Are Girls with Guns also Femme Fatales?

Are Girls with Guns also Femme Fatales? We were recently wondering here at MovieFanCollectibles if the two perennial female screen favorites are the same thing? After all, we need to keep our archetypes as straight as our stocking seams, don't we? Our first impulse was to answer, "Yes, of course they are the same." We were surprised to find the answer is more like sometimes they are, but really not so much. Turns out there are a couple of significant differences between our beloved Girls with Guns and her cinematic aunties.

A very important difference between the two is that Girls with Guns do their own dirty work. They pick up the weapons and take care of business themselves. Alternatively, Femme Fatales use the promise of possible sexual rewards, along with a toolbox of other feminine wiles, to get masculine dupes to commit mayhem for them. A cheap cousin of the femme fatale is the vamp, who actually does put out, quid pro quo, by swapping sex for murder. Historic stereotypes for the Femme Fatale are the classic Jezebel figure and Cleopatra.

Sharon Stone in "Basic Instinct"

Probably the most important distinction between Girls with Guns and Femmes Fatales is that femmes are always bad girls. And they are bad girls who must have their come-uppances by the end of the reel. Girls with guns, on the other hand, are often a force for good, and/or an anti-heroine, with many opportunities to come back and fight another day. Femme Fatales must be punished so that the accepted social status quo they have challenged can be put back to rights.

Of course, once we understood that Femmes Fatales were different, we became very curious about where the trope came from. Our hats are off to Barbara Hales and her article "Woman as Sexual Criminal" for tracing down the DNA of these cinematic sirens.

Although sexy bad girls have been on the scene basically forever, the film noire version germinated from a hokey strain of European medical and social science research at the end of the 19th century. This would be the same mad scientist crew who brought us winning ideas like Phrenology. These "experts" busied themselves with the study of women who were moving away from bourgeois norms of home and motherhood in the political and economic upheavals of the late industrial revolution. "What do women want?" the professors asked. Well, they obviously want guns, silly!

Louise Brooks in "Pandora's Box"

Fast forward a little bit further to interwar Germany where these criminalized sexy bad girls are now depicted in the tabloid press as embodiments of social unease about uppity modern women who won't stay down on the farm. As Germany put on its brown shirts and prepared to Nazi-up, we see the celluloid personification of criminal women or Femme Fatales in the German street film genre. Shortly thereafter, what was for many the best Femme Fatale ever, American transplant Louise Brooks, appears in Georg Wilhelm Pabst's 1929 classic "Pandora's Box."

So, we have our answer. A Girl with a Gun is sufficient but not necessary to the definition of Femme Fatale. We get a huge kick out of both of 'em. Although there are some divergent opinions about what other names would top the "best of" lists, here in no particular order are the names of a few American beauties who most agree did a great job playing Hollywood-style Femme Fatales:    

Jane Greer in "Out of the Past"

Kathleen Turner in "Body Heat"

Barbara Stanwyck in "Double Indemnity"

Lana Turner in "The Postman Always Rings Twice"

Sharon Stone in "Basic Instinct"