…the fantasy scenarios film noir celebrates, with its protagonists fatefully entrapped in a claustrophobic world and unable to master their destinies, can just as fruitfully be understood as an example of the resonance tragic expression continues to maintain, particularly in the realm of popular cinema. Indeed, if one follows Felski’s suggestion that tragedy be thought of less as a genre than as an attitude which addresses the limits of modern dreams of perfectibility, then the femme fatale can be understood as a particularly resilient contemporary example of tragic sensibility. For in the world of a film noir like Double Indemnity, where actions occur “accidentally on purpose,” she functions both as the screen for fantasies of omnipotence and as the agent who, by ultimately facing the consequence of her noir actions, comes to reveal the fragility not only of any sense of omnipotence that transgression of the law affords, but, indeed, of what it means to be human. (104-105)

From the moment the hero catches sight of the femme fatale, both find themselves caught in a sequence of events which can go only one way. Both are tragically framed within a narrative of fate and can only come to accept the law of causation. Yet if the contingent turn from free choice to inevitability is aligned with a masculine gaze appropriating a seductive feminine body, one must not overlook the fact that as bearer of the hero’s look, it is the femme fatale who manipulates the outcome of their fatal meeting. It may be a coincidence that this particular man has caught her in his field of vision, but she has been expecting someone like him to do precisely that. She knows all along that she is fated and can, therefore, turn what is inevitable into a source of power. (105-106)

We must look at her, and then, because we never see the object her thoughts are directed at, we follow her gaze into an abstract realm. In so doing we move away from treating her as a fetish image and instead share her mental space as one of conjectures about the inevitability of her fate. While Walter’s fetishism allows him to go on doing something—hatching the perfect plot to kill Mr. Dietrichson and then, when faced with the fact that he may be found out, devising a scheme to have Phyllis take the fall for his own fallibility—these close-ups call upon us to take the opposite course. In each case we are shown Phyllis as she stops and looks, but—and therein resides the tragic sensibility of her side of the story—not at her noir lover, rather, prophetically at the consequences her deeds will have. (110)

Phyllis Dietrichson emerges as a subject of radical tragic sensibility precisely because she directly accepts the death drive inscribed in the noir narrative she has been performing throughout. She explicitly gives a name to the obscene kernel at the heart of her being (”rotten to the core”), while refusing all moralizing excuses for her transgressions. By choosing not to shoot a second time, Phyllis Dietrichson performs an act in which she actively and consciously accepts her own fallibility. As the culmination of all the close-ups of Phyllis Dietrichson, we see first a look of astonishment and then pain, before we hear the two shots Walter fires straight into her heart; her death, like that of her husband, is registered only indexically, as a facial expression. (112)
- Femme Fatale—Negotiations of Tragic Desire // Elisabeth Bronfen