Dames in the Driver's Seat: Rereading Film Noir

by Jans B. Wager

With its focus on dangerous, determined femmes fatales, hardboiled detectives, and crimes that almost-but-never-quite succeed, film noir has long been popular with moviegoers and film critics alike. Film noir was a staple of classical Hollywood filmmaking during the years 1941-1958 and has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity since the 1990s. Dames in the Driver's Seat offers new views of both classical-era and contemporary noirs through the lenses of gender, class, and race. Jans Wager analyzes how changes in film noir's representation of women's and men's roles, class status, and racial identities mirror changes in a culture that is now often referred to as postmodern and postfeminist. Following introductory chapters that establish the theoretical basis of her arguments, Wager engages in close readings of the classic noirs The Killers, Out of the Past, and Kiss Me Deadly and the contemporary noirs L. A. Confidential, Mulholland Falls, Fight Club, Twilight, Fargo , and Jackie Brown. Wager divides recent films into retro-noirs (made in the present, but set in the 1940s and 1950s) and neo-noirs (made and set in the present but referring to classic noir narratively or stylistically). Going beyond previous studies of noir, her perceptive readings of these films reveal that retro-noirs fulfill a reactionary social function, looking back nostalgically to outdated gender roles and racial relations, while neo-noirs often offer more revisionary representations of women, though not necessarily of people of color.

202 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2005

Reviews

[Steven]

Wager attempts to introduce new terminology into the noir discussion, some of it is useful and some of it is confusing, and even seems off-point. The useful terminology is introducing "retro-noir" to describe movies made post-1960s that are set back in the classic noir period of the 40s and 50s. Chinatown is a good example of a movie frequently lumped under neo-noir because of when it was made that harks back to film noir origins. I think this distinction between retro-noir and neo-noir is on point and a useful distinction.

The less useful terminology is Wager's insistence on describing male protagonists as homme fatales. The point is to objectify the male characters in the same way the female characters have been objectified by the term femme fatale: their subjectivity is denied by the use of the label. Although, I see the point of this exercise, there are very few male protagonists in noir who are fatal in the same sense as the female characters are. Objectification aside, calling these male protagonists homme fatales completely misses their function in the plots.

Given the number of times that the phrase "white supremacist patriarchal culture" appears, it is clear from what perspective the rereading film noir of the subtitle is focused. Among the movies that are reread: The Killers, Out of the Past, Kiss Me Deadly, L. A. Confidential, Casablanca, Mullholland Falls, Fight Club, Twilight, Fargo, and Jackie Brown.

Overall, this was an interesting alternative take on Film Noir, even if the terminology reaches too far at times.

[reveurdart]

I've previously read the authors' later book, Jazz and Cocktails: Rethinking Race and the Sound of Film Noir, so I expected to love this one just as much. My problem with Dames in the Driver's Seat: Rereading Film Noir stems from my disagreements with some of her readings of particular movies. I appreciated wholeheartedly her goals for this book: to see more diversity in future film noir movies and to create awareness about the lack of diverse representations in film noir movies. For that alone, I recommend this book.

[Zoë]

I really enjoyed this study. I liked Wager's use of the term femme attrapee to designate the domestic woman who opposes the femme fatale. I thought that Wager's defining of post-noir films was very interesting. I didn't always agree with the readings here, for example the rather negative conclusions about masculinity in LA Confidential, but overall I found this book to bring many fresh perspective to the genre.