“Cough it up, sister”: Femme Fatales and the Role of Women in L.A. Noire
By Alex Cotignola and Matt Jogodnik
A city on the verge of greatness.
A new type of city…
Where every man can own his own home…
Where a man’s home is his castle.
— L.A. Noire, Introduction
In the year 1947, Los Angeles was on the rise to becoming one of the largest and most developed cities in the world. As the economy was starting to pick up in the United States, LA seemed like the perfect place for new development: a burgeoning movie industry was taking shape, manufacturers were shifting from wartime to peacetime production, and thousands of veterans were buying their first homes and automobiles and starting their own families. However, there was a lot of tension simmering from the end of the war, and it was about to come to a boil, manifesting itself in the intense violence that the city saw in the year 1947. Serial killers preyed on innocent young women, and vice and corruption ravaged the city. Conflicts between minorities and whites broke out in the streets, while conflicts between men and women broke out in the home. Much of society attempted to turn back the clock on the progress women and other minorities made during the war. As men went off to fight in the Pacific and Europe, many women took their place in the factories and other traditionally male jobs.
However, as veterans returned home, they expected their wives to work in the home and care for their children. This was an especially acute issue for Los Angeles, a center of aircraft production during the war. As Arthur C. Verge notes in an article entitled “The Impact of the Second World War on Los Angeles,” even with a wartime labor shortage “there was large-scale resistance to women workers from males in the workforce.” Veterans of the conflict came home to see women assert a new independence for themselves, and were often uncomfortable with that prospect.
It is into this world that Rockstar Games, the developer of the notorious Grand Theft Auto franchise, launches the player in their game L.A. Noire, released in May 2011. L.A. Noire takes the player back to the world of 1947 Los Angeles, considered the Golden Age of Hollywood, and puts him in the shoes of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Detective Cole Phelps, a veteran of the Pacific War.
The game revolves around the player solving a series of various cases across five divisions: Patrol, Traffic, Homicide, Vice, and Arson. (For the purposes of this analysis, however, we will focus solely on Homicide cases, since women are the victims in all of them.) You start as a lowly beat cop, patrolling the city to ensure its safety, but your superiors soon promote you to detective, where you undertake a methodical approach to solving cases. You interview witnesses, examine the crime scene, chase after potential suspects on foot or in car, and attempt to get to the truth no matter the consequences. L.A. Noire is a breakthrough for both storytelling and graphics in video games, as it utilizes a new technology called MotionScan, which Hilary Goldstein of IGN notes makes it appear as if “every wrinkle, twitch, downward glance, grimace, and hard swallow is from an actor playing a part, not an animator manipulating things from behind the scenes.”
It is in this immersive alternate reality that 1947 Los Angeles is modeled.
Cole Phelps lies in the middle of the various conflicts facing LA as a LAPD detective. He tries his hardest not to get wrapped up in office politics or the emotions of the job, attempting to focus solely on his purpose as a cop: solving crimes. However, that job is not so easy when much of the department is wrapped up in the crime and corruption that they are supposed to prevent. In short, he is the archetype of the hardboiled detective: an honest cop who refuses to show any outward emotion, and instead focuses on projecting his feelings through his work. This guides his attitude toward women, as he seemingly stylizes himself as a protector of women, especially when they are the victims of crime. He is not even affectionate towards his wife, only talking about her a few times throughout the whole game, and referencing her sternly as “the mother of my children.” From the outset, Cole is very much a traditionalist on the subject of women, and the game as a whole adopts this attitude as well.
The player is under no illusion from the beginning about who the world revolves around during this time period. A male voiceover announces in the optimistic and hopeful introduction to the game that Los Angeles is the place where “a man’s home is his castle.” As you hear the voiceover, you see one of the few interactions between Cole and his wife, Marie. It is a very traditional scene from the time period: the man in his work uniform, carrying the lunch his wife likely made for him as she kisses him goodbye. She can be seen wearing bright pink heels and the standard garb for a housewife: a nice blouse and skirt, with a necklace around her neck. The only other time a woman is shown in the introduction is when you see a line of young women standing outside the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. They are waiting to audition for a role in a new film, all dolled up with nicely done makeup, hair, and their finest clothes.
Although most women you interact with in the game do not fill these two roles, it is telling that the producers decide to highlight these choices at the beginning. They fit the mold of what men wanted women to be in 1947 Los Angeles: either obedient wives and mothers, or gorgeous actresses who grace the screen with their good looks. If they do not fulfill these roles, however, they are seemingly destined for a worse fate, as are many of the women who fall victim to crime.
When Cole reaches the Homicide desk, he is tasked with investigating the brutal murders of five young women, all with the same modus operandi: a young woman who has too much to drink is found naked, battered with a lug wrench, and strangled (or stomped) to death. Although the detectives see themselves as crusaders trying to protect vulnerable young women, the young women are not portrayed in a favorable light. All of them were estranged from their overbearing husbands or boyfriends; none of them fit the mold of dutiful housewife. All of them tried to stretch the bounds of what a woman could do, and were berated by their husbands for their efforts. And all of them tried to attract attention from other men, leading Cole’s partner Rusty Galloway to marginalize them as promiscuous women, or “tramps” and “lushes” as he calls them.
Your first victim, Celine Henry, fits this mold perfectly. Before she was married to Jacob Henry, she was an airplane pilot, “famous in her day…Flying around up there like a bird.” Unlike many women of the era, she was far from petite, wearing a size nine shoe, which Cole notes is “above average for a lady.”
She had an independent streak, often going out alone to drink at a bar owned by her former boyfriend. While at the bar, she had no problem attracting attention to her beauty, luring other patrons into having a drink (and maybe more) with her. In fact, the roles were reversed in their marriage: Celine often dragged Jacob from home and forced him to come pick her up when she had too much to drink. Because of her tendency to be independent, however, she was unable to settle down fully with her husband and follow his wishes. Her husband complained that she “never wanted to come down from the clouds…All I could give her was security. That was never going to be enough.” Celine was seemingly punished for being unwilling to fulfill the role of dutiful housewife, as many other women were forced to do during this era. Her inability to adapt to that role is her fatal flaw, literally leading to her death. Her husband can no longer take her controlling his life, as he finally puts his foot down and refuses to pick her up from the bar. This allows her murderer, a bartender who serves Celine too much to drink, to take advantage of her and eventually kill her.
Your third victim, a young Hispanic woman by the name of Antonia Maldonado, meets her fate when she attempts to commit the most egregious sin of all: getting a divorce.
(Quick side-note: it was much harder for women to get a divorce in this time period. There was no such thing as no-fault divorce, whereby the woman could seek a divorce for any reason (or no reason) at all. She had to establish a reason for why she wanted a divorce, such as mental cruelty or physical abuse, but even that was not enough. The husband had to approve of the divorce; even if she received an order from a judge, her husband could still refuse to accept it. This is what happened in Antonia’s case.)
Antonia was a very young woman; according to the account of her landlord, she married her husband, Angel Maldonado, when she was only seventeen. The landlord claimed that Angel was “cruel to her,” and thus she separated from her husband and moved into a place of her own. Wanting to get out of her marriage, Antonia attempted to file for divorce, and even received the papers from a judge to do so. However, when she tried to foist the papers on her husband, Angel “slapped her down.” Cole notes that receiving a divorce from his wife would be devastating for Angel, a young, husky Latino man. It would destroy the sense of who he is, as Cole put it. Throughout this scene, Phelps seems to sympathize more for Angel, the suspect, than Antonia, the victim, simply because she was no longer being a submissive woman. Later on in the investigation, you are brought to Antonia’s apartment to interrogate her landlady. After Phelps and his partner search the room, which has been broken into, they question her about Antonia’s whereabouts the night she was killed. When the landlady tells them the little she knows, Phelps lambastes her: “A nosey old hag like you knows everything about the people who live under her roof.”
Focusing on the fact that she is a female landlord, Phelps merely assumes she must know all the gossip, a stereotype often attributed to women. Throughout the game, though Phelps plays bad cop with several men who are withholding information, he never insults them like he insults the women he interrogates. At the end of the case, it’s revealed that Angel, like Jacob Henry, inadvertently kills his wife as well by making her leave the apartment after their last fight and allowing her to jump into her killer’s car. The saga continues.
In the last case, we’re introduced to Evelyn Summers, a woman in her early forties who works in the legal copyright department of Keystone Film Studios. Following the same trend established by the prior cases, she is an alcoholic whose propensity to consume only strengthened after her employer went under. She became depressed, and isolated herself from friends and family leading her husband to seek a divorce. Vagrant and penniless, she took up residence in the back of a liquor store owned by one of her ex-husband’s friends. Spending her days in a library, she met and began seeing a James Tiernan. Soon after, she became enamored with a man with drastically progressive views of the world named Grosvenor McCaffrey. Tiernan threw her out on the streets when he found out about her idolization of McCaffrey, and she began drinking again, wandering into a rail yard where she was brutally killed and defiled. The case again fits the narrative of innocent but ignorant alcoholic female outcast getting killed by a more powerful man. However, more traditional gender stereotypes are exposed throughout the case, most notably those concerning intelligence. While going through Summers’ belongings in the liquor store, Phelps is stunned to find a book of philosophy: “Evelyn was reading Aristotle?”
The fact that a woman could read and understand a topic as complex as Aristotle’s Astrophysics is impossible for Phelps to comprehend as he seems to subscribe to the fact that only men can succeed in intellectual areas such as philosophy. Later, when McCaffrey is being interrogated, the book is used as evidence to disprove McCaffrey’s claim that he barely knew Summers. McCaffrey chides Summers for stealing it, and also questions her intelligence solely based on her gender: “As if she could even comprehend any of it.” Again, Summers’ murder is meant to be seen as her own fault since she was drinking and without a man to protect her, allowing the same bartender to intoxicate and kill her.
For the most part, L.A. Noire portrays women as servile, dimwitted, and unworthy of sympathy, especially women who fail to adopt the traditional gender role as housewife. Ironically, however, a few select women who fall outside of this role do take on significant roles within the plot of the story. They are often femme fatales, the main female characters of noir films who use their charm and beauty to drive successful men towards physical and professional ruin.When you reach the Vice desk, you find two examples where women possess the agency to destroy the lives of men. The first example lies in the Vice case “The Naked City,” based on a movie of the same name, which involves the death of a model named Julia Randall.
Although you never see Julia alive, what you hear about her establishes her as someone who knows how to get her way. You discover that Julia had an insatiable appetite for new clothing and jewelry, which a model’s salary did not really cover. In order to get the money she needed, she concocted an elaborate burglary scheme involving a wealthy doctor, a former lover, and two career burglars. She charmed the doctor, a much older man by the name of Dr. Harold Stoneman, and convinced him to host elaborate parties so that she and her buddies could rob the houses of wealthy guests. Using her natural beauty, she put the doctor under her spell, fooling him into thinking that he could one day be her lover and actually marry her. However, she always dangled the fruit of marriage just above him, never allowing him to ever really get close to her or even touch her. This drove the doctor literally insane, and when faced with arrest due to his involvement in the burglary scheme, he decides to jump out the window and kill himself instead. A similar fate befell her partner-in-crime and former lover, Henry Arnett. It bothers him that Julia was the real brains of the operation, and when he decides to get out of the scheme, he claimed that “Julia laughed in [his] face.”
Unable to take the insult of a woman, and wanting to finally settle down and get married to his fiancé, Arnett arranges for the burglars to kill Julia. Although they do succeed, success comes at a heavy price for all three of them: Henry is arrested and unable to marry his true love, one of the burglars kills the other one after the murder, and the other burglar dies in a shootout with police. Unlike the other women in the game, Julia had the ability to plot her own course without falling into the trap of marriage. Unlike the other women in the game, she does not come across as sentimental and weak; rather, she is cold and calculated, exploiting the men around her for her own purposes. Although she still fulfills feminine beauty standards, she does so to the point of distraction, so beautiful that other men are drawn into her trap. Cole’s boss notes that even in death Julia looked like “she was made of porcelain,” and that she “left quite an impression on him.” While she might be another victim, Julia was also a perpetrator. She was not just on the receiving end of crime perpetrated by men; she also actively participated in crime at the expense of men.
Another woman that falls into the femme fatale category, albeit to a lesser degree, is Cole Phelps’ mistress, Elsa Lichtmann. Elsa, holding the same name as the femme fatale from the 1947 movie The Lady from Shanghai, works as a nightclub singer at the Blue Room in Hollywood.
She escaped Germany after her parents were killed by the Nazis. Her foreign origins, especially from a country that the Americans just defeated only two years earlier, makes her a menace among much of the powerful men in the game. In fact, most of them refer to her as that “German junkie whore,” referencing both her alien nature and addiction to heroin.
Cole first meets her in a most vulnerable state, as she is crying over the death of her friend (the only one who “never put his hands on [her]”) and a cop named Roy Earle slaps her across the face. This makes Cole vulnerable to her case because he feels sorry for her. Cole willingly gives up his entire professional career and marriage in order to sleep with her. Ostracized by the entire police department and his family, Cole is forced to turn to her for support, granting Elsa some semblance of power over him. And, Cole willingly dies for her as well, allowing himself to drown in a sewer tunnel as he carries Elsa to safety. However, while Elsa does involve herself in Cole’s crusade to bring down the corrupt administration, she only does so passively. She only follows what Cole tells her to do; she never really makes any decisions on her own. In true fashion, she is portrayed as a “vamp,” sucking love and sex from a powerful and morally superior man. Her German accent adds to this effect, making her seem dark and lifeless. Unlike Julia Randall, Elsa is never portrayed in a favorable light, and never really drives the plot forward. Cole is the one who starts the affair, tells her what to do, and saves her life; Elsa is only the receiver in all these cases. While following the femme fatale role in spirit, she does not really follow it in action.
What initially drew us to this game were three factors: the old cars, dapper characters, and the fact that this game was set in 1940s LA. We were attracted to the beautiful recreation of 1940s Los Angeles, when it still felt like a small town with plenty of allure. We love the 1940s time period, especially after the war, because there was such a glowing sense of optimism about what America could be. California seemed to embody that dream, with its warm weather year-round, abundant space, and a plethora of job opportunities. Today, Los Angeles seems way too overcrowded, way too congested, and way too expensive. We thus felt a desire to be a part of that time period, when things were only looking up for America. However, the game’s release in the year 2011 points to another reason for a million gamers: they were anxious about the increasing power of women. As Jennifer Malkowski, a professor of Film Studies at Smith College, notes in her book Gaming Representation, stories with femme fatales rise in popularity when there is anxiety about women “making sharp gains in social and/or economic power.” She notes two cases where this was true: “in the 1940s as the women joined the workforce during wartime and then again with the character’s resurgence in the 1980s, in the wake of second wave feminism and with the escalating ‘threat’ of the career woman.” You can add the period mid-2000s, right when L.A. Noire was being developed, to the list as well. This time, though, it wasn’t just economic power, it was political power as well. Hillary Clinton became the first woman to have a serious shot at a major party’s presidential nomination in 2008. In the Bush administration, Condoleezza Rice was the first woman to serve as National Security Advisor and the second to serve as Secretary of State, both extremely powerful positions dealing with traditionally masculine areas: war and diplomacy.
In Congress, Nancy Pelosi became the first female Speaker of the House in 2007. Considering that Speaker of the House is only two heartbeats away from the Presidency, men were likely threatened by having a woman in such a powerful position. It is plausible, therefore, to believe that men wanted to return to a time when women were “put in their place” but you still had women who could be cunning and charming. L.A. Noire fits these wishes perfectly, making it appealable to the masses and explaining its overwhelmingly positive reception.