Gilda

The femme fatale is a recurring character in western literature, art and culture, with origins in the morally corrupt figure of Eve who, in Genesis, symbolises the fall of man: she incarnates sin and avarice, the root of all worldly suffering. Her role in cinema has been extensively researched by the film theorist Mary Ann Doane, the author of the seminal text Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (1991), who concludes that “her most striking characteristic, perhaps, is that she never appears what she seems to be. She harbours a threat which is not…legible, predictable [or] manageable…thus transforming the threat into a secret, something which must be aggressively revealed, unmasked [and] discovered” (Doane 1991, p.1). For Doane, the femme fatale is a morally corrupt character who embodies, rather than represents, deceit; she is a perpetual hindrance to the narrative of the film (Mulvey’s text Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, which will be discussed in the weeks to come, will elaborate on this idea) because she is volatile and leads the calculated reason of man, determined to unravel her secrets, astray.

Following the Second World War, the image of the femme fatale adopted a particular set of motifs that mirrored the changing fashions of the 1940s, including a cigarette, rouged lips, waved hair and geometric (shoulder padded) silhouettes, which were all associated with the new “freedom” of the working woman. Rita Hayworth’s reputation as the “number one pin up for American GIs”, a persona that slipped on and off of the screen, shows that this was not the image of a liberated woman but rather the re-formation of the femme fatale: she dared to smoke, she was as wild as her hair and she was beginning to walk into the silhouette of man…which would swiftly be put to a stop (Ford 2018). In the film, Gilda’s cigarette is referred to, in full double-entendre, as her “frustration”, which she “tosses” away but which “land[s] right on” another man; her consumption of men is just as lethal as her consumption of cigarettes. This metaphor is a trope of classic Hollywood cinema and is famously used in Flesh and The Devil (Brown, 1926), in which Greta Garbo blows out the match of her beau before he has time to light his cigarette. Garbo proclaims that his actions are “an invitation to kiss”: one vice replaced for another.

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However, Gilda’s role as femme fatale is complicated by what Hales calls the “divided nature of women” in post-war cinema: she is described by her husband as “a greedy beautiful child”, yet confesses to having been a “professional dancer”, a term known for its sexual implications, by one of her many suitors (Nochlin 1989, p.235). She is caught in an economy of power in which she will always be infantilised by, or subject to, the authority of a man’s gaze.

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Indeed, as Gilda’s trapper-disguised-as-lawyer makes clear, “wherever you go for the rest of your life you’ll be tied to him, you’ll never be free”; that is to say, whilst Gilda is defined by the ensnaring gaze of man, a gaze that defines and legitimates her role in Vidor’s film, she will remain trapped. The careful composition of this scene, which ends in a taxi, infers that as the “libre” (free) status of the cab comes to an end, so does that of Gilda. 

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The issue of the captive male gaze is a recurrent theme in Gilda, but is most noticeable in the famous song and dance scene “Put the blame on Mame”, which is best known in film circles for its daring allusion to strip-tease under the Hays code (1934-66), suggesting that Vidor was not, perhaps, an advocate of female emancipation. In the scene Gilda is surrounded by an immediate circle of men, the gazes of whom are matched by lingering close ups of her face, as well as by an outer circle consisting of Johnny, Ballin and the casino in which she is trapped (without mentioning the enclosing gaze of the camera/viewer). However, throughout the film it is implied that Gilda has trapped herself, having constructed an identity based on sexual manipulation of the opposite sex.

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The most worrisome threat posed to Gilda’s male suitors is her transient, spectre like reputation. Virtually playing herself on screen, Rita Hayworth’s Gilda fills the air of Ballin’s casino with excitement and gossip. In keeping with the hype of the star, Hayworth first appears seventeen minutes into the film, introduced off screen like a siren by her deep, silky voice. The viewer knows that Gilda will lure Johnny into troubled water, but it is worth questioning whether it is Gilda, or rather the illusion that she and her male suitors have constructed, that will lead to their eventual downfall. In a world built on illusion and deceit, if one facade falls the rest inevitably follow. 

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However, what Vidor reveals in Gilda’s final scene is that all realities are constructed and that morality, the question of which is personified by Gilda, is only defined by the context in which it is applied. As Detective Maurice Obregon states in the final sequence, Gilda wasn’t inherently evil, “it was just an act”.