Before long, this formidable female crime lord steps out of the tub and shows us a beautiful flash of breasts. She stands naked before the man who offers her a towel. She is confident. She is tough, unquestionably sexy, the screen version of the female criminal. This recent incarnation of the ''deadly woman'' is found in Underbelly Razor, the latest instalment of Channel Nine's highly successful crime drama franchise. Razor (based on Larry Writer's fascinating nonfiction book of the same name) portrays two of Australia's most notorious female criminals - the sly-grogger Kate Leigh and the brothel madam Tilly Devine - as beautiful women at each other's throats. It's entertaining stuff. Though Razor is ostensibly based on real events, the lead actors bear little resemblance to the real Kate and Tilly, apart from their fetching pin curls, feathers and frocks.
The "ugly truth" behind the latest Underbelly war story is admiited by Nine bosses, who confessed they "tweaked the casting to put a prettier face on the femme fatale series". While mug shots of Sydney's most notorious criminals from the roaring '20s were used to hire actors resembling the hard men, the female leads went to Kiwi beauties Chelsie Preston Crayford and Danielle Cormack. Nine boss David Gyngell sold the sexier version to advertisers as part of the network's push to get Underbelly the right attention.
Photos from the time show real-life crime queens Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh were hardly the stuff of cinematic close-ups. While renowned for their indulgence in the latest clothing and dazzling jewels, they were as harsh looking as they were hard-nosed. Had Razor's Queen Kate looked more like the woman herself - heavy set, with belly and breasts thrust forward under a pleased grin, seeming to wear her extra weight luxuriously and with pride - that opening sequence in the bath would have been very powerful indeed, though in a very different way, thinks Moss.
The fact is, we prefer to see beautiful people on the screen. While male crime bosses can safely be depicted as old, brutish men with ravaged faces and pot bellies, we aren't quite ready to see the female version of this. ''The criminal woman is a true monster,'' criminologist Cesare Lombroso wrote in La Donna Delinquente (The Criminal Woman) in 1893 and for many, more than a century later, that gut reaction still holds. The hard, criminal woman unsettles us. She is an aberration and one we'd rather not examine too closely. Softening the edges of the female outlaw is all too irresistible.
We soften them physically, giving them eye-pleasing curves and even features. Sometimes we soften their temperaments, too, as evident in the portrayal of Razor's pretty Tilly running off quietly into the backyard to have a cry by herself when she catches husband Jim Devine in bed with one of her young prostitutes, Nellie Cameron. A very human response, yes, but arguably improbable from a woman with such a famously vicious temper that she literally shot both of her husbands in quarrels.
We like our female criminals to be beautiful and preferably fit the mould of the seductive femme fatale - an archetype born from Eve and Salome and popularised by glamorous bad girls of 1920s detective novels and the American film noir of the '40s and '50s. As historian and curator Nerida Campbell writes in her book Femme Fatale: The Female Criminal: ''Pulp fiction artists created a picture of incredible glamour, beauty and wickedness. The women were frequently depicted carrying out their nefarious activities, often with a smoking gun in hand.'' A weapon in the hands of a striking woman is a powerful and sexually charged image - the blade or the pistol as phallic symbol, the shooting bullet as metaphor for the obvious.
Mae West quipped, ''Is that a gun in your pocket or are you happy to see me?'' The fact is, we are happy to see the femme fatale. Men are drawn to her because she is not only beautiful but also sexually voracious and available. The heartache afterwards is an afterthought. Women like me love the femme fatale because of her untamed freedom, subverting the obvious cliche of the female victim - a cliche because it is still true too much of the time. Ours is a world where there are still alarming levels of domestic violence and more than 80 per cent of violent offenders are male.
When it comes to crime, the woman is often the victim so it is unsurprising that there remains something bold, novel and undeniably appealing about a gorgeous, razor-wielding bad girl, a` la Razor, a film noir Veronica Lake or Barbara Stanwyck, or a gun-toting Thelma and Louise. They rebel. They rebalance. They even make driving off a cliff look good. In reality, a life of crime and violence isn't so pretty. Take that most rare and terrifying of criminals, the serial killer. In popular culture the female serial killer is perhaps most famously portrayed by Sharon Stone as Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct, a bisexual beauty who beds her male victims and then stabs them to death with an ice pick.
Her real-life equivalent would be Australian Katherine Knight, a victim of appalling sexual abuse as a minor who grew into a violent woman and, in 2000, at the age of 44, had sex with her partner, John Price, then stabbed him repeatedly in bed, skinned him, decapitated him, hung his hide on a hook and put slices of his buttocks in a pot in the oven to cook. Katherine was found asleep at the blood-soaked crime scene and never had the opportunity to kill again.
US prostitute Aileen Wuornos, on the other hand, did. She murdered seven men and was put to death by lethal injection, aged 46. Like Knight, Wuornos was not rich or dangerously alluring like Stone's Catherine Tramell. She was raised in an atmosphere of grinding poverty and abuse and ultimately became a Monster as the title of the Oscar-winning 2003 film based on her life suggests. Screen beauty Charlize Theron played Wuornos, albeit with significant weight gain and unflattering make-up. Wuornos and Knight are not glamorous femme fatales. They are the ''monsters'' of Cesare Lombroso's view. Not the kind of fatal woman we had in mind.
As far back as the 16th century we find a tale of female serial killer, Countess Elizabeth Bathory de Ecsed, dubbed ''The Blood Countess'', who was charged with torturing and killing hundreds of her servant girls and was walled into her castle as punishment. Her actual guilt is debated but that hasn't stopped her from becoming a legendary femme fatale in myth. She is often depicted as a lesbian or bisexual sexual sadist, bathing in the blood of her virgin servants to maintain her great beauty. We just can't help attributing beauty, vanity and an intriguing sexual appetite to even our most terrifying historical female killers.
In addition to labelling the criminal woman a monster, Lombroso also asserted that women's ''evil tendencies are more numerous and more varied than men's, but usually these remain latent. When awakened and excited, however, these evil tendencies lead to proportionately worse results''. This echoes the old Italian proverb: ''Woman is rarely wicked but when she is, she is worse than a man.'' But just what qualifies as worse results is subjective. For every one Tilly Devine, Kate Leigh, Katherine Knight or Aileen Wuornos, we have many more examples of equally vicious deeds committed by male criminals and killers. But perhaps the idea of a woman committing such crimes at all shocks us as much as the crimes themselves. It challenges our perceptions of women as innocent daughters, loving wives and nurturing mothers - the ''fairer'' and ''weaker'' sex.
For centuries female criminality was primarily regarded as that of sexual immorality; women who led men astray with their feminine wiles, a danger to the fabric of a good and functioning society. Despite a 4 per cent increase in female offenders in Australia in the past decade and a general move towards gritty realism in crime dramas, we still have trouble imagining a criminal woman who isn't sexually alluring. Or if we can imagine her, it seems we don't particularly want to.
Television Series: Underbelly:Razor (S04E04- The Damage Done)
Release Date: September 2011
Actress: Danielle Cormack
Video Clip Credit: Johnny Moronic
Oron
Multi
No comments:
Post a Comment