One thing I found intriguing about Jennifer Lopez's femme fatale character
in  U-TURN was that the audience gets to learn about her past (i.e., her
relationship with her father), which is used as an explanation for her
present bad-girl behavior.  To my knowledge, such back-story explanations
for the development of femme fatale behavior didn't occur in earlier film
noir. But they make sense in our society's present approach to
understanding "deviance."

I think another point to consider are *teenage* femme fatales. This trend
is not new; it has been going on for decades.  However, today's teens
(especially girls) are far more explicitly sexual than in the past.
Consider Sarah Michelle Gellar's character in the recent remake of
Dangerous Liaisons, or the bad girl/fantasy object in American Beauty (an
interesting twist since she explicitly uses her sexuality as a means to
power, but then reveals that she's never actually engaged in sexual
intercourse).

Mary Kearney

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Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the
University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu