According to all definitions and accounts, a femme fatale is an attractive woman who seduces men to cause them to make mistakes. This usually happens for money or to commit criminal acts like murder. Modern terms may refer to this type of behavior in female characters. Film noir is defined by the femme fatale, a film genre or era of filmmaking. The film noir genre is most clearly defined by the criminal point-of-view. Nino Fran described the dynamism in violent death as a characteristic that is constant to film noir. In all respects, a noir is a movie about death. It is clear that a noir film must have a dark, sultry woman. The film’s definition, its main point, and the moral centre for the audience are all skewed because of the corrupt cops and the likeable criminals. In Double Indemnity Phyllis Dietrichson’s character is similar to that of Phyllis in the movie, but she is unique due to the fact that she is responsible for the downfall of another “bad guy.”
Phyllis Dietrichson is the perfect femme fatale in Double Indemnity. She uses her clever understanding of how the men perceive her to their advantage. She is definitely objectified as she uses the men’s lust for her to manipulate their minds. Phyllis makes it clear that she is a sexual object. She uses the seduction of a rich man to marry him and then manipulate the man to murder him. She does not directly attack men until she tries killing Walter, the man used by her to kill her husband. Her character does not demand that the men obey her. Instead, they are influenced by her words and look. She says this in the Walter and Phyllis conversation.
Walter: What happened? You can’t say that you love me because I’ve always been with you.
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Phyllis uses the dialogue to come clean. She tells Walter he didn’t mean anything to her. Neither did any of the other guys she used to get to where she was. In this quote, Phyllis is accused of being a femme fatale who seduced men with her beauty in order to ruin their simple lives. Walter then killed her husband after making her husband’s wife fall in lust with her. All this while she slept with Walter, her stepdaughter’s boyfriend.
The femme fatale is not like the other female characters in films. It is because she is both a predator and a prey. And she seems to be entangled and yet detached with the men. Film Noir and the Femme Fatale were created as a reaction to World War II. It was the fear that women, who had worked hard in the war to fill roles in industry and factories doing “men’s work” while their husbands were fighting, would leave the housewife’s role to resume the work they did during the conflict. Whereas women had been shown to be faithful wives and to perform their domestic duties in movies, now they were seen to drink and smoke, and no longer as chaste. Years. Some critics say that the development and perception of the femme fatale was nothing new. They also claim it is not as radical or shocking as people may think.
The femme fatale in films that fall under the film noir category represents an attack on independent working women. It portrays women from the post-war era as a new type of woman. The women who were once the housewives that soldiers left behind to fight are no longer there. They were now depicted on screen as being deceptive, seductive and hardened by the environment. They were also portrayed as predators. Phyllis Dietrichson from Double Indemnity was one of most notable examples of the Femme Fatale because she had the ability to seduce men and control them with her looks, and her meaningless love vows. This new femme-fatale character was very different from other female characters on screen. She used a seductive disguise that made her appear both predatory and prey.
