The phrase "femme fatale" is french for "deadly woman". A femme fatale is an alluring and seductive character who uses feminine devices like beauty, her charm and sexuality to lead other characters into compromising and dangerous situations. The outcome is quite often fatal- reiterating the meaning behind the name "femme fatale". She is a character utilised a lot within film, especially film noir. Her ability to entice her male victim was the earliest stories seen in literature; this is still used today in modern films. The character is most commonly seen within the crime or thriller genre as she is known to have a dark background. The ideas involved within the femme fatale character are closely tied to fears and perceptions that people have of the female witch. Misogyny is something else to look at when thinking about the femme fatale character as she shows signs of independence and is definitely a strong character; she goes against the wholesome traditional female roles. In some cases the femme fatale could be the victim of something or become a sort of heroine character, this is very rarely though. Often you see objects with the that suggest their bad character (e.g money, red nail varnish, red lipstick) and symoblism such as black underwear. This suggests a bad character also because of the connotations associated with the colour black- a change in character can be shown through the transition of white clothing or underwear to black. This is something that is utilised in Psycho.
It is quite conventional to see femme fatales smoking, especially in film noir's as it was something that was used in almost all of them.
This is an interesting post Sabrina. Femme fatales are not necessarily bad, but misguided. The lipstick, nail varnish and elegant costume is to emphasise sexuality and that these women in the 1940-50's noir thrillers were like sirens leading the flawed hero to crime, for example "Double Indemnity". The message of course was that independence, shrewdness, overt sexuality were part of the love/hate relationship film directors and audiences had with the femme fatale. Either these archetypes were bumped off or domesticated (Gilda in the film of the same name). There are many subtle variations in the representation of this archetype so one has to avoid being to generalised here.
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