If the fatales of the 40s and 50s were marked out from the vamp by their hunger for independence, their unfeminine ambition or unsettling sexuality, the threat they posed to cultural norms was merely that of the woman outside the conventional social structures. But in the 90s, the new freestanding fatale willingly in- habits the cultural margins; what motivates her is her enormous appetite for power, money and sex. When other motivations are introduced, they ring hollow (Jade destroys the credibility of its psychologist-hooker fatale instantly and inadvertently when she attributes her promiscuity to pain over her husband’s infideli- ties). Always a supra-real projection of ‘woman; the fatale begins to border on caricature in 90s cinema. (The ultimate example here is Catherine Trammel in Basic Instinct, constructed as an orphaned, homicidal maniac heiress who writes best-selling thrillers and flaunts her aggressively flexible sexuality.) A batch of new and varied features around the femme fatale underscore and contribute to this excess, adding to her extraordinary dominance within these texts. Long gone is the ‘nurturing woman, representing a wholesome alternative in classic noir. Instead, the fatale is now surrounded by women who mirror and double her effects, as they too are discovered to be duplicitous sexual transgressors as the narrative unfolds.'* Three of the four women in Basic Instinct are killers, linked by their un- natural blondeness (even brunette Beth is revealed to have been blonde during the period of her college obsession with Catherine) and their sexual or emotional relationships with one another. Their lesbianism is both a symbol of sexual out- lawry, and an expression of Trammel’s power over the hero, ‘making her omnisexual as well as omniscient.'? Doubling also intensifies the film’s underlying message about the true nature of woman since ‘when we ask the film to tell us who did do it, the only answer it can give us is that the women did it, which is to say The Woman did it’.

combining with a polysemic cinema to produce films which are simultaneously transparent and illegible