Neff: "I'm sorry, baby. I'm not buying.
Phyllis: "I'm not asking you to buy. Just hold me close.
Neff: "Goodbye, baby."
[The gun explodes once, twice.]
Double Indemnity (1944)
Double Indemnity (1944)
Femmes fatales have been on my mind for some time now. I could not really tell you why. In search of femmes fatales after this idée fixe arrived, I downloaded and watched several classics of the genre, including the venomous Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity. After some little while, it occurred to me that perhaps one of the reasons, or even THE reason, that the femme fatale imagery is occupying my thoughts is that I am keeping myself well-informed on the American election which simply abounds with knockoffs of the genre. To be sure, none of the women present in the electoral process can even begin to hold a candle to Phyllis, or Gilda, or any of the brilliantly bad girls from film noir in the 1940s and 1950s, yet they do manage to sow destruction all the 
same. The classic definition of a femme fatale is: "an irresistibly attractive woman... especially one who leads men into danger or disaster" (unknown). If there is a woman in the campaign who has managed to accomplish that, it is surely Sarah Palin. Not that I find Gov. Palin "irresistibly attractive," mind you, but I am told that many do. Certainly Sen. McCain did, to his everlasting regret. She cannot interview, she cannot hold her own without intensive coaching, she cannot be trusted to take two steps without a phalanx of minders and aides, she can abuse power, she can be petty and vindictive in state politics, she can sling racial mud and fearmongering, in short, she is an ambulant catastrophe. If he was going to pick a woman who would bring down his campaign in a fearsome blaze, I would have much more respect and admiration for him if he had searched for, and picked, a real femme fatale, someone in the corridors of power or influence who could carry the same weight as a Phyllis Dietrichson or a Gilda. Someone who radiated evil and glamor in equal measure, someone whose stiletto heels you could imagine buried in the heart of anyone standing in her way. The pitbull-with-lipstick soccer mom just does not have the gravitas to fill that role. And to top it all off, she is disturbingly stupid to the point of being an auto-caricature.Auto-caricatures are very much the name of the game these days. As anyone not living on the Antarctic ice cap
knows (and perhaps even there), there is an HBO program titled "Sex and the City." After viewing an episode of this travesty, I have steadfastly refused to watch it ever again. I found the women vulgar, cruel, shallow and without any redeeming value at all. They did not even have the depth to be evil, no femme fatales there, just amoral wanna-be vampires stalking the streets of Manhattan in search of expensive shoes and stupid men, all in abundant supply. So imagine my own surprise when I decided to watch their movie. There was, of course, no surprise, it was no better than their television show, just longer. Forty and fifty year old women still practicing valueless lifestyles with the false insouciance of younger people, still buying the shoes, still finding and abandoning the men when their criteria of "What have you done for me TODAY?" is not immediately met and fulfilled. Even the movie itself, or rather the production company, seemed to sense that the trope had been played out. The film premiered everywhere else in the world first before it even appeared in Manhattan, its natural home and showcase. They called it clever marketing, I call it dodging the bullet until the last minute. Here is an interesting aside - a typical American movie will release in a
pattern something like this: USA, Canada, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, Australia, Philippines, New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands, Taiwan, UK, Mexico, Italy, Brazil, South Korea, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Israel, Finland, Iceland, Panama, South Africa, Sweden, Belgium, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, and France. You will notice the placement of France; this is due to the everlasting jealousy that France suffers due to the American film industry. Priding themselves on being the inventors of cinema and home to the "real" auteurs, France simply cannot bear that American cinema is so successful on French home soil. They feel the same way about the wheel, electricity and insufferable arrogance (every civilization in antiquity thought they had that market cornered), so it is nothing new. There are many things for which I admire France and the French, but it amuses me that their greatest criticism of the USA, hubris, is exactly their own greatest fault as well.Hubris is a grand failing and one that carries some of the heaviest prices in history. I recently took a quiz somewhere on the Internet, I do not remember where, that through a series of questions placed you as one of the Chinese emperors according
to personality. I came out as Xuanzong of the Tang dynasty (a.d.712 to a.d.756). The summary was thus: "Personality Traits: Hardworking and diligent, reformist, employed capable ministers, internationalist, patron of the arts, obsessed with pleasure-seeking, delegated too much power to underlings History: The early half of his reign (A.D. 712-730s) saw Tang China reach the height of its powers. At the beginning, Xuanzong was a hardworking and diligent emperor. He made sweeping reforms to the bureaucracy, employed capable ministers, made contacts with foreign ambassadors as far west as the Middle East and greatly expanded China's borders. Xuanzong also greatly improved the empire's taxation system and transportation network. Arts and literature flourished as a result of his patronage. His administration began to deteriorate after his infamous love affair with Yang Guifei [apparently a classic femme fatale!]— the young wife of his son, Prince Shou. As Xuanzong became obsessed with pleasure-seeking with Yang, he paid less attention to the running of his empire, and much of his power fell into the hands of corrupt court officials and eunuchs. Compounding his problems, warlords from outlying provinces (many of which had been recently reconquered) took more regional power into their own hands. One of these — a Turkish/Sogdian named An Lushan — started the An Lushan Rebellion in Fanyang in 755. The rebels captured the city of Luoyang and the capital Chang'an six months later. Xuanzong fled to Sichuan during the war, and Yang Guifei was killed by the imperial army for her perceived role in the emperor's weakness and loss of control. Xuanzong then abdicated his position to Suzong, the heir apparent, in 756 and died in 762 shortly before the rebellion was finally quashed. His rule would be the longest of the Tang dynasty, lasting nearly 44 years. The strength that Xuanzong had allowed the warlords in the border provinces led to a period of increasing conflict and instability, which set the stage for the end of the Tang dynasty and the ensuing Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period." I enjoyed "my" summary until it reached the point of "my" affair with my daughter-in-law and the ensuing problems with those pesky warlords.That oriental typecasting brings to mind another femme fatale of long-ago Hollywood, Anna May Wong. Her
story is incredible, one of those strange but true tales that really only come out of America. Her mini-biography, by Jon C. Hopwood, is at the same time instructive, sad and fascinating. It is a somewhat lengthy read in a blog entry, but well worth the effort; a story not only of an incredible woman, but of the USA during a time of continuing prejudice as well as a short historical tract on how the oriental prejudice arrived in America. I include here an edited version (to read it in full, please visit - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0938923/bio). "Anna May Wong, the first Chinese-American movie star, was born Wong Liu Tsong on January 3, 1905, in Los Angeles, California, to laundryman Wong Sam Sing and his wife, Lee Gon Toy. A third-generation American, she managed to have a substantial acting career during a deeply racist time when the taboo against miscegenation meant that Caucasian actresses were cast as "Oriental" women in lead parts opposite Caucasian leading men. Even when the role called for playing opposite a Caucasian in Asian drag, as with Paul Muni's appearance as the Chinese peasant Wang Lung in "The Good Earth," Wong was rejected as she did not fit a Caucasian's imagined ideal look for an Asian woman. The discrimination she faced in the domestic industry caused her to go to Europe for work in English and German 
films. Her name, which she also spelled Wong Lew Song, translates literally as "Second-Daughter Yellow Butterfly" but has been interpreted as "Frosted Yellow Willows." Her family gave her the English-language name Anna May. She was born in Flower Street in Los Angeles in an integrated neighborhood dominated by Irish and Germans, one block from Chinatown, where her father ran the Sam Kee Laundry.Located near a noxious gas plant and the L.A. River, Chinatown had been built on private property, so there were no sewers or running water. In 1900, the population of 2,111 was 90% male, since U.S. immigration law of the late 19th and early 20th centuries would not allow a Chinese woman to immigrate unless she was already married to a U.S. citizen. Nineteen Chinese had been lynched in a Los Angeles race riot instigated by Caucasians in 1871, and there were later, lesser riots in 1886 and 1887. Until the Chinese emigrated to the U.S. in the mid-19th century, they had never encountered a people who considered them racially and culturally inferior, nor been forced to deal with overt hostility by a people who considered themselves their racial superiors. Discriminated against in a way exceeded only by the racism directed towards African-Americans, their assimilation was impossible, so the Chinese in America bought property to create their own communities. Boxed out of the American culture, their ties to China remained important and, forbidden by law to intermarry with whites, there was little chance of assimilation in the world Wong Liu Tsong was born into. She was destined to be one of the people who helped change that, at a terrible psychological cost exacted upon her by both the oppressors and their victims. The Wong family moved back to Chinatown two years after Liu Tsong's birth, but in 1910 they uprooted themselves, moving to a nearby Figueroa Street neighborhood where they had Mexican 
and East European neighbors. There were two steep hills between the Wong's new home and Chinatown, but as her biographer, Colgate University history professor Graham Russell Gao Hodges points out, those hills put a psychological as well as physical distance between Liu Tsong and Chinatown. Los Angeles's Chinatown already was teeming with movie shoots when she was a girl. Liu Tsong would haunt the neighborhood nickelodeons, having become enraptured with the early "flickers." Though her traditional father strongly disapproved of his daughter's cinephilia, as it deflected her from scholastic pursuits, there was little he could do about it, as Liu Tsong was determined to be an actress. The film industry was in the midst of relocating from the East Coast to the West, and Hollywood was booming. Liu Tsong would haunt movie shoots as she had earlier haunted the nickelodeons. . . . Educated at a Chinese-language school in Chinatown, she would skip school to watch movie shoots in her neighborhood. She made tip money from delivering laundry for her father, which she spent on going to the movies. Her father, if he discovered she had gone to the movies during school hours, would spank her with a bamboo stick. Around the time she was nine years old, she began begging filmmakers for parts, behavior that got her dubbed "C.C.C." for "curious Chinese child." Liu Tsong's first film role was as an uncredited extra in Metro Pictures' "The Red Lantern" (1919) starring Alla 
Nazimova as a Eurasian woman who falls in love with an American missionary. The film included scenes shot in Chinatown. . . . Liu Tsong Americanized herself as "Anna May Wong" for the movie industry, though she would not receive an on-screen credit for another two years. . . . Due to her father's demands, she had an adult guardian at the studio, and she would be locked in her dressing room between scenes if she was the only Asian in the cast. . . . Wong played Toy Ling, the abused wife of Lon Chaney's character Chin Gow, which the Man of a Thousand Faces played in Chinese drag. . . . being cast in her first major role at the age of 17, the lead in "The Toll of the Sea" (1922). She played Lotus Flower in this adaptation of the opera "Madame Butterfly," which moved the action from Japan to China. . . . Most portrayals of Asian women were done by Caucasian actresses in "yellow-face," such as the 1915 movie version of "Madame Butterfly" starring "America's Sweetheart," Toronto, Canada-born Mary Pickford in the title role. In "The Toll of the Sea," Anna May Wong's character perpetuates the stereotype of the 
Asian "lotus blossom," a self-sacrificial woman who surrenders her life for the love of a Caucasian man. The film was a hit, and it showcased Wong in a preternaturally mature and restrained performance. This breakthrough should have launched Anna May Wong as a star, but for one thing: She was an ethnic Chinese in a country that excluded Chinese by law from immigrating to the U.S., that excluded Chinese from inter-marrying with Caucasians, and that generally excluded Chinese from the culture at large, except for bit roles as heavies in the national consciousness. . . . The 170-cm-tall (5'7", although other sources cite her height as 5'4½") beauty was known as the world's best-dressed woman and widely considered to have the loveliest hands in the cinema. Her big breakthrough after her auspicious start with "The Toll of the Sea" finally came when Douglas Fairbanks cast her in a supporting role as a treacherous Mongol slave in his Middle Eastern/Arabian 
Nights extravaganza "The Thief of Bagdad" (1924). The $2 million blockbuster production made her known to critics and the moviegoing public. For better or worse, a star, albeit of the stereotypical "Dragon Lady" type, was born. Despite her waxing fame, she was limited to supporting roles, as Caucasian actresses, including most improbably Myrna Loy, continued to be cast as Asian women in lead roles in the 1920s through the 1940s, despite the ready availability of Anna May Wong. She was unable to attract lead parts despite her beauty and proven acting talent, even in films featuring Asian women, but she did carve out a career as a supporting player in everything from A-list movies to two-reel comedies and serials. The characters she played typically were duplicitous or murderous vamps who often reaped the wages of their sin by being raped. . . . she told journalist Doris Mackie, "I was so tired of the parts I had to play. Why is it that the screen Chinese is aways the villain? And so crude a villain--murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass." The extent of anti-Chinese sentiment in the U.S. was so deep that Hollywood usually typecast Wong, 
typically wearing form-fitting Chinese gowns, not specifically as an Asian but as an "exotic" foreigner. "American" hostility to the Chinese in America had existed almost from the start of their entry into the continental United States, with California targeting the Chinese in 1850 with a Foreign Miners' License Act that put a $20 tax on each "foreign" miner. (The Act was repealed a year later, as it had a deleterious effect on the mining industry by creating labor shortages.) As when the gold mines started sputtering out in California in the mid-1850s, when there was a general economic recession, opportunistic, racist politicians managed to divert the blame towards the Chinese. Chinese were blamed for taking away jobs from "Americans," immigrants from Europe who were as "foreign" as the Chinese they derided, but who had been enfranchised with the vote by political machines. Targeted by crowds of the working poor who were buffeted by the boom-and-bust business cycle of capitalist America, the Chinese were the victims of riots in California and in other western states and territories. The 1871 Los Angeles riot had left 19 Chinese dead, lynched in their own neighborhood, while crowds of Caucasians looted Chinatown of tens of thousands of dollars worth of their belongings and business assets. Most of the Chinese in America were located in San Francisco, 
and local and state authorities passed ordinances to harass them, many of which were subsequently declared unconstitutional by the courts. However, the California Supreme Court extended a statute that prohibited "negroes and Indians" from testifying against Caucasians in court to the Chinese, for the "logical" reason that in Christopher Columbus's time, Oriental countries were called "Indian." The U.S. and China signed a treaty in Burlingame, California, in 1868 that mandated that every Chinese citizen in the United States should enjoy the privileges enjoyed by American citizens in China, naturalization exempted. The Burlingame Treaty was met with a storm of protest in the western states and territories, with agitators denouncing it as a sellout of the American laborer. The U.S. subsequently entered into a treaty with China in 1880 that allowed it to exclude Chinese laborers, a treaty backed up by Congress when it passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. In this period, Mark Twain and Bret Harte created the genre known as "Chinatown fiction," full of a sing-song patois 
they created to approximate the pidgin English spoken by the Chinese in America. . . .Anna May Wong died of a massive heart attack on February 3, 1961, in Santa Monica, California, after a long struggle against Laennec's cirrhosis, a disease of the liver. She was 56 years old. (IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood) The full biography is much longer and fascinating as well. I urge you to visit the site and read it in full.I recently watched a 1932 Charlie Chan movie, Charlie Chan at the Opera and it is as full of the racial stereotype as one could fear or wish. Yet the interesting thing in the movie is a 1932 early version of a fax-scanner, which is absolutely fascinating. If you can see this film, do not miss this "invention of the future."
Well, perhaps that is enough for now. I can think of many more observations on femmes fatales and the modern world, but I have already taxed my limit for one blog entry. I hope to return again in a special blog entry for Halloween. Please visit the poll at the bottom of the page. Until the next,
Leducdor
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