In the past decade, American film has seen a resurgence of film noir. Remaining as popular today to modern audiences as its ancestors, a key development within this resurgence has been the advent of a new neo-noir film. Building its reputation by adopting the codes of classic noir and then repurposing them, neo-noir has evolved classic film noir into something fresh and distinctly different. One of the most popular focuses of the neo-noir trend is the reconsideration of the unforgettable femme fatale. Often freeing her from the same ties that bound all women before the women's liberation movement, the neo-noir femme fatale is stronger, more seductive, more dangerous and even more irresistible than her predecessors. Arguably the best example of this new woman can be found in the 1994 film The Last Seduction, directed by John Dahl.

The Last Seduction is the story of a woman taking on, dominating and succeeding in the space traditionally held for a man in classic film noir. The plot is simple: Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) escapes with $700,000 of money that her husband Clay (Bill Pullman) just swindled from a seedy drug deal. She flees to upstate New York where she assumes a new identity, Wendy Kroy, a cute acronym for her hometown of New York, and meets Mike Swale (Peter Berg), a small-town boy who she cons into murdering her husband. In the end, she will dupe all the men in the film, including two private detectives and her two lovers, to get away with what appears to be noir's crime of the century.

Honorably enough, the basic premise is that of Double Indemnity. Mike, the man Bridget meets in upstate New York, is the essentially weak insurance agent, modeled on Fred MacMurray's Walter Neff character. He is convinced by seductive spider-woman siren Bridget to murder her boorish bourgeois husband, thus bilking the insurance company with his double indemnity accidental death clause. Taking it one step further, what Mike doesn't know is that the man he is set to murder is Bridget's husband and the same guy she has already stolen $700,000 from.

The final love scene, also reminiscent of Double Indemnity, matches Bridget at gunpoint with Mike in a strange dance of death. As Thomas Schatz recalls of Double Indemnity, "traditional values of love and monogamy have been turned inside out; love is now greed and lust, the bond of marriage is shattered and the climactic sex act is a ploy embracing the deceptive murder and a gun." This linking of sex and death is prevalent in many noir films, but its visual representation as one of the final sequences is particularly striking in both Double Indemnity and The Last Seduction. However, what The Last Seduction does is use this dance of death to actually play to Bridget's advantage as she calls 911 and lets Mike's roll-playing sex talk serve as his seeming confession to her husband's murder. Unlike Double Indemnity's Phyllis, Bridget never falls in love her male co-conspirator. Instead, she uses their final embrace to land Mike behind bars rather than end up dead in his arms, as is the fate for Double Indemnity's love-stricken Phyllis.

The Last Seduction employs other classic noir films, although Double Indemnity is the most recognizable. Bridget, in name and deed, is the archetypal hardboiled heroine first epitomized by Brigid O'Shaughnessy, played by Mary Astor, in The Maltese Falcon. Beautiful, apparently victimized and helpless, both Brigid and Bridget exploit the detective(s) and all the film's men in their perverse quest for wealth and power. Sexually manipulative, both women emerge truly as the more menacing villains within their films. For the men, "confronted with the image of an avaricious, utterly self-serving woman, the effect is fascinating and disturbing." Brigid victimizes Spade in The Maltese Falcon as Bridget victimizes Mike in The Last Seduction.

Similarly, Bridget is visually aligned to many classic femme noir characters, most noticeably to Lauren Bacall's Vivian in The Big Sleep. Her long, vamp-like hair flows against her clear, pale skin and contrasts as strongly as do the shadows that often embrace her image. Her wardrobe stands to posit her as the classic long-legged femme fatale, but what is most striking is her strict regime of black, white and gray color coordination. Bridget never wears any color in the film, as if she has actually been resurrected from a 1940s black and white noir and implanted into this distorted land of modern technicolor.

While visually and narratively The Last Seduction gains much of its direction from films like Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, thematically it continues to play upon emblematic noir tropes such as victims, greed, lust, violence, deceit and isolation. What is interesting, however, is how its classic film noir identifiers are intentionally contrasted to the modern suburban landscape. While the film remains visually darker and compositionally more abstract that most Hollywood films, it sardonically embraces the small-town traits of its upstate New York location for staunch comparisons to its classic noir roots. When Bridget first appears at the bar in Beston, she marches in dressed in black and white, seductively takes a stance at the bar in classic femme fatale style, orders up a Manhattan and lights a cigarette. The bartender and the bar patrons, on the other hand, are dressed in jeans and flannels, taking tequila shots and drinking from aluminum beer cans while seeming at home in their odd lodge-like surroundings. It is her fateful dupe, Mike, who bridges the gap between the two worlds when he successfully orders her a Manhattan with a quaint "please" and "thank you" attached.

After spending the night back at Mike's place, Bridget ventures out into town, getting a cup of coffee and harshly pounding a newspaper stand as she commences her job search. While standing in the shadows of a nearby tree and close to the asphalt parking spaces of the street, the townspeople, dressed in varying shades of tans, browns and blues, pass by and exchange friendly banter and chit-chat with her. With each "good morning" and "nice day" comment, Bridget winces. Quickly repulsed, she retreats to the safer space of her car. Later in the film, when Bridget's alarm goes off to the radio singing "I Wanna Be a Cowgirl" in a twangy, southern voice, she grabs her cigarettes and moans "I gotta get outta here" in classic New York slang. These types of contrasts are ever present in the film, intermingling the recognizable style of film noir with the distinctly unfamiliar scenic landscapes of suburbia. Just like Bridget, who is in a city in New York but not in the City of New York, we are reminded that while we are in film noir, we aren't in classic film noir.

Despite Bridget's protagonist role, she ceaselessly perpetuates and embraces her femme noire identity. She is greedy, manipulative, seductive, and self-serving at all times. Her antagonists are entirely unable to comprehend her rejection of fundamental suburban values. The "problem" with Bridget is seen in relation to her intentional alienation, her misdirected ambition and her sexual liberation. Her behavior, as witnessed within the confines of small-town life, proves contrary to the covenants of the good-girl housewife and it is this deviation that seems ironically posited as her true evil, moreso than her murderous instincts. The Last Seduction, like any noir film, is considerably pessimistic and brutal in its presentation of contemporary American life. (Schatz, 112) When Bridget finally accepts her residency in Beston, she rents a house, which she maintains in a noticeably surreal and empty fashion. She furnishes it with only a bed and a lamp, symbolically the only things a true femme noir character really needs.

Bridget's anti-family stance is elaborated in other ways also. Within the narrative, she is figured as the evasive wife who runs out on her marriage, dismissing the wedding ring from her finger before even starting the car to leave town. Her mission throughout the film is to end her marriage, either through divorce or murder. Within her married life and then after it, Bridget's sexuality is constantly linked to her condom usage and thereby her desire not to have children. She escapes her New York apartment under the pretext of running out for more condoms and then later, in upstate New York, the post-coital shots at Mike's house pan pass unwrapped condom packages. Her disdain for family life is portrayed even more cynically when she settles into a conversation with her divorce lawyer; she takes a bite out of a homemade apple pie, abruptly spits it out and then puts her cigarette out in it, right next to the note that reads "Love, Grandma." As Sylvia Harvey explains in her essay Woman's Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir, "this terrible absence of family relations allows for the production of the seeds of counter-ideologies." Bridget actualizes the counter-ideologies of suburban normalcy: sterility, the absence of the family and the failure of romantic love.

Beyond that, what Bridget embodies is a "growing disillusionment with traditional American values in the face of complex and often contradictory social, political, scientific, and economic developments." While the original phase of film noir was reacting to the development of hyper-utopian, suburban family values and the promised but yet-unrealized rewards of capitalism following World War II, what Bridget seems disillusioned by are the contradictory post-feminist positions assigned to the modern woman. Sexually, financially and emotionally liberated but still expected to settle down into a subservient role to her abusive husband, Bridget explosively reacts against these expectations and instead embraces everything feminism promised but never delivered. She flees her marriage, abandoning all the emotional responsibility while embracing all the monetary rewards, and then preys and profits from the underestimated notions men hold of her, in the end achieving her own form of liberation.

Bridget's fight is against being "defined in relation to men." As Janey Place explains in her essay Women in Film Noir, "the primary crime the 'liberated' woman is guilty of is refusing to be defined in such a way" (in relation to men) "and this refusal can be perversely seen as an attack on men's very existence." By attempting to break convention and define herself, Bridget compromises the common understanding of the femme noir. While akin to the classic "black widow" women who actively assault the conventional values of family life, Bridget is also strongly identified to lead male characters like Michael in The Maltese Falcon. As Sylvia Harvey explains, for Michael, "marriage is an impossible state." The same can be said for Bridget. For Bridget to be "happily married" would be for her to accept being defined as a "wife" and thereby in relation to a man. Bridget, instead, wants to be liberated from the boundaries of this limited female identity.

How she achieves this is by embracing roles typically reserved for men. Beyond occupying the narrative space traditionally reserved for the male lead, that of protagonist, Bridget further asserts her dominant position by remaining in control of men throughout the film. At work we see her as a boss to men, from the opening sequence that shows her verbally lashing her male telemarketing employees to her lavish window office where she is identified as "Director of Lead Generation" at the insurance company. When Mike pursues her at the bar, she vehemently denies his accusation that she is a secretary, rejecting angrily any stereotypical female role. Her independence from female classifications is furthered by the fact that she has absolutely no relationship to any other women in the film whatsoever. In The Last Seduction, Bridget is not a woman; she is the woman. "Verbally as well as visually, Bridget is presented as an almost supernatural femme fatale."

William Covey explains in his essay Girl Power: Female Centered Neo-Noir, "woman centered neo-noirs intermingle both new and old noir themes within new critiques of patriarchy and analyses of female identity." The Last Seduction takes this critique and recombination a step further, uniting two key character types of film noir: the justifiably violent, isolated detective and the sexually empowered but brutally violent femme fatale. She, Bridget, personifies the individual style of the isolated detective hero while clearly remaining the femme-noire antihero. (Even her name, "Bridget Gregory," symbolizes her dual female and male identities.) While it is her stoic detachment that enables her to survive and continue self-sufficiently, it is her dark, seductive nature that empowers her to work for her own good which is, essentially, evil. As Thomas Schatz explains in Hollywood Genres, "as a form," like film noir, "is varied and refined, it is bound to become more stylized, more conscious of its own rules of construction and expression." It is this fusion of the unstoppable detective with the irrepressible seductress into one ultra-anti-heroine that makes The Last Seduction refreshing.

Visually, The Last Seduction adopts the suburban setting and repositions it to fit the visual style of noir. Despite the town's tree-lined streets, the location shots tend to focus on dark, rain-soaked alleys. Cameras are often positioned at high-angles and catch sight of any available blinking, neon signs, particularly those caught in a dark blankets of shadows. While most of the action tends to take place at night, the lighting at all times invokes ominous shadows, casting darkness and suspicion onto the characters, their actions and their environments. Interactions between Bridget and her men are often reflected markedly through glass or in the reflections of windows and mirrors, implying her dual nature and her duplicitous relationships with men.

In as much as Chinatown rewrote the modern detective character, The Last Seduction has rewritten the modern femme noir. No longer marginalized to the doomed seductress role, Bridget rebels against classic film noir conventions and rewrites the ending as if to say "Men may not have been able to pull off the perfect crime, but the femme noir can." The effect is spine tingling. When Bridget rides away in the limousine at the end of the film with a sly smile on her face, we, as the implicated co-conspirators, feel a chill as we realize that she's actually gotten away with it. "We are primed, all at once, to desire, root for, and despise her; and at the end, as she savors her triumphs, leaving town in a limousine, we are placed as her conspirators, enjoying, indeed sharing, her sly smile."

Perhaps what the film is doing here is confronting post Cold War, post-women's liberation anxiety to some extent. Whereas the original incarnations of film noir posited a fear of the bomb with the woman's name (Gilda) and face (Rita Hayworth) on it, the new fear is of the power of the woman herself. We, as the spectator, maintain a strange fear and love for the Bridget character in very much the same way modern men maintain a fear and love of the liberated woman. The gaze of the film is classical Hollywood style, objectifying Bridget as much as any other femme fatale, but her control over the men she comes in contact with redefines who's really in charge. Throughout the film and foreshadowing its conclusion, men are constantly chasing after Bridget as she calmly and coyly slips away from them. They turn their heads for one second, as Clay does when he goes to take a shower in the beginning of the film and as Mike does when he waits for her in his bed after their first night together, and Bridget quickly escapes them without even a glance back.

Curiously, reaction to her flawless escape at the conclusion of the film has shown itself to be somewhat gender differentiated. While women audiences seem to relax at the end with a certain pride in seeing the woman ride off into the sunset, men seem less comfortable with her success. After decades of classical good-guy endings, the threat of an invincible femme fatale seems too much to bear. It has been suggested that this threatening ending played a role in The Last Seduction's torrid theater release drama. As Roger Ebert noted in his review, The Last Seduction was "passed over by distributors, played on cable, etc., and then it opened in London and got some of the best reviews of the year." Unable to acquire a distributor, the film was dumped directly to cable on HBO until its release in London brought about a triumph of praise and popularity. With acceptance guaranteed, theaters in the United States finally acquired The Last Seduction for the big-screen, validating Bridget's modern appeal.

Truly what the film intends to do is simply turn a page in the history book of film noir. "Bridget's does indeed feel like the 'last' seduction, a final turn of the narrative screw for a noir icon."