I hope you're not confusing explicitness with sexuality. Many of the teen
bad-girls of the 50's pulp movies were as sexy as they come - they just
didn't come, on-screen.

At 09:32 AM 11/16/99 -0600, Mary Celeste Kearney wrote:
>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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>
Paul B. Wiener
Special Services Librarian
Melville Library
SUNY at Stony Brook, NY 11794
631/632-7253
fax: 631/632-7116
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Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the
University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu