Playtime Is Over

Abstract

Having tracked the ancestry of the deadly girl and introduced some of the ways dominant postfeminist discourse has informed representations of the figure since 1990, I now turn to focused analysis of more recent incarnations of the character. Concentrating on Stoker, Hard Candy, and Brick, the aim of this chapter is to determine how the fille fatale is constructed in postmillennial noir and the way these representations fit with postfeminist popular culture.1 I determine that overwhelmingly each of these films articulate a pervasive dread about the increasing power and centrality of young women in contemporary Western culture in ways that differ quite distinctly from modes of expression prevailing in the 1990s. These include a change in terms of subjectivity along with a move away from hypersexuality and spectacle as an approach to framing the character. Cognitively the contemporary bad girl has also transmutated. Far from being a raving lunatic like the sexually aggressive psycho-fille, she is cool, calm, and psychopathic. This is particularly pronounced on Stoker and Hard Candy where the fille fatales are all powerful creatures that revel in the annihilation of men, and in the case of Hard Candy, specifically those that have abused the privilege of their positions in society.