Product Description

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readings of these films reveal that retro-noirs fulfill a reactionary social function, looking back nostalgically to outdated gender roles and racial relations, while neo-noirs often offer more revisionary representations of women, though not necessarily of people of color.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #639482 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 202 pages

About the Author
JANS B. WAGER is Associate Professor of English and Literature at Utah Valley State College in Orem, Utah. This book continues the investigation of film noir she began in Dangerous Dames: Women and Representation in the Weimar Street Film and Film Noir.

Customer Reviews

An interesting but academic read
While Jans Wager's book reads a bit like it was written for a college course on Feminism and Film, it has some interesting points to make, especially about film noir criticism itself.

Her first valuable point is that the femme fatale in traditional film noir is not only fatal to the male protagaonist in the film, but she is invariably fatal to herself. This point, and its implications, is virtually always overlooked in film noir criticism. The "fatal fate" of the femme fatale is one of the major differences between film noir and neo noir. Wager goes on to explore this point through various movies, both of the film noir and neo noir style.

Wager explores how African Americans are either totally absent from film noir (even though virtually all film noir is based in American cities) or they are used, tangentially, to provide "hipness" to the male protagonist in the movie. For the most part, this observation is still holds true today with neo noir.

And finally Wager makes the point that recent movies, that are routinely labeled as neo noir, should rightfully be broken down into two categories, retro noir and neo noir--the difference being primarily how women are portrayed in the movies--both the femme fatales and the femme atrappes (trapped women, the good girls of film noir). If the women are portrayed as agents of their own destiny, (for good or bad consequence) and not simply as appendages of the male characters in the movie, then the style should rightfully be called neo noir.

If you find film noir interesting to watch and to read about, this book has some thoughtful points to make. But Wager's style of writing can be a little off-putting, both in its academic nature and its anti-capitalist, feminist slant.