by many critics to be Wilders ultimate

55
con rmation of the pairs homosexual attraction. As Phyllis has oscillated between roles, Ne

has assumed the conduct and appearance of a heterosexual man, visually camou aging his

verbally-expressed a ection throughout the lm. Thus, in their nal moments, both protagonists

are revealed to have been playing their own roles within the plot of the lm.

IV: Staged Heterosexual Desire and Male Fetishism

Barbara Graham was convicted in Los Angeles in 1953 of killing a woman, the widow

Mabel Monahan, in a botched robbery attempt. In Cairns book Proof of Guilt: Barbara Graham
56
and the Politics of Executing Women in America, detailing the 1953 trial and conviction of

Barbara Graham for capital murder, Cairns cites several news articles describing Grahams

beauty and sexual appeal. One writer for the San Francisco Chronicle described Graham as the

most brazen femme fatale in recent California crime annals, a defendant with tinted Titian

blonde hairdrawn up in a school-teacherish bun, a good complexion, and cold green eyes.

55
Gallagher; Bernard F. Dick, Chapter 6: Film Subtext in The Anatomy of Film (New York: Bedford/St. Martins,
2009)
56
Cairns suggests that the viability of the femme fatale archetype as a legal tool may have been in uenced by the fact
that Grahams trial occurred during the early years of the Cold War (Kathleen Cairns, Proof of Guilt: Barbara
Graham and the Politics of Executing Women in America [New York: University of Nebraska Press, 2013] 35).
Ferguson 33


57
Another journalist found it relevant to note Grahams shapely thigh in describing her as she
58
sat on the witness stand. In another article, the same journalist from the Los Angeles Examiner

noted that Graham potentially could become the most beautiful victim the gas chamber ever has
59
claimed. The journalistic value of these physical details is evident in the proliferation of such

descriptions throughout the news media coverage of Grahams case, many of which suggested

the construct of the femme fatale in depicting the image of the courtroom that would elicit the

most interest from readers looking to court reporting for entertainment.

As a symbol of her overall sexuality and deadly allure, Grahams shapely thigh serves

the same rhetorical purpose as Phyllis Dietrichsons notorious anklet in Double Indemnity. To the

extent that Dietrichsons captivating anklet lures Ne to commit a crime he would otherwise

never consider, Grahams shapely thigh similarly serves as proof of guilt for her own lusty crime.

Each image is a small, speci c, signature physical trait that possesses a sexual allure for the man

viewing it. The setting of the Graham case in Southern California served to blur the line even

more between reality and ction. In the beginning of Double Indemnity, when Ne and
60
Dietrichson rst meet, the rst thing Ne s narrator notices about her is that anklet. Towards

the end of the lm, Dietrichson takes her seat on the armchair in the middle of her living room

for the nal confrontation with Ne . She has prepared the room by turning out the lights,

explicitly and deliberately denying Ne s instructions to turn the lights on. She takes her seat

57
Monahan Case Femme Fatale: Story of a Girl Who May Die for Killing, San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 20,
1953
58
Cairns (2013) 42, citing Graham Girl on Stand Has Unhappiest Day of Her Life, Los Angeles Examiner, Sept. 1,
1953
59
Cairns (2013) 42, citing Barbara Breaks in Monahan Death Case, Los Angeles Examiner, Sept. 2, 1953
60
Double Indemnity, 00:11:21
Ferguson 34


after having heard Ne ring the doorbell, sitting down as the bell rings rather than moving to

open the door to greet him, as would be a housewifes typical duty, which she did previously in
61
the beginning of the lm. Most signi cantly, having set this visually striking scene, Dietrichson

plants a gun in the cushions of the chair and

takes her seat in the same place that Ne

originally favored in the beginning of the

lm. When he visited to discuss auto

insurance and planned to return to the house,

he asked whether she would be there with

the same perfume, same anklet, same

chair.

Upon entering the room in the climactic

scene, Ne makes the material connection

immediately: Just like the rst time I came

here, isnt it? We were talking about

automobile insurance, only you were

thinking about murder and I was thinking

about that anklet. The parallel between

Ne s thoughts and Dietrichsons thoughts is clear: while Ne was occupied by his fetish for

61
Film noirs use of chiaroscuro design elements has its roots in European silent lm from the early decades of the
20th century. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a silent German horror lm from 1920, has been hailed by some critics
as an exemplar of chiaroscuro. (Richard McCormick, From Caligari to Dietrich: Sexual, Social, and Cinematic
Discourses in Weimar Film, Signs, vol. 13, no. 3, 1993, 643)
Ferguson 35


Dietrichsons anklet and its suggestion of raw sexuality, Dietrichson, while wearing the

aforementioned anklet, had no interest in sex. Her thoughts, as Ne and the viewer both

recognize by the end of the lm, were consumed by much more abstract thoughts of murder.

While Ne , as a man, can only focus on the visual cue of sex presented by the anklet,

Dietrichson uses these visual cues as a form of bait, turning her body into a conduit between her

fatal ends (murder) and her banal means (Ne ).

While Dietrichons anklet shows a compelling parallel to Graham, as shown by Cains

experience with the Snyder case, Graham is only one of a series of cases in which women on trial

for murder were portrayed in terms of sex, including the Nellie May Madison case mentioned in

Chapter 1. Sex with these women was death, the nality of sexual climax, la petite morte, taken

to its logical extreme: a sexual fatality resulting from interaction with a fatal woman.

For Phyllis Dietrichson and her legal femme fatale counterparts, a womans only real lust

is for money and independence. As Dietrichson con rms to Ne before he ultimately kills her,

No, I never loved you, Walter, not you or anybody else. Her subsequent desperate attempt to

avoid death by convincing Ne that she did, in fact, love him shows her duplicitousness and

serves to bolster Ne s conviction that Dietrichson is incapable of feeling real love for a man.

The common failure of the ctional Dietrichson and the living Graham, Madison and Snyder
62
the failure to desire men as they should makes them perpetrators of a crime before they even

commit their crimes, legal targets twice over. As I will mention in the third chapter, in her trial

for the murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher, Amanda Knox was described by an Italian

62
Cairns writes that Madison led an active sex life with numerous partners, beginning when she was barely into her
teens and picked up and cast o husbands with a nonchalance that suggested she had no use for traditional values
(Cairns [2009] 85).
Ferguson 36


attorney as a young woman devoted to lust, a descriptor intended to augment, if not prove, her
63
guilt of the accused crime. Tasker writes that legality overlaps with gender norms and sexual

mores when women are castigated for suspected promiscuity, even for ambition, as much as for

theft or murder.64 In order to avoid the fatal label, a womans sexuality must always be

moderated by heterosexual relationships. Either pole devotion to lust, or no real interest in any

man is dangerous for its uncontrollability. A femme fatale can be on either end of the

spectrum but never in the middle she never truly possesses a mediated heterosexual sexuality,

no matter how well she may act it out; had she such a sexuality, she would not be eligible to be a

femme fatale.

The nonstandard, seemingly unmediated sexuality of the femme fatale nds its most

extreme illustration in the tendency of these fatal women to be attracted to other women. This

bisexuality, whether suggested, real, or in between, augments the womans duplicitous character

and solidi es the idea that she is someone not to be trusted, someone who cannot pick one story

and stick to it, even someone who is not truly or fully a woman insofar as a woman plays the

opposite role to the man. Tasker quotes Stables, who writes that in the 1992 neo-noir lm Basic

Instinct, Lesbianism is both a symbol of sexual outlawry, and an expression of [the femme

fatale]s power over the hero.65 As the social strictures that de ne her as a socially acceptable

woman those of heterosexual marriage; devotion to the home, husband and family; gentleness

evaporate, her basest female characteristics are all that is left to evidence her femininity.

63
An attorney, Carlo Pacelli, for another defendant, Patrick Lumumba, said Knox was devoted to lust (Attorney:
U.S. Student Amanda Knox a She-Devil, Fox News, Sept. 26, 2011).
64
Tasker 360
65
Tasker 368, quoting Kate Stables, The Postmodern Always Rings Twice: Constructing the Femme Fatale in 90s
Cinema, in Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London: BFI Publishing, 1998) 167.
Ferguson 37


These base instincts and characteristics are those that tend towards entropy and chaos. As the

man represents order (as I will explain later in this chapter), the woman evokes chaos.

Dietrichson, Graham, and Madison each t Sherwins assertion that female heterosexual
66
desire is always staged. Sherwin discusses the frequency of polysexuality depicted in lms that

feature femmes fatales as a manifestation of the fatal womans continual failure to be sexually

satis ed. The femme fatales failure to be sexually satis ed by socially acceptable heterosexual

means is precisely what makes her a fatal woman. It is this inability to live within the

heterosexual laws of society, especially in fanatically reproductive postwar, baby-booming

America, that initially de nes a woman as an outlaw, living outside the bounds of law (discussed

in Ch. 1, Sec. II). As I have previously theorized that the femme fatale evades the world of legal

language and de es the written law, so does lesbian desire seem to exist on a separate plane that,

through its violence, de es explanation or comprehension in words. A Foucauldian reading, one

that takes into account theories of law as a mechanism of punishment and deterrence, would

suggest that those living outside the law still need the law to de ne their behavior. Thus they are

not without the law (lawless), but outside the law (outlaw). Hales writes, The sexual woman is

synonymous with lawlessness, but this broad assertion ignores the role of the law in de ning
67
what, exactly, is within and without the boundaries of law. It was revealed in Barbara Grahams

murder trial that, while married to a man, she wrote a ectionate, even provocative love notes to
68
another woman in an extended epistolary relationship.

66
Sherwin 176
67
Barbara Hales, Projecting Trauma: The Femme Fatale in Weimar and Hollywood Film Noir, Women in German
Yearbook, vol. 23, 2007, 230; Cathleen Cerny, Televisions Crazy Lady Trope: Female Psychopathic Traits,
Teaching, and In uence of Popular Culture, Academic Psychiatry, vol. 28, 2014, 238
68
Cairns (2013) 42
Ferguson 38


As a character whose lm portrayal was so heavily in uenced by the popularly

androgynous gure of Marlene Dietrich as to take her name, Phyllis Dietrichson embodies the

Dietrich persona. Hales writes that this persona oscillates between heterosexual and
69
homosexual desire, and indeed Dietrichson admits to Ne that she has never loved any man.

Dietrichs androgyny con icts with Graham, Madison, and Dietrichsons highly feminine

self-presentation (discussed above in Chapter 2, Section III: Narrating Truth). However, I would

suggest the link between Dietrich as an actress and Dietrichson as a character is more related to

the perverse and strong qualities of each of their feminine sexualities. The fact that Phyllis

character takes Dietrichs name may even suggest a kind of marital relationship between Phyllis

and the Dietrich persona Dietrichson absorbs Dietrichs person as she absorbs Dietrichs

name, much as a wife takes her husbands name. Brian Gallagher writes, Double Indemnity

suggests that since the outcome of heterosexual relations is likely to be exploitative at best and

wholly destructive at worst, it might be wiser to eschew such relations altogether, if only in favor

of a meager alternativeimplicit, repressed homosexuality.70

Considered from a postfeminist retrospective viewpoint on lm noir, Double Indemnity

presents heavily coded implications of Phyllis as a woman who may not exactly be attracted to

men. Erin Delaney writes:

Withintheseconstraints,thefemmesfataleso ftheclassicnoirperiod(roughlytheearly
1940stolate1950s)expressednascent(ifheavilycoded)strainsofqueerness.
Homosexualityin1940sAmericawaswidelyperceivedasasexualinversion:lesbians
wereviewedaswomenwithmasculinesouls.Withthisinmind,thequeerconnotations
ofthe1944noirD
oubleIndemnitybecomeapparent:PhyllisDietrichson(Barbara
Stanwyck)appearshyperfeminineinsoftsweatersandfrillyblouses,untilWalterNeff

69
Hales 233
70
Gallagher 242

Ferguson 39


(FredMacMurray)uncoversherurgetodominateandhersuccessfultrespassintothe
71
masculinerealmsofcrimeandeconomics.
Delaney suggests that queerness can be read into Phyllis Dietrichsons character through analysis

of her costume changes throughout the lm. While I doubt that this is su cient evidence on

which to stake a claim, visual elements are just as real to the storyline of a lm as are narrative

elements, and examination of Phyllis wardrobe evolution contributes some evidence to the

possibility of Phyllis nonheterosexuality.

Phyllis rst appears dressed only in a towel. Her rst appearance in clothing shows her

leisurely buttoning up her dress as she approaches the then-stranger Ne in her living room.

When Ne returns to the house, she wears a gauzy oral top and long black slitted skirt. That

night, when she boldly goes to Ne s apartment without so much as an excuse, she wears a

sweater and pants under a large trench coat. I would argue that the turning point in Phyllis

self-presentation comes at some point between this ensemble and the next, in which she appears

in a black dress as she watches her husband unknowingly sign Ne s accident insurance papers.

Watching the two men from above, she is in control of the situation. This is also the closest

Phyllis clothing comes to true mourning clothing: after her husband has died, she does not wear

black, as a widow would be expected to do.

Once the plan has been set in motion and Phyllis has carefully observed the two men

acting according to plan, Phyllis abandons most of her careful self-presentation. The care with

which she rst said to Ne , I hope my face is on straight, applying lipstick before him in the

mirror, is all but gone. She then appears in a series of out ts that be t a working woman in the

71
Erin Delaney, Women Unbound: Queer Utopia in the Wachowski Sisters Bound, Clo, vol. 4, no. 3, Dec. 15,
2015, http://cleojournal.com/2016/12/15/women-unbound-queer-utopia-in-the-wachowski-sisters-bound/
Ferguson 40


1940s, which the wealthy, idle Phyllis is certainly not. She wears a rather dowdy boxy vest over a

white blouse and black knee-length skirt to meet Ne at the grocery store. Next we see her in a

black suit jacket making a phone call to Ne . Perhaps one of the only moments of visual humor

in the lm comes in the ensemble Phyllis wears to the murder of her husband: with a large bulky

trench coat, she wears heels, which makes for quite an image as she runs carefully along the

platform to throw her dead husbands cane onto the train tracks. It is certainly not a practical

choice, and shows Phyllis commitment to the murder plan that is straight down the line: she is

keeping up appearances. In the nal scenes of the lm, Phyllis appears in two complete skirt

suits: rst with a dramatic white collar underneath and pumps, and then in a noticeably light gray

suit topped with a small veil after her husbands death. Her stepdaughters out t is clearly

opposed: she wears a modest, completely black dress as she weeps openly.

Phyllis nal out t is a stunning one-piece jumpsuit, a visual combination of the gauzy,

silky out ts she wore at the beginning of the lm and the pants and suits she has favored in the

second half of the lm. The piece is made of a luxurious, silky fabric, but after all, it is

essentially a pantsuit. Pairing this the heels she wore on her and Ne s rst meeting, sitting in the

same chair, her appearance is strikingly di erent. In stark contrast to her initial poise, nursing a

sweet tea after preparing one for Ne , she is now slouching in the chair with a lit cigarette, her

pant-covered legs cavalierly crossed. She does not get up when Ne comes to the door, instead

sitting there smoking and waiting for him to come to her. The general visual similarity between

the two scenes makes the di erences especially striking, and meaningful, to the careful eye.

Perhaps the most compelling argument I would make in favor of interpreting

Ferguson 41


nonheterosexuality in Phyllis character is a basic one, ironically male-oriented. If the consensus

among noir critics is generally that her supposed partner, Walter Ne , is actually romantically

linked with his boss, Keyes, where does that leave Phyllis? Brian Gallagher writes that Ne s

taped confession, which frames the narrative of the lm, con rms Keyes attitude that women

are duplicitous, vulgar, and untrustworthy; and heterosexual relationships are generally noisome
72
and often lethal. The cynicism of the lm, Gallagher argues, lies in the fact that the alternate

relationship poised for Ne that between him and Keyes is also unrewarding, with only
73
a temporary misogynist bonding between the two men as Ne lays dying. The pleasure Ne

draws from Phyllis appearance at their rst meeting is both sexual and economic, Gallagher

writes, just as Phyllis interest in Ne is one motivated by her desire to enter and control the

masculine realm of nance from which she has been shut out by her husband My husband

never tells me anything, she tells Ne .

Overall, the lm suggests throughout several heterosexual couples storylines that, as

Gallagher writes, heterosexual relationships are exploitative at best and wholly destructive at
74
worst. Relationships between Phyllis and her two husbands are clearly not a ectionate, while

Lola and her boyfriend Nino Sachetti are plagued by arguments, and Sachetti has also been

sleeping with Lolas stepmother Phyllis.

The most overt put-down of heterosexual relationships comes in a scene set at the Paci c

All-Risk insurance o ce where Ne and Keyes work. Ne invents a ctitious Margie to cover

for the fact that a womans voice Phyllis voice is on the phone for him. Keyes immediate

72
Gallagher 237
73
Gallagher 238
74
Gallagher 242
Ferguson 42


response is, Margie! I bet she drinks from the bottle, showing his disdain for a woman about

whom he knows nothing other than the fact that she is female and has called Ne at work. His

wager that she drinks from the bottle shows how little he thinks of this woman he has never

met. Immediately, with no connection between Margie and his former girlfriend other than

their femaleness, Keyes launches into a tale of the time he almost got married but rst decided to

have his girl investigated a prime example of the male detective role exploring the feminine

image presented to him. Upon investigation, Keyes tells Ne that he found that not only had his

girlfriend been dyeing her hair since the age of 16 apparently an unpardonable o ense, and

the rst transgression he mentions but she had a manic-depressive in the family, on her
75
mothers side, as well as an ex-husband. Ne cuts Keyes o , understanding exactly what

Keyes is getting at in regards to his former girlfriend, Margie, and, because Margie does not

exist, Phyllis: I get the general idea: she was a tramp from a long line of tramps. The fact that

Ne interrupts with this assessment demonstrates his familiarity with exactly the kind of woman

Keyes is talking about that is to say, any woman. He does not need further description, or even

to have met the woman, to know that she is a tramp from a long line of tramps.

Bonding over their shared disdain for women, Keyes and Ne form a relationship marked

by signi cant, clear declarations of a ection. Ne tells Keyes twice that he loves him, in the

beginning and at the end of the lm. In the climactic scene in which Keyes walks in on Ne

recording his confession on Keyes tape recorder, Ne observes that Keyes couldnt gure out

that Ne was the killer because he was right across the desk from you. Entering the room and

hearing his confession, Keyes responds, Closer than that, Walter, as mentioned in Ch. 2, Sec. 1.

75
This detail speaks to the moral judgment attached to women with mental illness or a history of such.
Ferguson 43


The insinuations of homosexuality as part of the femme fatale pro le are repeated on

screen and in the courtroom. In Double Indemnity the viewer sees the possibility of a gay

relationship between Keyes and Ne , and a woman completely uninterested in men. In Pretty

Little Liars, a show unrestricted by the strict lm morality codes of the 1940s, lesbian

relationships are portrayed outright, as I will discuss in Ch. 3. In dealing with such an unreliable,

oscillating personality as the femme fatale persona that Graham and Dietrichson seem to share,

legal authority must redouble its e orts to pin down the rightful social position of the woman. In

what institutions does a woman belong? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to turn to

the question of the laws treatment of these special fatal women by examining its dealings in their

legal convictions, sentences, and executions.

V: Eyewitnesses, Experts, and The Legal Framework in Double Indemnity

This discussion of the interrelation between law and ction would not be complete

without discussion of courtroom reporter-turned-novelist James M. Cain. After a career as a court

reporter for New York newspapers, Cain turned to writing crime novels, including three that were

eventually made into three of the most famous lms noirs in American lm: The Postman Always

Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, and Double Indemnity. Cains seminal inspiration grew from the

1927 Ruth Snyder murder case. In 1927, Long Island, New York resident Snyder was tried for

murder after she took a lover, bought a $50,000 double indemnity insurance policy on her
76
husband Alfred, and killed Alfred together with her lover. Snyder was found guilty and

executed in January 1928. Seizing on the publicity opportunity of the event, the New York

76
Landis MacKellar, Double Indemnity Murder: Ruth Snyder, Judd Gray, and New Yorks Crime of the Century
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006).
Ferguson 44


tabloid Daily News printed a full front-page photo on January 13, 1928, of the dead Snyder
77
sitting limply in the electric chair after execution. Though the crass visual news strategy of the

Daily News, which accompanied the photo with the word DEAD!, may be shocking, it is not

the most consequential cultural response to come from the Snyder trial and execution, as the

tabloid was not alone in its coverage.

As a reporter, James Cain covered Snyders trial as a reporter for the New York World,

eventually using Snyders story as a blueprint for his novels The Postman Always Rings Twice
78
and Double Indemnity. Cain wrote Double Indemnity as a serial in Liberty beginning in 1936
79
and published it in book form in 1943. Double Indemnity was released as a lm in 1944,

starring Stanwyck as Snyders lmic counterpart Phyllis Dietrichson, and bringing the true story
80
of the murderous woman from New York to Hollywood. Both stories revolve around women

who plot to kill their husbands for insurance money, leaving the male elements of their schemes

stranded in their wake. The enormous success of Cains lms and their positions as essential,

classic lms noirs points to the inextricable link between real-life women on trial for murder and

lm noir indeed, considering the adaptations of Cains work as exemplars of lm noir, the

basis of the genre can hardly be anything but real trials, documented with a court reporters eye

for detail and legalistic nuance.

The legal framework inevitably applied in lm noir serves not only to create nal

77
New York Daily News, Jan. 13, 1928.
78
Cairns (2013)
79
Library of Congress, James M. Cain Papers: A Finding Aid to the Collection in the Library of Congress.
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, 2013.
http://rs5.loc.gov/service/mss/eadxmlmss/eadpdfmss/2009/ms009011.pdf
80
Though Phyllis surname in Cains novel is Nirdlinger, director Billy Wilder changed it to Dietrichson in order to
evoke images of German actress Marlene Dietrich, who played a vamp in several 1930s Hollywood lms.
Ferguson 45


resolution for the plot, but to con rm the previously ambiguous wrongness of the femme fatale.

The legal system in America treats women as femmes fatales in highly publicized cases where

their perceived unruly sexuality renders such treatment possible. The perception of female

sexuality as cruel and unfair cruel and unusual, one might argue is what allows the woman

to be a deadly threat in lm noir and therefore justi es her prosecution and, often, her execution

in both lm and law. The prosecution of the femme fatale for her criminal acts serves as the

justi cation within a previously established framework that of the legal system for the male

protagonists sense, and by extension every other characters and viewers sense, that something

is wrong or o about the woman in the lead role. Her position of authority her very status as

the lead and the catalyst of all action within the lm is troubling to the male lead, but there is

more at stake. The male protagonist, be he a detective, journalist, or insurance salesman, is

always a legal expert in some form, and his ability to act as a good judge of character is critically

important to the maintenance of his ego as a man, and his perception by the audience as a hero,

even a tragic hero.

In Double Indemnity, Ne initially deciphers Dietrichsons plan to kill her husband for

the insurance money the moment she suggests accident insurance. He senses something dark

about her even earlier than this conversation: simply from her presence at the top of the stairs,

clothed in nothing but a towel, he pegs her as a woman who might be amenable to the concept of
81
an extramarital a air. It is worth noting that the bonds of marriage are a legal contract.

Therefore, before he even holds a conversation with Dietrichson, Ne senses that she may be

81
In The Big Sleep, author Raymond Chandlers character Phillip Marlowe writes that femme fatale Carmen Dravec
gave me a nasty feeling (Cairns [2004] 20).
Ferguson 46


willing to break the law for the sake of sex and her personal status of authority. Ne s sense of

something dark, some inner tendency towards the morally wrong, comes only from his visual

perception of Dietrichson, but it is con rmed with the implementation of the exacting power of

criminal law by the end of the lm. Thus the legal framework works within lm noir as a

justi cation and veri cation of the male protagonists innate ability to act as both detective and
82
judge of character.

The gure most explicitly framed as a judge of character, even more so than Ne himself,

is Ne s boss, the insurance inspector provocatively named Keyes. Keyes instinct for a phony

insurance claim is so deeply embedded within his psyche that he says he can feel it in his

stomach whenever there is a problem with a claims authenticity. Keyes refers to this instinct as

the little man inside him. A twist on the traditional image of a tiny angel and devil resting on

each shoulder, this little man resides in Keyes stomach, making him literally sick when he can

feel a violation of the law coming on. An inspector not only in name but seemingly by nature,

Keyes is a repository of endless facts and statistics, an unusual and de ning characteristic that

comes as naturally as does his little man. Other men do not possess this quality: Keyes is

openly hostile toward other employees at the insurance o ce. In one memorable scene, Keyes

res o a long list of suicide statistics at his boss:

Comenow,youveneverreadanactuarialtableinyourlife,haveyou?Whytheyvegot
tenvolumesonsuicidealone.Suicidebyrace,bycolor,byoccupation,bysex,by
seasonsoftheyear,bytimeofday.Suicide,howcommitted:bypoison,byfirearms,by
drowning,byleaps.Suicidebypoison,subdividedbytypesofpoison,suchascorrosive,
irritant,systemic,g aseous,narcotic,alkaloid,protein,andsoforthsuicidebyleaps,
subdividedbyleapsfromhighplaces,underthewheelsoftrains,underthewheelsof
trucks,underthefeetofhorses,froms teamboats.But,Mr.Norton,ofallthecaseson
82
Though Ne does initially fall for Dietrichsons scheme, by the end of the lm his reasonableness is con rmed
when he gures out her plot, draws out her confession, and executes her.
Ferguson 47


record,theresnotonesinglecaseofsuicidebyleapfromtherearendofamovingtrain.
Andyouknowhowfastthattrainwasgoingatthepointwherethebodywasfound?
Fifteenmilesanhour.Nowhowcananybodyjumpoffaslowmovingtrainlikethatwith
anykindofexpectationthathewouldkillhimself?No.Nosoap,Mr.Norton.Weresunk,
andwellhavetopaythroughthenose,andyouknowit.

KeyesalsothrowsthestatisticalunlikelihoodofMr.DietrichsonssuicideatNeff,though

hedoesnotyetsuspectNeffofmurder:

Nowlook,Walter.Aguytakesoutanaccidentpolicythatsworth$100,000ifheskilled
onthetrain.Then,twoweekslater,heiskilledonthetrain.And,notfromthetrain
accident,mindyou,butfallingoffsomesillyobservationcar.Youknowwhatthe
mathematicalprobabilityofthatis?Oneoutof,oh,Idon'tknowhowmanybillions.And
afterthat,thebrokenleg.No,itjust,itjustcantbethewayitlooks.Somethinghasbeen
workedonus!

The legal framework functions in lm noir as male order reining in female disorder, but in the

face of the femme fatale, the real-life law must supplement its own authority with that of

additional respected forensic elds. Visually deceiving with all her sex appeal, seeming to cater

to the mans eye while simultaneously and invisibly working against his interests, the femme

fatale deconstructs a vital form of legal evidence: eyewitness testimony. Eyewitnesses have

historically been a signi cant factor sending defendants to prison, if not the only factor, and its

role was even more central in the 1940s and 1950s, before DNA evidence was discovered.

Modern critics of eyewitness testimony prove the potential harm of over-reliance on eyewitnesses

by citing prisoners condemned by witnesses and exonerated by DNA, but DNA was not
83
discovered until the 1980s.

The problem of the witness is initially introduced in Double Indemnity before any

83
Erika Hayasaki, The End of Eyewitness Testimonies, Newsweek, Nov. 19, 2014,
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/11/28/end-eyewitness-testimonies-285414.html
Ferguson 48


physical act of murder that would produce an eyewitness as such. The legal character of the

witness makes her rst appearance when Ne comes to the Dietrichson house to persuade Mr.

Dietrichson to sign the accident insurance papers. Everything looked ne, except I didnt like

the witness Phyllis had brought in. It was Dietrichsons daughter, Lola. It made me feel a little

queer in the belly they were sitting right there in the room playing Chinese checkers, as if

nothing were about to happen.84 The problem Ne has with this witness, the only witness to any

part of Ne and Phyllis crimes, is worth noting. Lola seems like a natural choice for a witness to

her fathers contract, as she lives in the house with her father Dietrichson and his wife, yet Ne

seems taken aback by what he sees as Phyllis selection. As a character, Lola is diametrically

opposed to the other main gure of investigation and the legal process in the lm, Keyes she

is a young girl, he a middle-aged man; she is a know-nothing, ighty teenager, he is a jaded

insurance inspector yet Ne observes that Phyllis ascribes a similar role of authority to Lola

as he does to the Keyes whom he reveres so much. As a witness, Lola makes Ne feel queer, as

her presence accentuates the domestic setting of his and Phyllis initial crime of insurance fraud.

Lola acts as witness in another occasion in the lm: when she relates to Ne , after her fathers

death, two of Phyllis private moments that she glimpsed and read as guilty acts. As mentioned in

Ch. 2, Sec. III, Lola tells Ne in his capacity as an insurance man that she once saw Phyllis

looking at herself in the mirror wearing a black mourning veil. She also relates to Ne that, years

prior, she had caught Phyllis, then her mothers nurse, neglecting her mother in illness.

One night I got up and went into my mother's room. She was delirious with fever. All the
bed covers were on the oor and the windows were wide open. The nurse wasn't in the
room. I ran and covered my mother up as quickly as I could. Just then I heard a door open
behind me. The nurse stood there. She didn't say a word, but there was a look in her eyes
84
Double Indemnity, 0:33:44
Ferguson 49


I'll never forget. Two days later my mother was dead.85

After hearing this story and con rming that she has not told anyone else, Ne makes

moves to ally himself with Lola, knowing that as the only eyewitness, she would hold the power

in a courtroom. He takes her out to dinner somewhere where nobody would see us. The next

day he takes her for a ride to the beach, explaining through the voiceover, I had to make sure

that she wouldnt tell that stu about Phyllis to anybody else. It was dynamite, whether it was

true or not.86

The importance of the eyewitness is manifest in the trouble that Ne takes to plan a

murder without any witnesses to the crime or its aftermath: killing Mr. Dietrichson in a moving

car at night, disposing of the body under cover of night. On the contrary, Ne goes to extensive

lengths to conjure up witnesses to an alternate theory of what happened to Mr. Dietrichson:

posing as Dietrichson, with the latters hat and crutches, Ne boards the train Dietrichson was

supposed to board and strikes up a conversation with a man on the observation platform (54:37).

Sending the man into the train to fetch Ne s cigars (55:30-40), Ne tosses the crutches o the

platform and climbs down onto the tracks, jumping o the low platform of the train (55:50-54).

Together, he and Phyllis toss Dietrichsons body onto the tracks, staging an elaborate scene of a

fatal fall o the observation deck top be corroborated by the other man, Jackson, with whom Ne

has carried out a conversation as Dietrichson, disclosing his name, destination, and his past as a

Stanford man.

The importance of an e ective detectives ability to gather visual evidence by seeing is

85
Double Indemnity, 1:14:50 - 1:15:49
86
Double Indemnity, 1:17:47
Ferguson 50


implied in the classic lm noir terminology that nicknames a private investigator a private eye

an eye that gathers evidence for a certain side of the adversarial courtroom story, an eye that
87
witnesses the prosecutions truth. When the eye of the male investigative lead is compromised

or unavailable, additional eyewitness accounts con rm his accuracy. In Double Indemnity, Keyes

brings in the eyewitness Jackson that Ne had set up without anticipating that he would have to

face him himself. As Keyes brings Jackson into the o ce, Ne turns his back to the door, visibly

nervous that Jackson will recognize him as the man who identi ed himself as Dietrichson.88

Though he does not recognize him as such, he does know Ne s face, proceeding to ask whether

he has ever been to Oregon or gone trout shing. The tension between the perpetrator Ne , the

eyewitness Jackson, and the investigator Keyes is palpable in this scene as the three of them

move about the o ce in a highly choreographed way, exchanging conversation partners and

gazes like an intricate dance that shows the critical importance of vision and non-vision.

Turning from lm to law, Nellie Madisons 1934 case is one in which the crucial role of

the eyewitness is evident. On cross-examination, lawyers for Madisons defense drew out

confessions from the prosecutions witnesses to Madisons alleged crime that neither could
89
recognize Eric Madison from either his image or his face in real life. Defense witness Dan

Mooney, Nellie Madisons brother, told defense attorneys that police photos of Eric did not look
90
like Eric to him. Nellie herself also insisted that crime scene photos of her dead husband were

87
The 1957 lm 12 Angry Men questions the validity of eyewitness accounts as proof that a certain person
committed an alleged crime, famously calling into question the vision of a female witness for the prosecution. This
argument is the last that the jurors have in their deliberations and eventually turns the rest of the jurors to acquittal.
88
Double Indemnity 1:20:13
89
Cairns (2009) 103, 105
90
Cairns (2009) 119
Ferguson 51


91
not of him. In Grahams case, the prosecutions star witness was John True, an eyewitness

who also participated in the murder of Mabel Monahan but decided to testify on behalf of the
92
state rather than be executed.

Wholly di erent in its theoretical justi cations from the ever-popular eyewitness, the

rise in popularity of the expert witness at criminal trials took place in the mid-20th century. As

psychiatrists became more professionalized, the possibility of admission of psychiatric expert

93
testimony became more plausible and, in turn, popular. Citing a 1957 paper by Anastasi, Loh

writes that it was not until 1950 that psychologists began to make an appreciable contribution in
94
this role of expert witness. These were the accounts of medical men, whose ability to see

inside the female mind and body developed cultural authority alongside the development of lm

noir. Since medical men could not literally see inside the body, their vision of the body and

brain was in need of construction by an expert.

The simultaneous timelines of the development of lm noir, the death penalty for real-life

femmes fatales, and the advent of expert testimony speak to the need for regulation and strict

de nition of femininity in the 1940s and 1950s. During World War II, women assumed more

authoritative positions in the home and workplace, displacing traditional gender roles and

creating a generation of women who were largely employed outside the home, no longer seeing

91
Cairns (2009) 125
92
Joan Renner, They Did It for Money: The Mob-Style Murder of Burbank Widow Mabel Monahan, Los Angeles
Magazine, June 4, 2013,
http://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/they-did-it-for-money-the-mob-style-murder-of-burbank-widow-mabel-monah
an/2/
93
Wallace Loh, Social Research in the Judicial Process: Cases, readings, and text (New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 1984) 614
94
Loh writes that in the 1940s and 1950s, modern legal authority took shape for clinical psychologists to o er their
expert opinions on causal relationships between mental disorders and criminal or tortious conduct. Increased
professionalization correlated with the broadened admissibility of this type of evidence (Loh 614).
Ferguson 52


95
homemaking as their primary or only duty or method of self-identi cation. Traditional gender

roles had to be reinforced upon mens reintegration into civil society upon wars end. In their

joint impact and expanding expert authority, the scienti c and legal professions reinforced one

anothers respective authorities. The practice of each rested, in part, on the subordinate, silenced,

pre-war domestic status of women. In scienti c and legal rhetoric and actions, doctors and

lawyers justi ed each others assumptions, established institutionally before the war, that women

should and would be docile and refrain from openly sexual behavior. Though several waves of

feminist movement have taken place in the United States since the late 1940s and 1950s, the

belief in a scienti c justi cation of female inferiority persists on the far right. The gure of the

femme fatale, established in noir during World War II, linked notions of psycho-scienti c

feminine inferiority with images of subversive, culpable feminine malintent.

In Double Indemnity, the deceptive beauty of Dietrichson that draws Ne in to her plot

places her in the position of an outlaw. As a woman, she uses the means available to her (her

body) to manipulate a man into using the means available to him: the written word. Ne is thus

torn from his allegiance to the law, the societal expectations of American males, into
96
Dietrichsons magnetic world outside the law. Ne s impotence in the face of Dietrichsons
97
sexuality frames the lm in terms of castration as the emblem of male powerlessness. Ne s

attempt to reclaim his power over the situation, that is, his voiceover of the event, still implies a
98
compulsion to act according to his uncontrollable sexual desire for Phyllis. As a result of his

95
Modern Woman: The Lost Sex - 50s Newsreel, YouTube, 2008,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2Rc63H7r6Y
96
Hilaria Loyo, Subversive Pleasures in Billy Wilders Double Indemnity, Atlantis, vol. 15, no. 1, 1993, 173
97
Loyo 177
98
Gallagher 240
Ferguson 53


inability to control his sexual impulses in an essentially Oedipal situation pursuing a sexual

relationship with the matriarch Mrs. Dietrichson while plotting the death of the patriarch Mr.

Dietrichson Ne is forced to confront the law. He is left with the emasculating wound left by

Phyllis, a literal and symbolic mark of castration, where he had no visible scars until his

prolonged encounter with her and the eventual (essentially suicidal) death by provocation that he
99
meets from Phyllis gun.

Ne s attempted reclamation of power lies wholly in his recorded confession to his boss,

Barton Keyes, which serves as the voiceover narration of the lm. Even as he is dying of his

castrating wound, as narrator, Ne exerts his power over the story by recording it. Ne labels

each part of the narrative in a nal assertion of his place within, not without, the structure of the

law he ultimately returns to the insurance company to record his nal words, the imperative of

the last word more urgent than any medical care he may have been able to receive had he

succumbed to the reality of his wound. This business of labeling and naming that the law entails

can be read not only as an exercise of power, but as a profoundly gendered one: with roots in

Adams biblical naming of Eve, giving names to things has been a principal means of
100 101
controlling them, of asserting and exercisingdominion. The masculine power vested in

the word, the paternalistic power vested therein, lends law its intrinsic authority.

In one of his many short, ery soliloquies on the virtues of honest insurance, Ne s boss

99
Gallagher 238, 244
100
Robert Roth and Judith Lerner, Sex-Based Discrimination in the Mental Institutionalization of Women,
California Law Review, vol. 62, no. 3, 1974
101
Anthony Easthope argues that the Lacanian structure of the castration complex, with its emphasis on the power of
the nom du pre, is manifest in several elements of patriarchy, including the practice of naming a child after his
father, the emphasis on paternity in determining a childs identity, and the Western tradition of brides taking their
names rst from their fathers and then from their husbands (Anthony Easthope, What a Mans Gotta Do: The
Masculine Myth in Popular Culture [New York: Routledge, 1990]).
Ferguson 54


Keyes delivers a stunning ode to insurance law as a practice equal to medicine in its honorability

and vitality. In fact, Keyes paints a graphic image of the insurance inspector as surgeon:

Tome,aclaimsmanisasurgeon.Thatdeskisanoperatingtableandthosepencilsare
scalpelsandbonechisels.Andthosepapersarenotjustformsandstatisticsandclaims
forcompensation.Theyrealive.Theyrepackedwithdrama,withtwistedhopesand
crookeddreams.Aclaimsman,Walter,isa,isadoctorandabloodhoundandacopanda
judgeandajuryandafatherconfessorallinone.Andyouwanttotellmeyourenot
interested.Youdontwanttoworkwithyourbrains.Allyouwanttodoisworkwith
yourfingeronthedoorbellforafewbucksmoreaweek.Theresadameonyourphone.

(Tellingly, this scene leads immediately into the discussion of the ctitious Margie on Ne s

phone, a code name Ne uses for Phyllis, and a critical moment of bonding over Keyes and

Ne s shared hatred of women, as I discussed in depth in Ch. 2, Sect. IV.)

Hales writes that in lm noir, Masculine discourses of medicine and the law must join

forces to diagnose and treat female illness before it leads to criminal actions. Like law, medicine

works in an exclusive language determined by those in power, and the medical eld also

commonly frames its principal power dynamic as a gendered one in which the male gure of

power is perilously subject to the possibility of castration by the female gure of submission. In
102
James Cains original novel Double Indemnity, Keyes labels Phyllis an out-and-out lunatic.

The imperative behind the enforcement of authority is, in this case, the same as that in law
103
enforcement and execution: the threat of castration is manifest in this potential loss of power.

As a territory to be increasingly mapped over the course of the rst half of the 20th

century, the brain became a new frontier for doctors to explore and claim knowledge of,

102
Cain 118, as cited by Gallagher
103
It is the masculine phallus which is the symbolic expression of the power and logic of traditional politico-legal
institutions. Joseph Indaimo, The self, ethics and human rights: Lacan, Levinas & Alterity (New York: Routledge,
2015)
Ferguson 55


especially in the female body. While the investigation and pursuit of Dietrichson as a femme

fatale is situated within a legal discourse, it also takes place in a historical context in which the

criminalization of womens sexual desire the view of a sexual woman as synonymous with an

outlaw was augmented by a medical institution that increasingly embraced mental illness
104
diagnoses, and experimental procedures to treat those labels, for women speci cally. Both

institutions enforce a strict gender binary.

The epigraphs chosen for the beginning of this chapter, quotations from the ctional

Walter Ne and a real reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, speak to limited conceptions of

femininity as a threat diametrically opposed to masculinity in both ction and reality. While Ne

exhibits a fetishistic xation on Dietrichsons anklet, as well as the rest of their controlled

physical setting, the cultural xation on Barbara Grahams physical appearance during her

murder trial is aligned in its form of collective fetishization of the visual appearance of the femme

fatale. As a ctional construct, the femme fatale has no determined place in the legal system, and

yet this gures e ect on the legal systems adversarial proceedings is evident in trials both in the

noir era of the 20th century and generations beyond. While the reporter for the San Francisco

Chronicle described murder defendant Barbara Graham in his 1953 article, he could just as well

have been referring to Phyllis Dietrichson as the deceptively demure young woman who had

emerged as the most brazen femme fatale in recent California crime annals. The line between

fact and ction in the legal case of the American femme fatale is not only blurred, but near

irrelevant: when the necessity of distinguishing becomes unnecessary, the duality itself is erased.

104
Hales; Sherwin
Ferguson 56


Chapter 3: Pretty Little Liars

I. Postwar: Comparing the Femmes Fatales of World War II and 9/11

The construction of the femme fatale in 21st-century media, while still built around the

same fundamental principles that laid the groundwork for the archetype in the 1940s, is

signi cantly di erent in context. Seventy years after Double Indemnity, the women who

represent femmes fatales in popular movies and TV are still sexually unruly and therefore

threatening, but the historical context in which they act is dramatically di erent. While noir

emerged with the onset of World War II, the current target audience for young adult ction, lm
105
and television is a generation often referred to as the post-9/11 generation. Notably, a wave of

tragic and dystopian childrens and young adult book series also followed the attacks, capturing

the market to an astonishing degree. These new books and movies put a spotlight on tragedy and
106
never-ending danger, a sense of persecution that mimics the constant threat of terror in war.

In this chapter, I intend to argue that just as the original femme fatale of the 1940s

105
Eleni Towns, The 9/11 Generation: How 9/11 Shaped the Millennial Generation, Center for American Progress,
Sept. 8, 2011, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/religion/news/2011/09/08/10363/the-911-generation/. Ann
Fishman, Who Comes After the Millennials? A Case for Gen 9/11, American Marketing Association, Aug. 5,
2015,
https://www.ama.org/publications/eNewsletters/MarketingInsightsNewsletter/Pages/whats-after-the-millennials-a-ca
se-for-gen-911.aspx.
106
Popular ction changed signi cantly after the attacks, including novels and lms about the attacks, such as
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005, adapted for the screen in 2011) and Remember Me (2010) (R.B.
London, How 9/11 changed ction: After the unthinkable, The Economist, Sept. 2, 2011,
http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2011/09/how-911-changed- ction). Along with many of my millennial
peers, I grew up reading Lemony Snickets A Series of Unfortunate Events series (1999-2006) and J.K. Rowlings
Harry Potter series (2001-2007). A downpour of dystopian novels followed the success of these two series: rst
Twilight and its numerous imitators, then The Hunger Games (2008-2010), Maze Runner (2009-2016), Divergent
(2011-2013), all four of which were converted into lm franchises. The TV shows and movie adaptations followed,
including entirely new series made for TV: The 100 (2014-), Teen Wolf (2011-), Shadowhunters (2016-), and more.
Ferguson 57


represented a new type of social threat after the onset of World War II, todays femme fatale

characters, exempli ed by Alison DiLaurentis and her foil, the unidenti ed A, in Pretty Little
107
Liars, also represent a new form of social danger since war began after 9/11. Though she

re ects the context of a very di erent historical war moment, Alison/A gures the threat of the

femme fatale in the same core ways that Phyllis Dietrichson represented it in her own historical

moment of war: through portrayals of narcissism, staged heterosexual desire, and the forceful

triumph of masculine law over feminine disorder. The persistence of this type throughout

di erent historical moments suggests an inevitability to the structure of on-screen entertainment,

and a pattern to the social overtones of these lms, which become embedded in the collective

mind of the American jury. This femme fatale has persisted through decades on screen, and her

persistence in the 21st century suggests that her in uence in the courtroom is not over.

Accordingtotheformulationuponwhichthisthesisisbased,thefemmefatalegainsher

dangerouspoweruponthemomentthathersexualitylosesitsmediationandherinnerfeminine

disorderisnolongerconstrainedbysociallaws.IncontemporaryAmericanportrayalsof

femininedangerandthethreatofabeautifulwoman,oneofthemostpopularifnotas

criticallyacclaimedasDoubleIndemnityisthatofAlisonDiLaurentisinthebookandTV

seriesP
rettyLittleLiars.OriginallyconceivedasalengthyseriesofyoungadultnovelsbySara

Shepard,publishedin16volumesfrom2006to2014,andreimaginedinahighlypopular

107
Amanda Fairbanks, Post-9/11 Generation: Millennials Re ect on Decade Since Terror Attacks, The Hu ngton
Post, Sept. 9, 2011,
http://www.hu ngtonpost.com/2011/09/09/september-11-anniversary-millennials-worldview_n_951000.html.
Robert Lifton writes that having to rea rm ones moral system or sense of self by destroying, violating, murdering
another, as a nation does in a retaliatory war, is always an attempt at a rming the life power of ones own group
(Cathy Caruth, An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton, Trauma: Explorations in Memory [London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1995]140-141).
Ferguson 58


108
Freeformtelevisionseries from2010to2017,PrettyLittleLiarstellsthestoryoffourteenage

girlsstalkedbyamysteriousonlinepresenceafterthedisappearanceandapparentdeathoftheir
109
friendslashringleaderAlison. Frombehindthescreensoftheirphonesandlaptops,the

stalker,theselfnamedA,tormentsthefourgirls

withthepromisethatheorsheknowstheir

secrets.Holdingthemhostagewiththeirown

personalsecretsallofwhichinvolvetheir

sexualhistoriesAextortsfavors,money,and

humiliationfromthegirls.Simultaneously,

Alisonsdisappearancecatalyzesherfourfriends

toconstructanddefendaselfforAlisoninher

absence.

TheargumentforAlisonasafemmefatale,while

bolsteredbymanyinstancesofviolenceand

seductionthroughoutthes eries,isanchoredinaSeason4episodecenteredaroundfilmnoir.

Thisepisode,entitledShadowPlay,airedFebruary11,2014inblackandwhite,with

traditionaln oircostuming,dialogue,andchiaroscurolightingstyles.TheepisodefeaturesAlison

dressed as a femme fatale nearly identical to the title character of Otto Premingers 1944 lm

Laura, gazing at a portrait of herself in a scene that visually replicates Premingers piece and

108
T
henetworkrebrandedfromABCFamilytoFreeforminJanuary2016.
109
As a TV series, Pretty Little Liars (PLL) stretched through seven seasons, and its commercial success caused
Shepard to extend the book series to twice its original length (Jennifer Armstrong, Pretty Little Liars: Four new
books on the way, starting in July, Entertainment Weekly, Dec. 8, 2010,
http://ew.com/article/2010/12/08/four-new-pretty-little-liars-books-on-the-way-in-july/).
Ferguson 59


110
suggests Bergers interpretation of female self-surveillance. In both the lm and the show, the

subject of the portrait uncannily appears in front of her own image, despite her supposed death.

ThenoirepisodeisacrucialpillarofPrettyLittleLiarsinthatitanchorstheseriesinan

historicalfilmiccontext,situatingitinlinewithn oirofthepastandsuggestingn oirinthe

111
presentandeventhefuture. As Nelson writes, Noir aesthetics have been amply available to

help Americans experience the terrorist atrocities of September 11, 2001.112 These aesthetics

lend a sense-making structure to an atmosphere of real-life fatalism that is otherwise inexplicably

dark. Pretty Little Liars is an excellent example of the in uence of noir aesthetics in popular

culture after 9/11.

Aside from their distance in time, two critical di erences separate the Alison/A femme

fatale and the Phyllis Dietrichson femme fatale. As Phyllis Dietrichson displayed threatening

qualities of social life after the onset of World War II, Alison and A emblemize the terror that

grips America after 9/11, and during the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But unlike Double

Indemnity, Pretty Little Liars portrays the threat of Alison much more explicitly as a non-real,

imagined entity, a gment of imagination. Along with the identity and meaning of A, Alisons

existence and meaning remain in question throughout the entire series, personifying several

qualities of the unknowability and ubiquity of the vague threat to American social life after 9/11.

110
Laura, directed by Otto Preminger, 20th Century Fox, 1944.
111
The shows creators themselves have acknowledged the in uence of noir on the show. Executive Producer Joseph
Dougherty said,I twasABCFamilythatsaid,'Itseemsyouguysareheadedsomewhereandwe'dliketogiveyou
permissiontogothere.We'dlikeyoutoconsiderablackandwhiteepisode.Theyknowthatsomuchofthevisual
aspectsofP
rettyLittleLiarsc omesfromaplaceofrespectforclassicfilmmaking:Hitchcockandthe'40s.We're
writerswhopaybackthedebtstothewriterswelovedthatmadeusturnintowriters(PhilianaNg,PrettyLittle
LiarsEPonGoingNoir:ThisIsntaParody,TheHollywoodReporter,Feb.11,2014,
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/livefeed/prettylittleliarsepnoir678748).
112
John Nelson, Four Forms of Terrorism: Horror, Dystopia, Thriller, and Noir, Poroi, vol. 2, no. 1, 2003,
http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1057&context=poroi.
Ferguson 60


Jacques Derrida predicted in a 2001 interview, only weeks after the terror attacks, that there

would be worse to come, and that it would come, as I argue, through the growth of technology

networks:

One will be able to do even worse tomorrow, invisibly, in silence, more quickly and
without any bloodshed, by attacking the computer and informational networks on which
the entire life (social, economic, military, and so on) of a great nation, of the greatest
power on earth, depends. One day it might be said: September 11 those were the
(good) old days of the last war. Things were still of the order of the gigantic: visible
and enormous! What size, what height! There has been worse since. Nanotechnologies of
all sorts are so much more powerful and invisible, uncontrollable, capable of creeping in
everywhere (italics mine).113

Derrida observes that 9/11 represents a turning point in the nature of American war, both its

waging and the threat it presents. The attacks on September 11, Derrida suggests, provided a

nal showing of the large and visible attack of violence while introducing an element of the

silent threat that altered American visions of where danger could come from. This huge,

unknowable terror, creeping in everywhere, is the kind that is invisibly waged on the Liars in

Pretty Little Liars: a terror that is real but impossible to point to.

In a second distinct di erence from Double Indemnity, in Pretty Little Liars, the imagined

persona of the femme fatale is created not by one man or by a male audience or jury, but by a
114
group of women girls, to be exact. Eachgirlinitiallyrepresentsoneteenagegirlstereotype

andcontinuestoembodythesequalitiesthroughouttheseries:EmilyFields(ShayMitchell)is

113
Giovanna Borradori, Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida in
Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004) 102
114
The collective female imaginary is a structure of horror that Pretty Little Liars borrows from, or shares with, the
modern audience of teen horror, which Martin Fradley argues is largely female (Martin Fradley, Hell Is a Teenage
Girl?: Postfeminism and Contemporary Teen Horror in Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed.
Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013).
Ferguson 61


sporty,AriaMontgomery(LucyHale)isartsy,SpencerHastings( TroianBellisario)issmart,and

HannaMarin(AshleyBenson)isstylish.Thegirlscombinetheirownfracturedselvestoforma

collectivegirltheycallAlison.

I argue that the signi cance of these di erences lies in Pretty Little Liars depiction of the

post-9/11 American individual-group dynamics that have followed the simultaneous explosion of

terrorism and the Internet in American social life. In real life, images of an individual with

absolute power are simultaneously destructed and rebuilt in online discourse as well as in

terrorist acts. On screen, Pretty Little Liars showcases the bizarre nature of the relationship

between individual and group in the 21st-century American imaginary: while we become

increasingly interconnected, the rhetorical image of the individual remains incredibly powerful,

regardless of that individuals actual agency. While the fact of integrated social interaction and

endless group formation is undeniable, the pervading in uence of the seeming individual
115
remains a huge draw in online media as well as terrorist attacks.

Paradoxically, the femme fatale is both a gure with absolute power and a character

pathologically out of control. Like noir lms such as Double Indemnity and the contemporary

trials that incorporated their in uences, Pretty Little Liars pathologizes its female characters even

while imagining and acknowledging their excessive power as individuals. This pathologization

constructing an image of the characters as mentally ill or unstable throws into question the

115
The intense media focus on the personal lives and possible motivations of individuals labeled terrorists in
Western countries ex. Omar Mateen in Miami, Anis Amri in Berlin, Syad Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik in
San Bernardino, Lahouaiej Bouhlel in Nice belies the ease with which American media investigates and
castigates an individual rather than situating him in the enormous, unfathomable context in which he exists and acts,
which would be the more di cult task.
Ferguson 62


116
meaning of their words, while presenting them as more dangerous. Signi cantly, the

noir-themed episode of Pretty Little Liars, Shadow Play (4x19), takes place within the frame

of an anxiety-induced hallucination from a pill-addicted Spencer. While popping unprescribed

ADD medication, Spencer watches a 1952 lm noir, The Narrow Margin. Watching the lm,

Spencer says to herself, Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean,

quoting noir author Raymond Chandlers famous 1944 essay from The Atlantic Monthly, The

Simple Art of Murder, in which he de nes what a noir private detective should be:

The detective in this kind of story...is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete
man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered
phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly
without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any
world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think
he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man
of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not
be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He
has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no mans money
dishonestly and no mans insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a
lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you
ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of
the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure
in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man t
for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by
right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.

The precision with which this description applies to Walter Ne , the self-styled detective of

Double Indemnity, as well as his boss, Barton Keyes, is stunning. Ne is a proud but common

116
Multiple female characters are hospitalized at Radley Sanitarium, an old-school mental hospital in town, for
behavioral outbursts. Mona and Spencer are both hospitalized, as is Toby Cavanaughs mother. CeCe checks herself
into Radley disguised as her sister Alison. It is revealed in later seasons that the girl mistakenly identi ed as Alison
and buried in her grave was actually a di erent blonde patient at Radley named Bethany. The hospital is a site not
only of treatment and punishment, but of extreme identity insecurity regarding the collective Alison identity.

Ferguson 63


man, relatively poor as the viewer sees in his modest apartment; he talks with rude wit and

searches for a hidden truth. He considers himself a good man and lives by a personal code of

honor, one that he struggles to reconcile with the law when his personal motives of well-deserved

revenge go against the word of the law. Keyes lives by an even clearer moral code, one that aligns

perfectly with the law; for Keyes, the law and his own values are one and the same, displaying

how despite his normal job, Ne is in fact unusual, as Chandler dictates. The context of

Chandlers quote about the de nition of a detective is important in examining the role the

episode assigns Spencer: it is a cautionary tale about what happens when a woman tries to

assume a detectives role.

As a gunshot rings out on this screen-within-a-screen, Spencer dissociates and enters a

hallucinatory world of noir herself: her world becomes black-and-white, her nails long and

polished, her clothing in 1940s style. Her boyfriend Toby appears, dressed as a private eye, and

casts a skeptical eye at her bottle of pills when she insists theres nothing wrong with me.

Whos kidding who? he responds.117 As an anxiety-induced hallucination, this entire episode,

and its setting in noir aesthetics, are products of female instability and apparent insanity.

Though Spencer is not a femme fatale either in this vision or in the series at large, her

critical role as a believer in the femme fatale Alison is reiterated strongly in this episode, as she

sees Alison through her madness while others do not. Spencers position as the smart one in

the series makes her a prime candidate for both the lead investigative role within the group and

the one most vulnerable to mental illness with her overactive, restless intellect. In Shadow Play,

this epithet is explicitly used: confronting Spencer about her pill abuse, Toby says, I thought you

117
Pretty Little Liars, Shadow Play, 08:07
Ferguson 64


were the smart one. Spencer responds, I am the smart one.118 As such, Spencer is a powerful

constructor of the Alison image, one who consistently reads evidence to build up proof that

Alison is alive. Spencer reiterates in the beginning of Shadow Play, as she examines evidence,

that both of her parents are lawyers,119 a fact that tints the scene and lends her credibility and an

instant background of some kind of training in fact- nding. Her insistence throughout the

episode that Alison is alive, contrary to popular and legal belief, is alternately bolstered and

disrupted by her reputation for intelligence.

In addition to recreating the portrait from Laura, the Shadow Play episode recreates

other iconic noir scenes among other noir elements and styles throughout. In parts of the

episode, Spencer wears an elaborate nightgown120 that visually recalls Grace Kellys stunning

sleepwear in Rear Window. The gown is also nearly identical to the negligee that Veronica Lake,

an actress typecast as a femme fatale in several noir lms, wears in the 1942 lm The Glass Key.

The episode uses noir elements to frame highly modern situations - the pursuit of a stalker who

uses the Internet as a means of terror - in more historically consistent terms, most visible in

speci c moments of cinematography. The camera uses a classic noir device of extremely high

camera angles in a shot of Hanna as she stands on the sidewalk, looking up into a window as the

frame closes in on her face from above.121 In this moment, Hannas investigative gaze is

obstructed as she looks up at the window and the curtain is closed from inside. Like Spencer, she

is reduced to an unreliable witness: just as Spencers ability to collect evidence is limited by the

118
Shadow Play, 12:00
119
Shadow Play, 02:55
120
Shadow Play, 11:12
121
Pretty Little Liars, Free Fall, 13:42
Ferguson 65


reliability problem presented by her prescription drug abuse, so is Hannas eye unable to

penetrate important scenes.

This scene also recalls Rear Window in its focus on the curtain as a method of concealing

incriminating scenes from potential witnesses. Rear Window is a noir lm that the show

incorporates throughout all its episodes by featuring the Rear Window Brew, a local co eeshop,

as a recurring setting. The Rear Window Brew sign makes an appearance in the episode in a

scene that recalls Casablanca, a 1942 non-noir lm produced and set during World War II. The

acute reference to Casablanca a troubled couple nurses cocktails at a small table in a deserted

cafe as a lilting piano melody plays in the background hints at a tragic romance as it brings to

mind the ending of Casablanca, in which the two lovers are separated by war. In Pretty Little

Liars, too, the couple in this scene, Emily and Paige, is separated by war: the silent war of terror

waged on the group by A forces Emily to break up with her girlfriend Paige.

In a scene of confrontation between Spencer and Hanna, the attempted investigative

forces, and Ezra, the seeming villain of the episode, dialogue between Ezra and Spencer reveals

the danger of Spencers assumption that she is the smart one. Her insights and stakeouts, no

matter how painstakingly thought-out and planned, are no match for male voices of authority.

The following dialogue illustrates Ezras command over language, and Spencers questionable

judgment and sanity, in bold terms:

S: Im only going to tell you this once. Leave Aria alone.

E: If thats what you want, why dont you just tell her about me? Tell her who you think I
am, that should x everything, right? But you havent. Why not?
Hanna: Spencer, lets go.
E: Ill tell you why not if you want me to. Its that youre not sure. Youre not sure about
anything. Youre in over your head and you know it.
S: I know what Im doing.

Ferguson 66


E: Really. Look around you, Spencer. Look where you are right now. Tell me youre not
cracking up.

Spencer has no response to Ezras curt observation that she is cracking up. Confronted with a

voice that labels her instability, Spencer falters, proving in her lack of speech that she is indeed

not sure about anything. It is this unsureness, the constant probability of being wrong and the

realization of that wrongness when it occurs, that undercuts the girls attempts throughout the

episode and throughout the show to address and alter reality.

II. The Fiction of the Female Gaze in Pretty Little Liars

Incomplete and incorrect womens insights abound throughout the series, perpetuating

the doubt surrounding individual identity around which the series revolves. This theme manifests

several times in Shadow Play, accentuating the problem of Alisons uncertain identity. In the

beginning of the episode, before the noir vision begins, the girls search for evidence and

uncover something incriminating; Emilys rst reaction is, Tell me thats not what it looks like.
122
Towards the end of the episode, using the

wordplay of the title quite literally, Alison

appears in front of all the girls as a gure

emerging from the shadows. Entering the

backstage dressing room after nishing a

performance as a showgirl, the 1940s version

of Alison appears slowly from behind a strategically placed shadow. For a moment, this person

could be anyone. The girls are fooled by another shadow towards the end of the episode, when

122
Shadow Play, 01:41
Ferguson 67


Ezra appears completely cloaked in shadow, coaxing Aria to join him. When Aria does join him,

a light ickers on, and the man silhouetted is revealed to be Toby.

This theme of ignorance through lack of clear vision and gullibility is repeated as season

after season, the real A is revealed, only to reveal that there is another A, the actual real A.

Whomever the Liars think is A never is. Eighteen episodes feature titles centered around vision
123 124
and appearances, yet the Liars can never quite see everything. Spencer confronts Alison

towards the end of Shadow Play, telling her, You only ever tell us what you want us to know.

Its always been that way.125 Alison counters, And youre di erent? Yeah, Spencer says,

Im di erent. At this point, Alison turns to Aria, asking Has she told you?, turning the tables

on Spencer for keeping her suspicions about Ezra from Aria. Alison reveals that while Spencers

gaze and understanding may be blocked, she too is guilty of concealing information and hiding

the truth from the other girls, leading their collective perception to be skewed and incomplete.

The Liars inability to see the complete truth is what Alison implies keeps her on the run: while

Alison attests to the presence of a ubiquitous, threatening force in her own defense, no one - no

character or viewer - actually sees this force in action. In Double Indemnity, Phyllis Dietrichson

also claims persecution, but neither Ne nor the lms viewers ever witness it: she tells Ne that

123
Someone to Watch Over Me (1x20), The Goodbye Look (2x2), Blind Dates (2x4), Picture This (2x9),
Blond Leading the Blind (2x17), Eye of the Beholder (2x23), unmAsked (2x25), Kingdom of the Blind
(3x3), Out of Sight, Out of Mind (3x21), Face Time (4x4), The Mirror Has Three Faces (4x10), Now You
See Me, Now You Dont (4x12), Shadow Play (4x19), A Dark Ali (5x10), Through A Glass, Darkly (5x14),
Pretty Isnt the Point (5x20), Dont Look Now (6x4), In the Eye Abides the Heart (7x15).
124
In Misery Loves Company (3x16), Alison visits Aria in her bedroom and tells her, I dont know who said
knowledge was king some old fart probably. But he was right. I see everything now. I missed so much when I was
here. Aria asks, Do you see A? Alison responds, Everywhere I turn. So do you. You all do. Alisons appended
remark Im surprised Spencer hasnt gured that out speaks to my discussion of each girl in the foursome
performing one particular function in the grander Alison persona, with Spencer as the supposed smart one.
125
Free Fall, 35:00
Ferguson 68


her husband has abused and neglected her. Viewers are asked by these femmes fatales to believe

an account that they cannot see for themselves. In lm as in law, seeing is believing, and what is
126
not presented as an image does not exist. Though those watching may witness the aftere ects

of each of these supposed persecutions and conspiracies against the a icted woman, ultimately,

the scene of attack itself cannot be proven, instead con rming the initial suspicion: the woman

herself is guilty.

Laura Mulvey writes that the intricate relationships between her three looks are speci c
127
to lm. The presence of these three looks in Pretty Little Liars serves to bolster my argument

that the show belongs in the tradition, if broadly described, of lm noir. Mulvey describes the
128
three actors who direct their own looks in lm as follows: rst is the camera recording the

event; second, the audience watching the scene; third the characters looking at each other. The

power of the look is of utmost signi cance in two related and oddly similar systems: this system

of gazes set up in a lm and its consumption, and a system of highly regulated and yet

uncontrolled looks between the players in a courtroom. As I discussed in Chapter 2, Sec. V, the

look is a critical form of evidence in trials. In court as in lm, I would argue, there are three

actors:

1) The people presenting exhibit, or the lawyers;

2) The exhibits, or the witnesses; and

3) Those who witness the presentation of the exhibits, or the jury.

126
Robert J. Lifton says that meaning and image are inextricably interrelated (Caruth). For something to have
meaning it must have an image. This theory, a version of the idea that seeing is believing, serves as a major
theoretical basis for the practice of privileging eyewitness testimony in court.
127
Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989) 26
128
Mulvey 26
Ferguson 69


I believe the reason that the court proceeding appeals to the public at large lies in its resemblance

not to theater, as is so often suggested, but in its resemblance to lm. Just as narrative lm

presents itself as a narrative in pursuit of truth, pitted between a truth-seeker and those who stand

in his way, the courtroom presents itself as a place subject to an extremely speci c set of rules. A

criminal trial is a process: though it may display drama, the trial is procedural, not theatrical.

Created not spontaneously but painstakingly, over time, a lm is also the result of a process. Film

noir in particular adheres to the courts juxtaposition of the guilty and the truth-seekers, sticking

not only to the narrative script of the lm with a beginning, middle, and con ict-resolving end

but also to a particular grammar of preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original
129
trauma...counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment of saving of the guilty object.

The crucial di erence separating Pretty Little Liars and classic lm noir lies in who

constructs the third type of look: the inter-character look on screen, which Mulvey insists is

always the primary gaze in any lm that seeks to reveal a truth.130 In classic lm noir, it is a male

character, a male truth-seeker and representative of the law, who assumes the protagonist role, a
131
role with which the audience can identify. The audience joins the perspective of the male

protagonist, who either acts as a truth-seeker or is explicitly termed a detective, in the lm,

seeing events from the point of view of the camera but identifying with him as witness to the

events of the lm. In the 21st-century show Pretty Little Liars, the truth-seekers are female. The
132
show puts the audience in the position of Mulveys invisible guest just as any lm situates its

129
Mulvey 21
130
Mulvey 25
131
Mulvey 32
132
Mulvey 26
Ferguson 70


audience, but in the case of Pretty Little Liars, the protagonists are young girls, without the

power of the law behind their actions (many of their sleuthing tactics even rely on illegal actions,

as discussed in the introduction to this chapter). The construction of this look also re ects a

signi cant shift in cultural gender norms since the 1940s.

The primary gaze in Pretty Little Liars is in girls hands and appears to be empowering,

with girls taking the reins over their own fates. But the unspoken cruel joke played on all the

girls, not by any stalker but by the rules of gaze in lm, is that girls cant be detectives. The tools

of the investigator - language, vision and law - do not belong to women within the show, bringing

womens outlaw status in American law onto the screen. As MacKinnon writes, No women had

voice or representation in constituting this state or its laws, yet we are presumed to consent to its
133
rule. It was not written for our bene t, and it shows. Emphasis abounds in Shadow Play on

the failure of women to accurately construct narratives of fact based in evidence because of their

dual outsider status: as outsiders to the law, and outsiders to any kind of accurate, viable vision or

perception. This problem of women and eyewitnessing134 recalls a similar problem in Double

Indemnity, where Ne is troubled by Lolas status as his only eyewitness. In Shadow Play, the

show accelerates a plotline that showcases girls incapacity for perceiving truth and narrating it

in language, by pitting the aspiring writer Aria against her lover and teacher, the professional

writer Ezra. Early in Shadow Play, Aria discusses a creative writing assignment with Ezra.

Ezra, of course, will be the one to grade her story. Meanwhile, viewers recognize the dramatic

irony: the other girls are realizing that instead of the loving boyfriend Ezra appears to be, he may

133
Catherine MacKinnon, Womens Lives, Mens Laws (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2005) 33
134
Later in the episode, Alison shows concern that in nding her, the girls may have left behind eyewitnesses: the
rst thing she says upon seeing them is, Did anyone see you come in here? ( Shadow Play, 34:05)
Ferguson 71


actually have malicious intents.

It is worth noting that in the following episode after Shadow Play, Ezras motives are

revealed when Aria discovers that his reasons for dating her are grounded in his writing

aspirations. The secret, of course, is not what the girls thought it was (that he is A); rather, it is

that Ezra moved to town and began dating Aria for the purpose of writing a true crime book

about her and her friends, determined to nd out the truth behind the Alison murder mystery.

Arias discovery of the manuscript and revelation of this manipulation destroys her faith in her

own capability as a writer. I like to write, but who knows now, she tells a lover later in the

season.135 She questions not only her own command of words, but also her ability to accurately

perceive the world: re ecting on her failure to recognize Ezras real motives earlier, Aria tells

Hanna, The more I think about it, the stupider I feel. I mean, there had to have been signs. How

did I miss them?136 Hanna responds that Aria is not alone in her ignorance: He fooled all of

us. Not only did Aria fail to see the truth, but every one of the girls, despite their banding

together, failed to gather enough vision to recognize signs of Ezras true intention.

The message is implicit in every mistake the Liars make: girls, no matter how smart,

sporty, artsy, stylish, or gay; no matter whether they work individually or in groups; whether or

not they seem to have evidence, can never possess an accurate sighted gaze.

The show symbolizes the problem of the inaccurate female eyewitness with its use of

visibly mediated gazes, including gazes through windows, cameras, mirrors, and the screens of

the Liars phones and computers. The most common obstruction of the visual truth is the mask.

135
Unbridled, 12:30
136
Cover for Me, 26:16
Ferguson 72


Setting aside the implications that the female form itself is duplicitous and any pretty girl is
137
necessarily lying, making the attractive female face a mask in and of itself, the mask motif
138
appears throughout the seven seasons of the show in various manifestations. However, those

who wear disturbing masks and are ultimately revealed to be evil are, of course, never the real

villains once A is unmasked, the story continues.

III. Girl-on-Girl Crime: Lawless Lesbianism

In their endless attempts to discover the truth, the Liars often resort to violence, a misstep

that reveals their stance outside the law. This status as a violent outlaw is particularly important

for a femme fatale - in the case of Pretty Little Liars, this is Alison. Alisons sexual uidity and

lesbian relationship with Emily serves to play up her deceptive, duplicitous side, showing her

willingness, like that of Phyllis Dietrichson, to assume any identity required in order to perfectly

execute her plans. Ruthann Robson writes that as far as lesbianism is a violent rupture in the

laws enforcement of heterosexual hegemony, it expresses its violence whenever it exists. Her

observations on lesbianism as a legal rupture shed light on the lesbian and bisexual leanings of

Alison as a manifestation of a femme fatale. Alison is constantly viewed as dangerous, a force to

be reckoned with at ones own risk. The violence of her relationships with other women are what

137
The face as mask operates as a reference to the concept of the image as lie, which Berger discusses.
138
Papier-mach and plaster casts of Alisons face are used to make various Alison masks (3x13, 3x23, 3x24, 4x1,
4x2, 4x3, 4x4, 4x10, 4x12, 5x13, 5x25, 6x10, 6x13), as are casts of Emilys face used to make an Emily mask (4x3,
4x6). Realistic skin masks are placed both on living people (6x20) and on dolls (7x1), and the Liars attend a
masquerade ball at which every attendee is masked (2x25). In one Halloween episode, more than one person wears
the creepy baby mask (which appears in later episodes), and one boy wears a translucent mask to scare Alison
(3x13, 5x13, 2x13). A veiled funeral attendee is a suspect just by virtue of her being veiled (4x1). In the premiere of
the fth season, the girls confront a person in a black mask, only to be presented with a group wearing various white
masks, designed to confuse them as to who is the ever-elusive real A (5x1). Various stalkers wear masks black,
translucent, plaster cast, grotesque, lifelike, even gas masks (4x12, 4x13) and the Liars wear only decorative
masks.
Ferguson 73


constitutes her as this risk: another girl can only be an enemy or a sexual interest to Alison.

Recognition of Alisons inability to form functional, platonic girl-on-girl friendships serves as

the jumping-o point for the show: the plot begins at her friends realization that, in fact, there is

so much they did not know about their friend Alison, information that may even put them in

danger.

Instead, Alisons girl-on-girl relationships are in ltrated with physicality and the threat
139
of violence. In the fth season of Pretty Little Liars, Alison slaps her enemy Mona in the face.

This moment of girl-on-girl crime which Mona surreptitiously records and shows to Alisons

friends in order to turn them against her serves as an apparent turning point in the newly alive

Alisons relationship with her clique, showing her that she must be completely honest and even

transparent to them. Of course, the show would be nothing without secrecy and lies, so Alisons

momentary revelation of honesty is short-lived. Still, the power of girl-on-girl violence to turn

other girls against Alison is a powerful reminder of real situations in which girl-on-girl crime is

treated as an especially heinous o ense. In particular, it calls to mind the public shock at two

major elements of Barbara Grahams crime: her promiscuity, even to the point of a lesbian

relationship with another inmate, and her ability to brutally murder a fellow woman.

Alisons lesbian relationship with the only gay Liar, Emily, is also mediated by violence.

Indeed, several moments of a ection between Alison and Emily occur in the wake of violent
140
threats to Emilys life. Even though Emily is her favorite, Alison refuses to reveal the

139
Pretty Little Liars, Miss Me
140
In an episode titled Over My Dead Body, A attempts to kill Emily by locking her in a garage with a car with
the engine running. Emily passes out from the fumes. When she wakes, she is miraculously outside the garage and
sees Alison. While it is unclear whether it is a hallucination or a real image, Alison leans over Emilys body (a
callback to the episodes title) and kisses her. I never told you this, but you were always my favorite, she tells
Ferguson 74


life-saving information of As identity, which she knows, of course. As she physically shows

her sexual interest in Emily, Alison still leaves her to be subject to more violence, leaving their

lesbian relationship as one that hangs in the balance between life and death, one which they each
141
must earn by surviving encounters of violence. Just as bisexuality and lesbianism implied guilt

in Barbara Grahams courtroom when the prosecution exhibited her love letters to a fellow

female inmate, so do ctional girl-on-girl relationships suggest violence and crime.

With each of the Liars unlawful sexualities adopted into her own personal history, Alison

treats them as armor, augmenting her own unbounded sexuality and making her a more potent

femme fatale. Sex is a major stressor in Pretty Little Liars, and it rarely comes without

repercussions. Illegitimate relationships of many types ourish in Pretty Little Liars: child-adult
142 143 144
relationships, incestuous relationships, and exhibitionism. There is no such thing as a

Emily. Nobody loved me as much as you did.

141
In a Season 7 episode, Emily and Alison kiss and fall asleep together after Alison shares with Emily the revelation
that she is pregnant by her late husband, Archer, who had assumed a false identity in order to marry her and drive her
to insanity. Having convinced her that she was insane, Archer, a psychiatrist, would have her admitted to a mental
hospital, thereby incapacitating her and enabling himself to take all her money. The use of an insanity construct to
pathologize and disable Alison ts with the tradition I have already discussed, one used in lm noir, of pathologizing
women to validate violence against them and incarceration. Once his sinister motives are found out, Archer is killed
by Hanna. This moment of sexual a ection between Emily and Alison is, thus, a moment of reenacting the traumatic
violence enacted on Alison by Archer, and a girl-on-girl sexual moment driven by the remembrance of violence and
realization of even further violence in her unwanted pregnancy. The moment also recalls an earlier Season 7 moment
where Emily and Alison kissed in bed and slept together, shortly after Alison had been forcibly restrained and
sedated by Archer at the mental hospital where he had had her admitted. Alisons lesbianism, displayed only through
her relationship with Emily, enacts Robsons theory quite literally: her girl-on-girl sexuality expresses its violence
whenever it exists (Ruthann Robson, Incendiary Categories: Lesbians/Violence/Law, Texas Journal of Women
and the Law, vol. 2, no. 1, 1993, 35).
142
As teenaged half-sisters, Alison and Spencer share an adult love interest: Ian, who is Spencers older sister
Melissas boyfriend. The teenaged Spencer also has a relationship with another one of her sister Melissas adult
boyfriends, Wren.
143
Aside from Jenna and Tobys technically non-incestuous stepsibling relationship, siblings CeCe and Jason also
date.
144
In 1x22 it is revealed that someone had been watching the girls undress through Spencers bedroom window and
recording videos of it. Were young girls in our bedrooms, changing clothes. Were naked, Aria says. Exposed,
Spencer replies.
Ferguson 75


happy sexual encounter: even if a couple manages to successfully have enjoyable sex, the viewer

can be sure that some terrible event is imminent, one that will either punish the girl in question or

inundate her with guilt.

The malevolence of sex is a crucial connecting thread placing Pretty Little Liars squarely
145
in line with the horror tradition, especially when women are punished for having sex. In the

iconic horror movie Scream (1996), one of the original ensemble-cast horror lms, Randy tells

his group of friends, There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully

survive a horror movie. For instance, number one: you can never have sex. Big no-no! Big no-no!
146
Sex equals death, okay? The equation of sex and death seems comical in context, in Randys

colloquial speech, but his self-conscious reference to life as a horror movie introduces a chilling

scope of reality to his claim, which is proven in the movie. If sex equals death in the law of

horror movies, it implies execution in the law of the real world as well, another suggestion of the

oddly close relationship between ction and law that I observe in this thesis.

As a femme fatale, Alison crucially poses a threat to men as well as to women. It is this

threat that leads male characters to seek investigation, documentation, apprehension, and

eventually execution for Alison. In Shadow Play, the two male leads share one conversation,

centered around their shared fear of Alisons violence.

Ezra: We have something in common. We both know what happens when a man lets a
skirt get to him.
Toby: He makes mistakes, walks into trouble with his eyes wide open and ends up in
145
Constance Grady, Pretty Little Liars knows what its like to be a teen girl better than any other show on TV,
Vox, April 18, 2017, http://www.vox.com/2016/9/9/12585116/prettylittleliarsteengirlshorror. The villain in the
2014 lm It Follows is an ambiguous, disembodied force that kills the last partner who the most-recently-cursed
person had sex with. Unless this partner has sex with someone else, he or she will become the new target of it. In
the movie Teeth, a woman with teeth inside her vagina takes revenge on a rapist. In Gone Girl, adapted from a novel,
the female villain stabs a suitor to death during sex.
146
Scream, dir. Wes Craven, 1996.
Ferguson 76


trouble all by himself.

As a gesture of goodwill towards a brother who also knows the trouble of a skirt, Ezra tells

Toby that Alison is alive. This information, shared in man-to-man con dence, serves as a

warning to Toby and by extension, to all other men as brothers that Alison, and all her

violence, are alive and well. Previously comforted by the knowledge that Alison is dead, Toby is

shaken from his position of comfort by her aliveness. The insinuation gathered from this

conversation is that the men of town are safe only with Alison dead. Towards the end of the

episode, Aria repeats this sentiment, telling Alison, I think I liked you better when you were

dead.147 It is this justi cation of safety for others in Alisons death that various characters invoke

when rationalizing reasons to execute Alison.

IV. Executing the Femme Fatale: The War on Terror Then and Now

The principle of execution that premised the legal cases and lms noirs of the 1940s and

1950s retains its critical position in Pretty Little Liars as modern noir television, but it re ects the

completely di erent kind of war that todays audiences face. While the new warfare of the 1940s

was the atomic bomb, a singular event that wiped out everything in its path, the new warfare of

the 21st century is what Grace Halden calls information warfare a form of aggression that is

both ubiquitous and invisible, creating and destroying in many places at once, so insidiously that
148
it is nearly impossible to stop until its damage has already been done. This warfare, Halden

writes, is visible both in terrorism and in Pretty Little Liars. The new joint forces of ubiquitous,

147
Shadow Play, 37:03
148
Grace Halden, Pretty Little Liars and Their Pretty Little Devices, in Girls Series Fiction and American Popular
Culture, ed. LuElla DAmico (New York: Lexington Books, 2016) 277
Ferguson 77


invisible group warfare have combined seamlessly in the 21st century: terrorism and the internet,

as networks whose vast size allows for anonymity and complete dispersal throughout the world,
149
so that complete annihilation is near impossible.

Even when Alison does appear truly present and alive, nevertheless doubt remains as to
150
whether it is really Alison. She is both nowhere and everywhere. Assuming the fragmented
151
identity once embodied by Alison, A de-individualizes each Alison imitator. Each Liar, to the

point that there can be no one truth: each Liar is not her own person, but one component piece of

what makes up the Alison persona and enables it to live on, as demonstrated in the extended

hallucination of the noir Shadow Play episode. Even in her absence, the girls lives are

absorbed by a need to construct and reconstruct Alison, a need for her to survive.

149
This is the di erence between the Iraq War and World War II in their psychological e ects in popular screen
culture: while the new threat in the 1940s was singular and highly visible, the new threat of the 2000s is in nitely
multiple and completely invisible, rendering normal legal techniques completely obsolete in preventing and
punishing crime.
150
The girls are constantly in a state of war against an invisible yet omnipresent opponent, even when everyone
around them does not see the war and lives a state of non-war, of peace. Slavoj Zizek writes that the United States
has been in a simultaneous state of war and non-war since the terror attacks of 9/11: TheproblemisthattheU.S.is
notinastateofwar,Zizekwrites.Forthelargemajority,dailylifegoesonandwarremainsthebusinessofstate
agencies.Followingthistheory,warandpeacearenolongerseparatestates:thedistinctionhasbeenblurred.Zizek
suggeststhatinpost9/11America,astateofpeaceitselfcanbeatthesametimeastateofemergency(Slavoj
Zizek,On9/11,NewYorkersfacedthefireinthemindsofmen,TheGuardian,Sept.10,2006).Thisisthestate
orstateoffluxinwhichtheLiarsconstantlyexist.HaldenquotesoneofShepardsoriginalbooksinthe
series:O utside,theworldwasmaddeninglyimpassivetoherpanicthebirdschirped,thepinesswayed,awoman
walkedbywithababycarriage,talkingonhercellphone(SaraShepard,F lawless[NewYork:HarperTeen]2009).
Theinvisibleyetconstantthreatofdanger,existingalongsidenormallife,becomesoneofthemaintoolsof
psychologicalwarfarethattheirstalkeremploystocontrolthem.
151
Characteristics associated with A begin to appear everywhere: a black hoodie, a red coat. Vaguely Alison-esque
physical attributes also become ubiquitous: the yellow top she wore the night she went missing, and her trademark
blonde hair. Several blondes are revealed to be wearing the same pieces of clothing at di erent times: at least three
separate women wear the red coat, and three separate girls also wear the yellow top. This clothes sharing emphasizes
in visual terms the interchangeability of the Alison persona across any woman the Liars deem suspicious.
Ferguson 78


Conclusion: Final Girls and the Continuing Life of the Femme Fatale in the

21st Century

Judith Bennett writes that modern American culture has produced many girls who never
152
quite die, most notably the nal girls who always manage to survive in slasher lms. The

nal girl is a stock horror character whose impenetrability corresponds to her virginal qualities

and is often directly related to her virginal behavior or status. In Pretty Little Liars, the Liars are

quintessential nal girls. The show re ects a combination of modern horror and classic noir

elements, which accounts for the lack of the nal execution or punishment one would expect

from classic noir. While the show uses noir archetypes and themes, as clearly enacted in the

noir-themed episode Shadow Play, it is also a product of its time, a post-9/11 world that

combines horror and terror, a fantasy genre and a war reality.

The tie between the femme fatale and the nal girl provides an easily visible link from the

noir of the 1940s to the horror of the 21st century. David Greven writes that what he calls the

phallic heroine of lm noir, which he says is analogous to the femme fatale, pre gures the

Final Girl.153 The capital function of the immortal nal girl is to evoke sympathy from the

audience and give viewers a hope to cling to throughout the seemingly endless slaughter of the

horror plot. The nal girl is attractive to audiences and elicits respect because she de es death in

ways men do not, and cannot, because of what they have to lose. If only through her

152
Judith Bennett, Death and the Maiden, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 42, no. 2, 2012, 291
153
David Greven, Representations of Femininity in American Genre Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US,
2011) 12
Ferguson 79


disadvantages as a woman, the nal girl is invariably already a victim before the plot of the

horror lm or show begins. Having already experienced a loss and a blow to her ego, and

incorporating it into her fundamental female lack (of an external signi er in the penis) to

apply Lacanian terms the nal girl is armed with the ability to cope with further victimization

and emotional trauma in ways that the men who surround her are not. However, this is not to say

that she is hyper-feminine: like the femme fatale, the nal girl embodies some masculine traits.

Carol Clover writes that the nal girl is boyish. She is not fully feminine, Clover writes.154

However, the nal girl is still a girl, and her ability to cope as a victim is what allows her to

survive. While she has the tools to cope with loss and therefore does not fear it, the men around

her have something signi cant to lose and experience signi cant fear, making them expendable

and vulnerable to death. In Pretty Little Liars, it is the fear of this power that belongs to nal

girls, such as the Liars and the perpetually alive Alison, that drives male characters around them

to seek their deaths.

But the troubled lives of the Liars are in nite. In one sense they are un-killable nal

girls. Arguably the greatest mystery of the show is how the girls all four of them, ve

including Alison have avoided death and prolonged imprisonment throughout the entire

series, despite arrests, trials, and attempts on their lives. In another sense, the Liars lives and

stories are in nite in the complete absence of any resolution to the in nite questions that the

shows innumerable parallel plots pose. Every episode creates more questions than answers.

Even when an answer is reached, every answer, seen through the lens of the Liars with whom the

154
Carol Clover, Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film, Representations, no. 20, Special Issue:
Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy, Autumn 1987, 204
Ferguson 80


audience is primed to identify, is incomplete at best, and not infrequently wholly wrong at worst.

No longer is it su ciently entertaining to be satis ed by the punishment of one singular femme

fatale, as it was in the 1940s, or even several women: in a new century in which war is unending

and its very existence unclear, the only satisfaction can be in the lack of an ending, the continued
155
lack of knowing on the part of the audience and the characters.

This public fascination with the lingering notion that we as an audience may never

know what happened, or why, is the social phenomenon that allowed Net ix to release a
156
documentary on Amanda Knoxs case nine years after the 2007 murder itself. In 2009,

Amanda Knox was convicted by an Italian court of killing her roommate Meredith Kercher. She

was acquitted in 2011, retried, and found guilty again by the Italian courts in 2014. In 2015, Italy

acquitted her again. Knox has had more than her day in court she has had it twice and seen

four di erent verdicts for the same crime.

Yet despite the exhaustive amount of media coverage and the nearly unbelievable number

of verdicts delivered on this one case, America is still talking about Amanda Knox. Articles

continue to appear in 2017 containing new and especially lurid, previously unknown details of

Knoxs life. The release of Net ixs 2016 documentary is notable in and of itself, but to add to

that, the underlying message of the documentary seems to be that we as Americans must

155
This shared lack of knowing serves to provokes the audience to identify personally with the dramatic characters,
thus turning the uncertainty and continuance of their own real lives into narratives that can be understood as a type
of drama. The viewer of noir still identi es as a hero, but in a di erent way: whereas he would have been aligned
with the male [voiceover] narrative of a 1940s lm as an enforcer, he (or she) is now the survivor of a war whose
end, and meaning, is out of sight. As the new stock form of contemporary noir, the dystopian, unending noir series
reinforces the viewers sense of self as a warrior, though he may never leave the home front.
156
In 2014, victim Meredith Kerchers sister told press, It may be that we will never really know what happened
that night (Nick Squires, Amanda Knox: Family of Meredith Kercher fear they may never nd out the truth, The
Telegraph, Jan. 31, 2014)
Ferguson 81


continue asking questions about the case, never to abandon it.

Like Alison DiLaurentis, Knox is largely a gment of an overactive post-9/11 American

imagination. Knoxs case captured Americas attention through the element of surprise. When a

young woman is sexually assaulted and brutally killed by a man, even a young and handsome

man, the element of surprise does not exist. While murder almost always creates some sense of

shock and un-nature, Knoxs case created a sense of widespread horror and fear because she was

a young, beautiful woman. If Amanda Knox could commit such a heinous crime, any woman

could commit any crime at any time, anywhere, for no apparent reason. The conspicuous lack of

eyewitnesses or evidence placing Knox at the crime scene are also prominent elements in the

neverending whodunit Knox mystery.

This completely unknowable, explosive, silent, constant threat of danger is a quality of

mystery that Knox, whose fame spread through the Internet, shares with the growth of modern

terrorism, which has also grown online. Like the interconnected networks of terrorism and

internet communities, which so often work together, Knox is unknowable, unpredictable, and

inexplicable. More than just a typically mysterious woman, Knox is a sexual bombshell, untamed

by social taboos against casual sex and therefore capable of breaking any law, written or

unwritten. She is a modern femme fatale, as much of a ticking time bomb as any literal explosive

attack. With the onset of terrorism on American land, and beautiful young American girls (i.e.,

Knox) committing violent crimes, the atmosphere becomes one in which literally anything can

happen in the 21st century.

I must stress the fact that Amanda Knoxs trial is not an example of the American justice

Ferguson 82


system, and therefore the behavior of the Italian courts that tried her cannot be said to be

indicative of any trend or in uence within the American legal system. But o cial legal verdicts

even those in other countries are critical for Americans to decide their own opinions on the

guilt or innocence of an American woman accused of murder. The social importance of these

verdicts, and of each step of the court proceeding, is perfectly illustrated in the Knox case, in

which the American public continues to xate on a trial that did not even take place in their own

country. Knoxs unintentional role of the femme fatale excited the attention of the media and a

narrative that was not limited to her accused crime. She provided provocation and justi cation for

an unspoken modern resistance to sexually active women who control their own sex lives.

Grossman writes that the language of the femme fatale seems remarkably accessible as a way
157
for the media to package her as a source of excitement and lurid entertainment.

Ten years after the murder, Knoxs new memoir continues to create tabloid buzz. Such

current press attention demonstrates the pervasive power of a murder story that seems immortal,

a story that will not die, no matter how many years pass or how many verdicts are delivered. Like

any femme fatale, Knox is an unwilling nal girl, one of these women who continues to make it

through every horror lm and haunt American law and ction even after her execution. As years

pass, Knoxs story becomes eligible to be a part of the past rather than our current American

present, but the legacy of the femme fatale remains anything but distant.

157
J. Grossman, Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009) 8
Ferguson 83


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