Uploaded 30 June 2000

Robert Aldrich’s oeuvre has been described as firmly situated in a “man’s world, [where] the talk is rough, the camaraderie close, and the action violent and heroic”.[1] If it is a man’s world in Kiss Me Deadly (USA 1955), it is conversely a world dominated by women. In this early Aldrich work, the talk is as much characterised by mythological and literary allusion as rough speech, the camaraderie is virtually non-existent and the action is violent but profoundly unheroic. Kiss Me Deadly would appear in many ways to be an atypical Aldrich film. If atypical, it has also been one of the most frequently analysed Aldrich texts. This analysis has overwhelmingly focused on the film’s distinctive visual style and subtextual enunciation of cold war politics. But as Carol Flinn has suggested, Kiss Me Deadly equally lends itself to political analysis of another kind – analysis of the politics of gender. [2]

Film noir is one of the most exhaustively mined topographies in the history of film theory. It has been variously designated a visual style, movement and genre. Films have been classified as noir in terms of their thematic preoccupations, character configurations, pervasive tone and/or distinctive mise en scene. Heated debates over issues of epistemology, ideology and typology in noir are long standing and ongoing. The noir canon has been a touchstone for feminist theorists over the last two decades, particularly in relation to the significance of the femme fatale. Janey Place has argued that the femme fatale of the 1940s noir cycle represents “one of the few periods of film in which women are active, not static symbols, are intelligent and powerful, if destructively so, and derive power, not weakness, from their sexuality”.[3]  Recent feminist interventions in noir scholarship have further problematized the representation of the femme fatale, emphasising the complex structures of identification and desire underpinning the appeal of this iconic figure. [4]

Kiss Me Deadly occupies an important position in this context. An anthology of contemporary feminist writing on cinema bears the film’s title, “…because Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly has been read in contradictory ways from within the problematic of feminist film theory itself”. [5] Equally importantly for the purposes of this paper, the title acknowledges Aldrich’s “great inventiveness and wit in casting a range of ‘B-girls’ in this film, so that the 1940’s image of the femme fatale is powerfully modified…” [6] It is precisely this notion of a powerfully modified femme fatale, and the ramifications of this modification for subsequent neo-noir texts, that demands further investigation.

The noir film of the 1940s is typically structured by a fatal attraction between a beleaguered male character, more anti-hero than hero, and the object of his personal and/or professional investigation – the femme fatale. Iconographically distinguished by suggestive costuming, seductive lighting and the ‘phallic’ accessories of cigarettes and guns, the femme fatale is a perversely dominant trope in what has been described as a “masculine genre” [7]  The figure of the femme fatale has been conventionally understood as the cinematic manifestation of an enduring archetype in western culture – feminine evil embodied in the form of the treacherous temptress. The 1940s noir femme fatale has thus been described as a universal “male fantasy”- produced by a specific set of socio-historical conditions. [8]  For Place and others, the noir femme is thus a fascinating if transparent distillation of cold war masculine anxieties about the “liberated woman” – anxieties resulting from the changing nature of gender roles during this period.[9]

If the femme fatale of 1940s noir represents an hyperbolic manifestation of the newly independent woman, it has also been argued that she is frequently, and equally transparently, contrasted with her archetypal opposite – the redemptive, “nurturing woman”. [10] According to Place, the demarcation of these two feminine noir types is often delineated within the diegesis in terms of location (rural innocence/urban decadence), lighting regimes (flat, undistinguished/high contrast, enigmatic), costuming (modest/suggestive) and sexual activity (chaste/sexually assertive). [11]

In Kiss Me Deadly it is apparent that Aldrich is attempting something rather different from the typical representations of the 1940s noir archetypes outlined above. The women in Kiss Me Deadly connote a deliberately deglamourised,”‘B-girl” quality and yet their specific referent remains unmistakably their female counterparts in the film noir canon of the preceding decade. Christina (Cloris Leachman) and Lily (Gaby Rodgers) thus suggest “B” versions of Barbara Stanwyck and Lana Turner respectively, while Velda’s (Maxine Cooper) dark, stylised glamour and verbal acuity recalls a fledgling Joan Crawford. Minor character Friday’s breathless delivery and come hither vulnerability parodies the hyper-femininity of Marilyn Monroe. Where as in Curtis Hanson’s retro noir LA Confidential (USA 1997) the “whores are cut to look like movie stars”, here Aldrich has merely cast to look a little like them.

Edward Gallafent has noted how the discourse on impaired masculinity that underpins Aldrich’s film is carried by the three central female characters, at different points in the narrative trajectory. [12] Equally, one could argue that many of the signature attributes of the noir femme fatale are also dispersed across the three women, in a series of complex and shifting associations, made more complex given the women never actually share a scene together. Thus Christina, Lily and Velda are defined at key moments by the duplicity, avarice and verbal and sexual assertiveness characteristic of the 1940s femme fatale. For example, as with the enigmatic femme fatale of classic 1940s noir, each of the women in Kiss Me Deadly, engages to varying degrees in subterfuge. Appearances in Aldrich’s film are quite literally deceptive. In the opening scenes Christina resists police detection by masquerading as Mike Hammer’s wife. She also remains an enigma to Hammer himself. Velda is “real woo-bait”, acting out the role of temptress as part of Hammer’s sting operation designed to trap philandering wives and husbands. In the film’s denouement Lily is revealed as the most duplicitous of them all – rather than being Christina’s fearful flatmate, she is really Soberin’s treacherous accomplice Gabrielle.

The female characters in Kiss Me Deadly affect a collective commentary on the iconographic tradition of women in film noir. They signal a shift in the representation of, and a critical distance from, the semantically overburdened figure of the classic femme fatale. Traditional polarities for representing the feminine in noir thus give way in Kiss Me Deadly to a more thoroughgoing complexity. The qualitative difference signified by the women in Kiss Me Deadly is apparent in the ambivalent reception their representation provoked. Following the release of the film, critics were revealing in their crudely enunciated dissatisfaction with the way Aldrich’s women looked and behaved. The Los Angeles Times lamented that of all the actresses “there is scarcely a knockout in the batch”, while other commentators remarked that they weren’t “big-breasted enough” and “all four of the women are near nymphomaniacs”[13] .

These contemporary responses betray a critical unease that could also perhaps be traced to the aural/oral transgressions linked to the female characters. Aldrich’s women not only look different but, as Flinn has noted, they are also consistently differentiated by the sounds, linguistic and otherwise, associated with them. [14] Sound design in Kiss Me Deadly has been the subject of considerable critical discussion. [15] For the purposes of this paper, what is of most interest is that issues of sound, speech and discourse in the film are ineluctably linked with notions of female agency. It is here that Aldrich is at his most provocative.

Film noir, more than any other cinematic form, has been associated with the voice-over. Often combined with the flashback, the noir voice-over typically presents the perspective of the doomed central male character. Double Indemnity (USA 1944) seminal conbination of a “confessional” male voice-over and flashback established a prototypic narrative structure much imitated thereafter. Mickey Spillane’s novel, on which Kiss Me Deadly is based, employs the convention of first-person masculine narration. In their adaptation, Aldrich and scriptwriter A.I.Bezzerides significantly changed the narrative structure. Dispensing with the novel’s declamatory, masculine voice, Aldrich’s film offers in its place, a complex layering of discourses, voices and sounds that arguably works to foreground a form of feminine enunciative authority. Kiss Me Deadly thus inverts what Kaja Silverman has described as the gendered audio hierarchies constitutive of the classical Hollywood cinema. [16] The film works to deprivilege masculine speech in favour of its feminine counterpart. According to Flinn, in Kiss Me Deadly it is the female characters who are endowed with enunciative authority. [17]

Such feminine discursive authority can be discerned in the film’s various offscreen voices. While such voices are typically gendered masculine in noir, they are invested in Aldrich’s film with a definitively distaff quality. Pronouncements from the radio, Mike Hammer’s answering machine, and cryptic clues from Christina Rossetti – a form of disembodied voice from the grave – represent critical events in the narrative trajectory articulated by women. Conversely, Hammer is marked by the sort of discursive inadequacy that, as Silverman has noted, is generally associated with the feminine. [18] He is spoken for by his female counterparts. Hammer is subject to Christina’s “character assassination” in the opening scene. Velda’s equally perspicacious running commentary articulates the precise nature of the conflicts that beset Hammer and that he himself is unable to express. When Hammer does speak, he is frequently limited to loaded but tragically inarticulate verbal exchanges – most spectacularly, the “fuel-injected” verbal interactions with his motor mechanic off-sider, Nick.

If women are invested with a certain discursive authority in Kiss Me Deadly, this constitutes a radical enough proposition within the tradition of noir. But this is made even more provocative with the alliance of femininity and sound itself. Where Silverman describes the feminisation of sound in the pejorative sense of a subordinate relation to the cinematic image, [19] Flinn contends that Aldrich’s film arguably contests this entrenched audio-visual dynamic.[20]  The latter has argued persuasively for “a competing form of signification” in Kiss Me Deadly – a form specifically aligned with the feminine. [21] According to this interpretation, a range of non-representational sounds and rhythms associated with the female characters constitutes an alternative aural register in the film. This in turn acts as a subversive force, that at critical moments, compromises narrative cohesion and the primacy of vision. [22] Flinn nominates the opening scene as exemplary: Christina’s heavy breathing “is disconcertingly loud and imperfectly synched…[an effect] that introduces a break in cinematic verisimilitude and sense of disruption into the text”. [23]

The women in Kiss Me Deadly arguably attest to a representational watershed in the American film noir tradition. Aldrich problematises the overdetermined figure of the noir woman by exploring female agency in relation to image, discursive authority and the transgressive potential of sound. Ironically, from a director with an allegedly misogynist reputation, Aldrich’s 1955 film obliquely foreshadows the ambitious project of feminist film theory, still two decades away. [24]  Where this mid-1970s project could be broadly articulated as an attempt to make the “invisible visible”, in Kiss Me Deadly, it is more particularly a matter of making the silent audible.[25]

Aldrich’s film has had a considerable impact on subsequent manifestations of the noir text. There has been a proliferation of noir inflected or neo-noir texts in both the mainstream and independent American film sectors over the last two decades. As B.Ruby Rich has noted, much of the inspiration for these contemporary noir films comes from “…the psychotic years of late noir, (already tinged with parody and subversion)”, of which Kiss Me Deadly is perhaps the pre-eminent example. [26] The legacy of female characterisation in Aldrich’s film can thus be seen in everything from the determinedly B-style performances of actors such as Drew Barrymore in minor neo-noirs(Poison Ivy USA 1992; Gun Crazy, USA 1992; Lethal Lolita, USA 1992), through Martin Scorsese’s adroit tale of urban paranoia, After Hours (USA 1986) to the self-conscious, noir-literate films of John Dahl and Quentin Tarantino. But two contemporary works have taken particular inspiration from the most subversive aspects of feminine representation and aural transgression in Kiss Me Deadly – the Wachowski brothers’ Bound (USA 1996) and David Lynch’s Lost Highway (USA 1996).

Bound has been described as a “brilliantly bent variation on noir“. [27]  The film’s most striking innovation is a reconfiguration of the central relationship in the standard noir text. Rather than the fatally attracted heterosexual pair typical of noir, Bound features a lesbian couple – femme fatale Violet (Jennifer Tilly) and tough, ex-con Corky (Gina Gershon). The story is told from their viewpoint. While some analyses have criticised the film for unabashedly milking the novelty of the lesbian angle for all its commercial worth, the film is far more interesting in the way it extends the polemic on femininity, speech and discourse inaugurated in Kiss Me Deadly. The competing claims of the visual and aural in Kiss Me Deadly resound in Bound.

The film demonstrates the noir penchant for narrative complexity. The spatial ambiguity of the opening scene, accompanied by lines of apparently unrelated dialogue, only makes sense retroactively when reinstated at decisive points in the film. The subsequent voice-over and associated images in flashback belong unmistakably to the character of Corky. This rare instance of the female voice-over in noir, where the character survives the repercussions of such an aural/oral transgression, makes apparent the debt to Aldrich’s film. [28] Both texts subvert conventions of the noir tradition in their investment of discursive authority in the feminine.

Female speech in Bound resonates in complex ways. The clipped exchanges between Violet and Corky intentionally invoke the loaded verbal economy of classic noir. Corky’s dialogue is shot through with traces of the male noir vernacular, her utterances are the consistent commonplaces of masculine fear and desire: “That’s the problem with sleeping with women…all those mind games”; “You make your choices, you pay the price”. Lines are delivered by both women with a self-conscious irony, investing the female voice in Bound with a distinctively parodic quality. Such self-reflexivity again suggests Aldrich’s influence. While Bound may deploy some of the standard tropes in relation to women in noir, such as the conflation of sex, violence and avarice with the libidinous figure of the femme fatale, it offers an informed commentary on the problematic nature of their status within this tradition.

David Lynch’s Lost Highway equally concerted a concerted interrogation of the noir text. As with Kiss Me Deadly and Bound, it is a film that at once invokes and undermines signature conventions of the form. In Lynch’s film, parallel and intersecting narratives depict two couples in a technophobic nightmare where meaningful communication is rendered impossible. Renee and Alice, classic femmes fatale, are both played by Patricia Arquette. Their troubling resemblance is one of the key confusions plaguing Lynch’s two heroes Fred Madison(Bill Pullman) and Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty). The film is full of doublings and repetitions, overtly working the terrain of Freudian dreams and nightmares, and invested with a distinctively Lynchian paranoid quality.

Speech, particularly for the male protagonists, seems almost painful, concealing rather than revealing motivation and furthering the notion of discursive inadequacy explored in Kiss Me Deadly. It engages unequivocally with the enunciative possiblities of the noir text and the hegemony of image over sound. Dialogue in Lost Highway, even by noir standards, is cryptic and severely attenuated. Exchanges between characters are oblique and evasive. Speech, particularly for the male protagonists, seems almost painful. It conceals rather than reveals motivation, and enhances the notion of discursive inadequacy explored in Kiss Me Deadly. However, where speech fails, sound itself prevails.

Lost Highway is a cinematic text suffused by the sound and fury of noise. Synchronised speech is deprivileged in favour of ambient sound, literally amplifying the aural register of Kiss Me Deadly. Lynch takes the sonic threat of the “great whatsit” and turns the volume up high. Frequently extra-diegetic, off-screen, and threateningly undifferentiated, noise in Lynch’s film is always imbued with a palpable sense of foreboding. Whereas Raymond Chandler has described the classic noir story as generating the “smell of fear”, Lost Highway evokes even more potently the sound of fear. [29]

As with Kiss Me Deadly, Lynch’s film insists on the homology woman/sound by consistently aligning the sounds of fear with the figure of the femme fatale. But Lynch makes this relation a far more menacing proposition. This is perhaps most transparently symbolised in a series of extreme close-up images of the speaking female mouth. Punctuating the cinematic text at crucial moments, the subtle disjunction between these images and the accompanying dialogue seems to disavow speech, while pointing to the threatening indeterminacy of both the feminine and sound. Given the film’s semantic and aural obfuscations, Lynch’s heroes (and viewers) only dimly perceive the psychic threat intended in this conflation of woman and sound.

As with Kiss Me Deadly, in Lost Highway noise is the repressed of the mainstream aural text which inexorably and aggressively returns. At decisive moments this ambient noise undermines the hegemony of both synchronised speech and the image itself. In Lost Highway “feminised sound” is thus not the “perpetually supportive acoustic mirror” of the classical cinema, but rather is positioned outside the diegesis and discourses of noir [30] Here again Aldrich’s influence is evident in that sound in Lost Highway arguably functions not as a conventionally structured form of enunciation but rather as metadiegetic and metadiscursive effect.

Kiss Me Deadly, Bound and Lost Highway contest some fundamental verities of the classical cinema within the paradigm of film noir. If the tradition of noir has been described as “tearing the voice from the image in a way that remains unexplained”, these three texts,to varying degrees, expedite that rupture. [31]  All three seek to intervene in the determining structures, iconography and gendered audio hierarchies of noir. All three delimit the enunciative and figurative possibilities for women within a cinematic tradition that has been described as determinedly masculine. [32]

Footnotes:

[1] James Powers, “Dialogue on film”, American Film 4, no.2 (November 1978):5
[2] Carol Flinn, “Sound, woman and the bomb: dismembering the ‘great whatsit’ in Kiss Me Deadly“, Wide Angle 8, no.8 (1986):116.
[3] Janey Place, “Women in film noir“, Women in Film noir, E.Ann.Kaplan, ed. (London:BFI, 1980):35.
[4] See Elizabeth Cowie, “Film noir and women”, Shades of Noir: A Reader, Joan Copjec, ed. (London: Verso, 1993):121-165; Joan Copjec, “The phenomenal nonphenomenal: private space in film noir“, Shades of Noir, Copjec, ed.:67-197; and Karen Hollinger, “Film noir, voice-over and the femme fatale“, Film Noir Reader, Alain Silver and James Ursini, eds. (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996): 243-259.
[5] Laleen Jayamanne, Kiss Me Deadly: Feminism and Cinema for the Moment (Sydney: Power Publications, 1995):3. See Flinn, “Sound, woman and the bomb”; Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988):65-66. See also Laleen Jayamanne, “They are becoming us or they are becoming other: they are at a dangerous point”, Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1979-1990, Catriona Moore, ed (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994):184-190.
[6] Jayamanne, 3
[7] Janey Place, 45. See also Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (New York: Penguin, 1973):207.
[8] Haskell, 190. See also Place, 35-36.
[9] Place, 35-36.
[10] Place, 50.
[11] Place, 52.
[12] Edward Gallafent, “Kiss Me Deadly“, Movie Book of Film Noir, Ian Cameron, ed. (London: Studio Vista, 1992):246.
[13] Flinn, 116.
[14] Flinn, 122-123.
[15] See Flinn, 118-126. See also J.P.Telotte, “Talk and trouble: Kiss Me Deadly‘s apocalyptic discourse”, Journal of Popular Film and Television13, no.2 (1985):69-79.
[16] Silverman, 42-71. Silverman’s hierarchy rates synchronised speech as the weakest, most “feminine'”pole, with the offscreen and embodied voice-over aligned with the masculine in ascending order of narrative authority.
[17] Flinn, 122.
[1] Silverman, 45. Silverman’s thesis draws on a Freudian understanding of the cinematic representation of woman associated with lack/absence and extends that argument in terms of the acoustic lack also associated with her image on the mainstream American screen. Women are therefore constructed as fundamentally lacking in discursive authority in contrast to their male counterparts. The voice-over in cinema is the most self-evident example of this gendered distinction.
[19] Silverman, 45.
[20] Flinn, 120.
[21] Flinn, 122.
[22] Flinn, 122.
[23] Flinn, 122.
[24] Jayamanne, 3.
[25] Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London:Pandora, 1983):73.
[26] B.Ruby Rich, “Dumb lugs and femme fatales“, Sight and Sound 5, no.11 (November 1995):8. Rich nominates Gun Crazy (USA 1949), The Big Combo (USA 1955) and Touch of Evil (USA 1959) along with Kiss Me Deadly as emblematic late noir texts.
[27] Tom Ryan, Bound review, The Sunday Age, 16 March 1997, 7.
[28] According to Amy Lawrence, there are very few instances of the female voice-over in the classic noir canon, an exception being Sorry, Wrong Number (USA 1948). Lawrence notes that in these occasional instances of the female voice-over, the characters associated with the voice-over are always punished – usually killed- for their aural/oral transgressions. See Amy Lawrence, Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991):145.
[29] Edgardo Cozarinsky, “American Film Noir” in Ricvhard Roud, ed. Cinema: A Critical Dictionary (New York: Viking, 1980):59.
[30] Silverman, p42-71.
[31] Copjec, 185.
[32] Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). Krutnik argues that noir narratives offer a range of alternative or “transgressive” representations of male desire or identity, but that however transgressive, the cycle is ultimately a definitively masculine form.