Listen to this 'Talk of the Nation' topic

 
killers.jpg

Ava Gardner is the real killer in The Killers.

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Men, listen up. If you're driving around on a rainy night in Los Angeles wearing a fedora, and you happen to spot a pair of dangerous eyes narrowing beneath a curtain of hair -- dude, you're in trouble. Shut your eyes, grab your wallet, and run for the hills. That creature with the tiny waist and curving smile is a ticket to a thrill ride of terror that will almost certainly end in tears and bullets. That lady isn't just a woman, she's a femme fatale -- and you are about to get noired up.

Right -- so I'm a hardcore feminist. I think Pretty Woman is sexist as hell, and every time I see Mad Men I feel slightly nauseated. So, why, you might ask, am I so hung up on the archetypal femme fatale? Sure, the fatalicious femme is completely without moral compass; all she wants is the cash, the car, and the way out of town. She's greedy and heartless. And it looks like the quintessential male punishment for a spirited dame -- if she's fearless around a snake and has a taste for apples -- we better make sure she doesn't haunt the Paradise Motel again. We'll put a bullet in her chest, and make sure a wide-eyed blonde shows up to provide children, dinner, and laundry help for any good men that didn't taste her apple pie.

But what if the femme fatale is actually subverting all that male fear? Listen, there isn't much control a woman could possibly have had back in the '30s... come to think of it, check out the '70s and '80s too, and then go ahead and check this out. A woman screaming inside for some kind of power might just feel that she would kill to get out of her confinement. And she's not afraid to die trying. So sure, she's greedy and heartless, but she's brave, and smart, and ambitious -- just like the men who fall for her.

So the guys keep looking for these dolls, and it's not just about the sex er, that honey of an anklet, it's because they want to feel the freedom of leaving their own roles behind. It's not the femme that's fatal -- it's the weight of all those expectations. So forgive me if I love Babs, and Lana, and Rita, and Sharon best when they're bad. They're fighting for freedom the fatale way.

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1:58 - August 21, 2008

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