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chapter 6 KISS ME DEADLY (1955): APOCALYPTIC FEMMES This is the desperate flip side of the film that opened the noir series fourteen years earlier, The Maltese Falcon. The theme is the same: the search for a treasure, a statue or an iron strongbox . The hero is the same: a private detective, both tough and vulnerable, who adores pounding a face, pummeling a belly, and who is the victim marked out by fate of she who will remain his objective counterpart: the grasping, desirable and frigid female. But between 1941 and 1955 . . . the tone has changed. A savage lyricism hurls us into a world in manifest decomposition, governed by dissolute living and brutality; to these intrigues of wild men and weaklings, [the film] offers the most radical of solutions: nuclear apocalypse. raymond borde and etienne chaumeton A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941–1953 In choosing texts to include in the section dealing with classic film noir, I sought films that were both quintessentially noir and more than that as well. In The Killers, the femme fatale becomes a femme attrapéewhen her boyfriend returns to the narrative. In Out of the Past, the femme attrapée wants more than she should in her generic role as ‘‘woman as redeemer.’’ In both The Killers and Out of the Past, the safety and security of domestic life includes an indisputable visual and emotional drabness, and in the case of Out of the Past, connotes a life devoid of love and comfort. The male characters in both texts, though typical of film noir, 63 prove more than typical as well.The investigator in The Killers is neither particularly competent nor attractive. The investigator in Out of the Past is appealing, but unlike his precursors, Marlowe and Spade, he cannot reason or talk his way out of his troubles. The only way this homme fatal can make sure that the femme fatale gets what she deserves is by dying along with her. Kiss Me Deadly (1955), like these earlier films, stands as quintessential noir and as much more than that. Directed by Robert Aldrich and based on a novel by hard-boiled writer Mickey Spillane, Kiss Me Deadly remains a perennial favorite of critics and scholars and may even be the most written-about classic film noir of all. It features a detective without a moral code. If Swede in The Killers and Jeff in Out of the Past needed to be smarter to survive their narratives, at least they seem like decent if doomed men. The less-than-brilliant male protagonist in Kiss Me Deadly, Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker), abuses both his enemies and his friends. His predilection for violence explodes onto the screen throughout the film. Hammer is an homme fatal after money, and only money. He does not care about women, beyond needing to use them as his investigators; his own capabilities do not extend that far. Kiss Me Deadly disrupts the usual pleasures of classic film noir by replacing the attractive male physicality and passivity of hommes fatals Burt Lancaster and Robert Mitchum with a violent, belligerent, but still doomed masculinity. It substitutes sweaty, whiny, desperate femmes fatales for the composed, sexy femininityof Ava Gardnerand Jane Greer (Figure 6.1). Although I did not like Kiss Me Deadly at first viewing, perhaps the disruption of my visual and narrative pleasures enables a more complex and revisionary reading of gender. This reading culminates with the concluding sequence of the film, which features a Pandora’s box of destruction opened by a femme fatale. The film begins with a desperate woman, Christina (Cloris Leachman, in her Hollywood debut), flagging down the sleazy detective mentioned above. He gets beat up; she gets brutally tortured and murdered, and Hammer spends the rest of the complex and violence-infused narrative trying to figure out what she knew and the reason for its value.1 For Stephen Prince, in Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1968, the stylized and ‘‘exceptional brutality and sadism’’ of Kiss Me Deadly effectively provide ‘‘pleasurable entertainment for the viewer that in practice renders almost all screen violence, of whatever apparent ideological inflection, into an easily consumed commodity.’’2 The film ends with the ultimate form of violent destruction, a nuclear explosion; the box I refer to above contains a nuclear device. Nuclear noiras a subcategoryof noir has a venerable tradition, including titles such as The House on 92nd Street (1945), Alfred Hitchcock’s...

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