Femme Fatale—Negotiations of Tragic Desire

1 Femme fatale negotiations of Tragic DesireBronfen, Literary History, Volume 35, Number 1, Winter 2004, (Article)Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: additional information about this article Access Provided by University of Virginia Libraries & (Viva) at 04/21/11 2:46PM Literary History, 2004, 35: 103 116 Femme fatale negotiations of Tragic DesireElisabeth BronfenTragedy is the image of Fate, as comedy is ofFortune. Susanne LangerOne of the old themes of tragedy, Stanley Cavell argues inhis reading of Shakespeare s King Lear, is that our actionshave consequences which outrun our best, and worst, inten-tions .. the reason consequences furiously hunt us down is not merelythat we are half-blind, and unfortunate, but that we go on doing thething which produced these consequences in the first place.

2 If Cavellthus locates a repetition compulsion at the heart of the Tragic theme heis concerned with, he does so because at stake for him is not simply themoral lesson we are to learn from tragedy but also the question whatleaving the scene of tragedy might imply. For this reason, he goes on toclaim that what we need is not rebirth, or salvation, but the courage, orplain prudence, to see and to stop. To abdicate. But what do we need inorder to do that? It would be salvation. 1By distinguishing between a salvation which results from seeing andstopping and one that results from rebirth, Cavell raises two interrelatedquestions. Firstly, what exactly is it that we keep on doing to sustaintragedy? And, secondly, what would putting a stop to the repetitioncompulsion underlying Tragic Desire imply? For Cavell both questionsrevolve around the human proclivity to avoid attending to the specificityof the person before one, as this comes to be coterminous with failing toattend to one s own specificity.

3 Recognizing a person, thus his claim, depends upon allowing oneself to be recognized by him (AL 279) in adialogic gesture where self-revelation implies self-recognition as well. If,for Cavell, Tragic action serves to prevent one from seeing the other(and thus oneself), then the knowledge being staved off is, furthermore,precisely that referring to one s humanity in the sense of acknowledg-ing one s fallibility and imperfection, which is to say, one s mortality. Forwhat is being avoided, as a perpetual sustenance of Tragic misrecognitionprevents one from stopping to see the world at hand, is anacknowledgement of one s irrevocable literary history104 Implenitude thus comes into play in the sense that one can neverknow the other, but only acknowledge her or him as embodyingprecisely the limit to one s knowledge, and thus one s existence; asmarking an obstacle which can only be overcome by recognizing it assuch.

4 At the same time, the refusal to acknowledge the other brings afurther aspect of mortality into play. For the Tragic corpses, whoseproduction is the inevitable conclusion of a refusal to put a stop to anarrative of avoidance, only cement the fact that not seeing the other istantamount to denying his or her humanity. The logic of denial at workcan be formulated as follows. A recognition of one s own mortalimplenitude is staved off by virtue of turning the other into a figurewhose function is to sustain an illusion of self-empowerment. Yet, asCavell claims, tragedy not only enacts the fatal consequences of refusingrecognition of the other and of the self, but also comes to be the placewhere the heroes and heroines and, implicitly, we as the audience are not allowed to escape these consequences.

5 For if the dead bodies atthe end of a Tragic text give evidence of the denial of the other shumanity, they also signify the death of our capacity to acknowledge,which is to say, the denial of our what follows I want to take the theme of fatal misrecognition, theconsequences this entails, as well as the possibility of putting an end totheir haunting, as a way of discussing a genre film noir which isusually ignored by Tragic theorists. In so doing, I follow the proposalmade by Rita Felski for this volume, namely, to think of tragedy not justas a narrowly defined dramatic genre, but as a mode, sensibility, orstructure of Vivian Sobchack notes, It is now a commonplace to regard filmnoir during the peak years of its production as a pessimistic cinematicresponse to volatile social and economic conditions of the decadeimmediately following World War II.

6 3 Indeed, the heroes of film noirrepeatedly find themselves penetrating into the darkness of a fascinat-ing, and at the same time threatening, counterworld of corruption,intrigue, betrayal, and decadence from which they can escape only bydeath. Yet the sense of a paranoid world transmitted in film noir need notbe conceived exclusively as a cinematic refiguration of the politicalinstability of the postwar period, especially when one takes into consid-eration its transformation since the 1980s into neo-noir. Rather, thefantasy scenarios film noir celebrates, with its protagonists fatefullyentrapped in a claustrophobic world and unable to master theirdestinies, can just as fruitfully be understood as an example of theresonance Tragic expression continues to maintain, particularly in therealm of popular cinema.

7 Indeed, if one follows Felski s suggestion thattragedy be thought of less as a genre than as an attitude which addressesthe limits of modern dreams of perfectibility, then the Femme fatale can105femme fatalebe understood as a particularly resilient contemporary example of tragicsensibility. For in the world of a film noir like Double Indemnity, whereactions occur accidentally on purpose, she functions both as thescreen for fantasies of omnipotence and as the agent who, by ultimatelyfacing the consequence of her noir actions, comes to reveal the fragilitynot only of any sense of omnipotence that transgression of the lawaffords, but, indeed, of what it means to be issue for me in tracing the question of Tragic sensibility in BillyWilder s Double Indemnity (1944) is the way the Femme fatale emerges asthe figure who comes to perform Tragic acceptance in the mannerStanley Cavell understands it, namely, as an enactment not of fate butof responsibility, including the responsibility for fate (AL 310).

8 For acharacter like Phyllis Dietrichson, this means insisting to her lover that,once they have embarked on their transgressive action, it s straightdown the line for both of us. Insofar as it was fate that they should havemet, to play their criminal game (killing her husband, cheating hisinsurance company) to the end ultimately means acknowledging thateach is responsible for the fatal consequences their transgression willhave. What is, however, particularly significant about Wilder s femmefatale is that, in contrast to the lover she ensnares, she chooses destruc-tion at every turn, and in so doing draws attention to the question ofinevitability in a Tragic sequence. Given that she is radically andcontinuously free to make a choice against sacrificing others and,ultimately, herself, her embrace of death calls upon us to ask why, if onecould avoid death, should one choose it.

9 Following Cavell s suggestionthat tragedy grows from the fortunes we choose to interpret, to accept,as inevitable (AL 318), my own interest in the Femme fatale is a two-foldengagement with the vexed interface between agency and fate. For evenif in the classic film noir Phyllis Dietrichson chooses to interpret herdemise as inevitable, significantly she comes to discover her freedomprecisely in her embrace of the inevitability of focus on the Femme fatale , of course, also means introducing thequestion of gender difference into a discussion of Tragic sensibility, inthe sense that, while she comes to acknowledge her responsibility forher fate, the hero she involves in her transgressive plot is characterizedby the exact opposite attitude, namely, a Desire to stave off knowledge ofhis own fallibility at all costs.

10 In the classic noir plot, the hero quitecoincidentally meets the alluring Femme fatale in Double Indemnity hehappens to pass by her villa and enters to ask her husband to renew a carinsurance policy. Yet their meeting follows the fateful logic of a love atfirst sight. As Mladen Dolar notes, what seemingly happened uninten-tionally and by pure chance is belatedly recognized as the realization ofan innermost wish: the pure chance was actually no chance at all: theintrusion of the unforeseen turned into necessity. 4 From the momentnew literary history106the hero catches sight of the Femme fatale , both find themselves caught ina sequence of events which can go only one way. Both are tragicallyframed within a narrative of fate and can only come to accept the law ofcausation. Yet if the contingent turn from free choice to inevitability isaligned with a masculine gaze appropriating a seductive feminine body,one must not overlook the fact that as bearer of the hero s look, it is thefemme fatale who manipulates the outcome of their fatal meeting.