It's Official: Angelina Jolie Raises the Femme Fatale Bar With 'Salt'

By Gina Misiroglu Posted Jul 27th 2010 02:50PM

Pop-Ed: Mae West once said, "There are no good girls gone wrong. Just bad girls found out." I'm left contemplating those words as I watch Angelina Jolie, whose role unfolds as the ultimate femme fatale ("deadly woman" in French) over the course of her new action thriller, 'Salt.'

With roots in the hothouse eroticism of film noir, today's sinister seductress is a hardcore action heroine. No longer packing an automatic pistol in her garter while balancing a martini seductively in one hand, the modern femme fatale serves up her balm of praise with a heavy dose of artillery and explosives. Duplicitous to the core, she is never what she appears to be. Read on for Gina's take on how Jolie raises the bar for future femme fatales.

As rogue CIA agent Evelyn Salt, Jolie discards her signature red-lipped pout in favor of a subtler form of seduction: The sexiness of a cold-blooded Russian sleeper agent, waiting patiently to strike on cue. On the lam from the Agency, its counterintelligence officers, and the NYPD, Jolie -- by altering hair color from good-girl blonde to bad-girl brunette, kicking off her high heels for combat boots, and changing gender via latex mask -- morphs into a Russian spy before the audience's eyes.

In Bourne- and Bond-esque fashion, Evelyn Salt violently opposes her would-be captors, scales semi-trucks and elevator shafts, skirts bullets, carefully extracts the venom of a poisonous arachnid, and navigates New York's subterranean depths and underground bunkers with finesse. She slips off her undergarments to tie up security cameras. Doles out flying sidekicks. Stops men dead in their tracks, single-handedly engaging Russian super-villains while saving the world from nuclear destruction. All without a stunt double.

Jolie is no stranger to strong, sexy female protagonists, having successfully navigated the waters in the characters of Lara Croft and Mrs. Smith. Would viewers be so accepting of Jolie as Salt if Ripley and Nikita and Sarah Connor had not eased modern audiences into the concept? Or if Jolie hadn't exercised the bad-girl image in her own life?

See Jolie in the trailer for 'Salt':

While men openly lust after these dangerous seductresses, women secretly identify with them. The bad girl represents the tantalizing forbidden fruit that our upbringing and morality teaches us to resist. With self-preservation and control at an all-time high, now -- perhaps more than any other time in history -- women embrace the uber-vixen for her unique qualities of rebelliousness, individualism, and antisocial leanings.

Discarding traditional gender and cultural roles of wife/mother/girl next door, today's action heroine remains fiercely independent and sharp-tongued, even in the face of self-destruction. By the end of the film, Evelyn Salt embodies the image of an exciting, determined, and unrepentant woman who defies the control of men and the confines of the law. And she'll plunge to her would-be death to prove it.

This new ultimate femme fatale is intuitive, proactive, psychologically complex -- and, like a male action hero, able to compartmentalize difficult feelings to survive. Salt reconciles multiple personas and lives. Her example shows women how to strategically mastermind their own identities ... and not just rely on sucker punches and power pouts to save the day.

Gina Misiroglu writes about pop culture and women's issues, and is the author and editor of a dozen books, including The Superhero Book: The Encyclopedia of Comic-Book Icons and Hollywood Heroes. Read her blog on Red Room.

Tags: Angelina Jolie, Gina Misiroglu, Red Room, Salt