Vocal Women in Detour and Raw Deal:Narrative Gaps and the Female Voice in Film Noir

Abstract

Film noir is often described as a masculine genre, as it pivots around male narratives. In film noir, the masculine narrative attempts to contain subversive female characters, or “femmes fatales,”by turning them into spectacle, or by deploying the male voice-over narration. Although voice-over narration in film noir often grants the male narrator control over the representation of the female character,this male dominance over narration is not always all powerful. A closer reading of film noir reveals gaps in the male narrative that allow for the female narrative to push through and exert its presence. This essay examines how the woman’s story vocally and visually struggles for narrative control in two film noirs, Detour (Edgar Ulmer,1946) and Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948). A close analysis of these two films reveals that various forces operate simultaneously within each film; the film thereby becomes a negotiating ground for multiple narratives that contradict, destabilize, contest, and compete with one another. The two films present different versions of a “vocal woman” who aspires to acquire an authorial voice: a verbally potent “femme fatale” in Detour, and a woman narrator in Raw Deal. Through a textual analysis of the films’ narrative, I demonstrate how disjunctions and contradictions among multiple objective and subjective viewpoints, visualized through such devices as lighting,camera movement, and shot composition, reveal narrative gaps in the film. These gaps ultimately open up interstices in the narrative for women characters to tell their stories with or without the mediation of the voice-over narration, thereby enabling more empowered readings of the noir woman. I focus on how the complex Vocal Women in Detour and Raw Deal 83narrative structure of a film provides space for the female character to exert her presence and voice, ultimately destabilizing the hegemony of masculine power in classical Hollywood cinema.