The Last Seduction

Neo-Noirs and sex

The femme fatale is a cornerstone of Film Noir and by extension, Neo-Noir. They are either the temptation that leads an otherwise straight man astray, or a physically weak character that can only fall back on her feminine wiles and beauty to survive a tough situation. In a great Noir, like The Last Seduction, she can be both.

The Last Seduction follows a classic Noir template: woman betrays one man, runs away and entangles another man in her web of lies, both men wind up the victim of her manipulations. It includes echoes of Double Indemnity and even has a minor character named Neff. In this case, Bridget (Linda Fiorentino) flees with $700,000, the proceeds of a drug deal made by her crooked doctor husband Clay (Bill Pullman). On her way to Chicago, she lands in the small town of Beston, New York. There, she seduces a naive local, Mike (Peter Berg) and, based on advice from her lawyer, settles in while she waits for her divorce to work its way to completion, so she will be free to spend the money. The rest of the movie is taken up with a complex series of maneuvers by Bridget which lead to doom for both Clay and Mike and ends with her riding off into the sunset with the money.

The film has become a Neo-Noir classic, anchored by an utterly brilliant performance by Fiorentino. I think she may be the greatest femme fatale ever, surpassing greats like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Ann Savage in Detour, or Jane Greer in Out of the Past. Bridget is a complete psychopath, but a quirky, ferocious, sexy, and utterly watchable one. And every minute she is in complete command of the situation.

The movie also features crisp and witty dialog – a Noir staple. The sex scenes are hot and the plot twists shocking. It's a perfect film.

The Last Seduction also falls into the Erotic Thriller category, a genre of film that was enormously popular for several decades. Anthony Penta in Crimes of Desire: A Casefile on Erotic Thrillers did a deep dive and came up with a list of over 700 erotic thrillers released since 1987, the of year of Fatal Attraction, the hit film that kicked off the phenomenon. Their popularity has waned somewhat, but the combination of suspense and sex will never fade away.

Erotic Thrillers can span several different genres: psychological thrillers (Fatal Attraction), police procedurals (Basic Instinct), legal thrillers (Presumed Innocent, Jagged Edge), or horror (Angel Heart) The formula is simple: add to any of these genres a protagonist who seduces or is seduced by a possible malefactor, and include at least one soft core sex scene. Is she/he really the killer? Is she/he a dangerous psychopath? Those questions add to the underlying suspense of the story.

Many Erotic Thrillers are pure Neo-Noirs, a perfect marriage of genres. Bound, with its plot to steal from dangerous gangsters could have been told straight with John Garfield and Rita Hayworth back in the day. Body Heat, a Neo-Noir classic, replays the classic plot to kill a rich husband from Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. After Dark, My Sweet involves an ex-boxer, ex-cop, and seductive widow, all iconic characters from the Golden Age of Noir.

During the peak of popularity for Erotic Thrillers, attempts were made to tie their popularity to anxieties of the day. Men were scared of liberated women, their manhood was threatened by the movement of women into the workplace, so it was said. These attempts to connect them to current day trends were wrong; femme fatales have always been present and popular in movies since at least The Maltese Falcon and certain the massively popular Double Indemnity. Linda Fiorentino and her sisters of Neo-Noir were nothing new, just a refinement of the type.

Film Noir was shaped by the Hollywood Production Code, with writers, producers, and directors pushing the combination of sin, sex, and violence right up to the allowed limits. Sex was always present, though muted. It didn't take much of a shift for the genre to up the steaminess once the limits were taken off. We’re all better for it.