In my viewing experience there are five main structural features of film noir that together produce a specific location for women and somewhat ambiguous ideological effects. These are:

1. The investigative structure of the narrative
2. Plot devices such as voice-over or flashback, or frequently both 3. Proliferation of points of view
3. Frequent unstable characterisation of the heroine
4. An ‘expressionist’ visual style and emphasis on sexuality in the photographing of women.

In the mainstream thriller the investigative structure presupposes a male hero in search of the truth about an event that either has already happened or is about to come to completion. This premiss has two consequences. The plots of the thriller/detective story offer a world of action defined in male terms; the locales, situations, iconography, violence are conventions connoting the male sphere. {Women in this world tend to split into two categories: there are those who work on the fringes of the underworld and are defined by the male criminal ambience of the thriller — barflies, nightclub singers, expensive mistresses, femmes fatales, and ruthless gold-diggers who marry and murder rich old men for their money; | and then there are on the outer margins of this world, wives, long-suffering girlfriends, would-be fiancées who are victims of male crime, sometimes the objects of the hero’s protection, and often points of vulnerability in his masculine armour,}T he second consequence is an epistemological one in so far as the investi- gation assumes truth to be a goal attainable by tracing a logical process of cause and effect, and that to every puzzle there is a key through which a complex but coherent pattern will emerge within seemingly anarchic events.

Rather than the revelation of socio-economic patterns of political and financial power and corruption which mark the gangster/thriller, film noir probes the secrets of female sexuality and male desire within patterns of submission and dom- inance. Thus the enquiries of the police or private detective come eventually to concentrate on the state of the hero’s, and more frequently, the heroine’s, heart.

These inflections set up a conflict in the treatment of women in film noir. On the one hand their image is produced in the course of male investigation and moral judgment. On the other the suppression of the bourgeois family and centrality of women in the male world of action produces female representations out- side family definition and dependency. This means that questions of economic survival have to be broached. Two options are available to women — work or living off a man. In film noir both options emphasise the sexual objectification of women, for its criminal ambience situates working women in bars and nightclubs rather than in professions or factories. But sexuality and money are brought into explicit juxtaposition — a contradiction for bourgeois morality in that female sexuality is supposed to be sanctified by love given freely, which is hidden within marriage and the family. Moreover, the heroine often shares the hard-boiled cynicism of the hero, which further undermines conventional sexual ideology. But this does not imply an unambiguously progressive approach in the noir treatment of women, for female sexuality is also juxtaposed within the investigative structure to the law and the voice of male judgment, and in many ways it is the under- side of the bourgeois family that is brought to the surface for investigation.

Rather than a coherent realisation of the unstable, treacherous woman, we tend to find in film noir a series of partial characterisations juxtaposed, not necessarily in continuity but separated by gaps in time (see Out of the Past) and often in blunt contradiction with each other. So, for instance, in The Postman Always Rings Twice Cora exhibits a remarkable series of unmotivated character switches and roles something as follows: (1) sex-bomb; (2) hardworking, ambitious woman; (3) loving playmate in an adulterous relationship; (4) fearful girl in need of protection; (5) victim of male power; (6) hard, ruthless murderess; (7) mother-to-be; (8) sacrifice to law. Such a mode of characterisation, needless to say, is in marked contrast to the consistent moral trajectory of the male, who, although he may be confused or uncertain as to the relation of appearances and reality, at least maintains a consistency of values.

The ultimate ideological effect of this unstable and fractured characterisation of women depends on the organisation of each particular film. As an aspect of the genre’s theatricality such characterisations contribute to the instability and uncertainty of the hero’s world, to the ever-deceiving flux of appearance and reality. In this sense they express a male existential anguish at the failure of masculine desire. But in the course of this, noir female characterisations, while they super- ficially confirm popular stereotypes about women, in their stylisation and play with the surfaces of the cinematic image they arguably foreground some of the features of that image. This is not to claim the progressiveness of the cycle but merely to assert its ideological interest for feminists.