One could argue that in The Black Dahlia it is women, rather than detectives, that play a major role in the narrative. In the novel, Ellroy presents female characters of diverse temper. The writer plays with the noir themes, reinventing new types
of femme fatale, thus setting new standards in noir literature. The following section analyzes the figures of femme fatales presented both in the novel and De Palma’s film adaptation.
In the book, Lee Blanchard repeatedly uses the expression “cherchez la femme,” which already highlights that women are the focal point of the story.
Indeed, when the Black Dahlia killers’ identities are revealed, it turns out that it is a woman who is the mastermind of the murder. In addition to that, Lee’s killer is also a devious femme fatale. Moreover, the phantom that figuratively haunts all the characters in the novel is none other than a woman. Finally, it is a woman who serves as a binder between the two main detectives.
The Dutiful
Kay Lake is the first woman introduced in the story. She is Lee Blanchard’s cohabitant, yet she does not share her bed with him. Lee takes care of her and wants to “love [her], not fuck [her]” (Ellroy 2005: 277). Kay has been sexually abused by Bobby DeWitt and it was Blanchard who saved her. Since then, he has provided for her, paid for her tuition and all the whims. She repays him by simply being his partner in life and taking care of the house chores. She is also a schoolteacher, yet is overqualified for this position. Kay is a very clever and intelligent woman with two master’s degrees, broad knowledge and charm, yet she by no means can be categorized as a classic femme fatale as she is dependent on men in her life.
Dwight Bleichert meets Kay in Lee’s house and is intrigued by her from the very beginning:
Auburn hair in a pageboy cut brushed her shoulders and long, thin neck; the fit of her Eisenhower jacket and wool skirt told me she was thin all over [...]. Letting out a lungful of smoke, she turned. Up close, I saw a strong-pretty face [...], full lips and big black-brown eyes (Ellroy 2005: 29–30).
What makes her even more intriguing is the way she smokes a cigarette with a quellazaire. The sheer fact of smoking a cigarette shows that she tries to create an image of a strong, self-sufficient and mysterious woman, yet she is just a pastiche of a femme fatale, in other words, just an imitation of a fatal woman. To describe her significance in the narrative, once again a quotation
from Wager can be employed: “she walks the walk, talks the talk, and certainly dresses the part. But unlike the dangerous dames of film noir, she in no way drives the narrative or influences the outcome of events” (2005: 84).
When Bucky meets Kay and is invited by both Lee and her to their lives, the relationship between the characters gets complicated. Kay serves as a link between the two detectives and, surprisingly enough, does not divide them, but rather unites them:
That fall of ‘46, we went everywhere together. When we went to the movies, Kay took the middle seat and grabbed both our hands during the scary parts; when we spent big band Friday evenings at the Malibu Rendezvous, she alternated dances with the two of us and always tossed a coin to see who got the last slow number. Lee never expressed an ounce of jealously [...]. The quieter it got, the more available I knew Kay was – and the more I wanted her. But I let it all ride, not because it would have destroyed my partnership with Lee, but because it would have upset the perfection of the three of us (Ellroy 2005: 71).
Once Lee departs to Mexico, Kay seeks the closeness with Bucky. Even though she has the money, she is not able to stay alone. She says she loves Bleichert and soon they get married. Her character is even more fragile in the film adaptation than in the literary original. In the film, she forgives Dwight the affair with Madeleine and his fascination with Elizabeth Short, and welcomes him back with open arms. However, Ellroy offers a different ending. In the novel Kay travels to Boston in order to “wash the taste of L.A.” (Ellroy 2005: 379). She confesses that she is pregnant with Bucky, but this time she is the one who decides about her future and proves herself to be a self-reliant woman. As opposed to De Palma, who decides to present a pastiche of femme fatale till the very end, the novelist gives the pastiche a voice of her own, making Kay stronger and emancipated.
The Beautiful
Bleichert comes across Madeleine Linscott while conducting an investigation on the Black Dahlia case. Struck by her resemblance to the victim, he claims that
“she wasn’t the first Dahlia-wannabe [he] seen...but she was the best” (The Black Dahlia). Madeleine is spoiled, rich and bored with her comfortable life. In order to get out of the mundane reality, she dresses up as the Dahlia and frequents
the places in which Short was seen. She meets Bucky in one of such places.
Madeleine knew Elizabeth and had a brief sexual relationship with her, since she wanted to know “what it would be like to do it with someone who looked like [her]” (The Black Dahlia). As she wants to keep her name out of the papers, she offers Bucky sex if he agrees to suppress evidence for her. Dwight complies with Madeleine’s request and engages in casual sex with her. However, after some time their relationship evolves and one may presume that the woman actually cares for him. She even tells him secrets about her father’s dirty business and appears to be more fragile than one could have thought. Nevertheless, her innocence is deceptive, since when confiding in him, she pries information about the ongoing investigation out of Dwight.
At first Madeleine resembles a femme fatale only because of her appearance.
When she takes off her wig and Dahlia-like outfits, she appears to be an ordinary woman. However, she takes advantage of Bucky’s obsession with Elizabeth: “I’ll never be a schoolteacher from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, but I’ll be Betty or anyone else you want me to be” (Ellroy 2005: 211). When Bucky leaves her for Kay, she calls him and, once again, reminds him that she is Elizabeth’s lookalike:
“Find somebody safe? You’ll be back, you know. I look like her” (2005: 234).
Indeed, Bleichert cheats on Kay with her, having an affair with Madeleine for the second time.
Not only does Madeleine serve as a femme fatale character in the narrative, but she is also a doppelganger of the murdered woman. Paul Meehan explains that “[i]n film noir the doppelganger frequently takes the form of two characters who are in diametric moral opposition to each other, yet who share a common bond [...]”, and that “the ghostly double is manifested as an evil twin or coun-terpart of the protagonist” (2011: 168–169). In this case, it is Elizabeth’s ghost that is an archetype and Madeleine is her evil doppelganger.
Even if one believes that Madeleine does have feelings for Dwight, the notion is no longer conceivable when it is revealed that it is she who kills Lee in revenge for her stepfather with whom she has a pseudo-erotic relationship: “Emmett and Madeleine were lying on the big canopied bed, clothed, her head on his lap, his rough carpenter’s hands massaging her shoulders. The father-lover noticed me first; Madeleine pouted when Daddy’s caresses stopped” (Ellroy 2005: 342). The reader discovers that, as a matter of fact, “Bleichert served his purpose” (2005:
342) and he meant nothing to Madeleine. Together with her father, they use Bucky to keep their family out of sight. The detective is just a tool in the fatal
woman’s hands. When it is revealed that Madeleine murdered Bucky, she comes up with a story of a love triangle between her, Bucky and Lee and admits she has killed Lee, as he beat her father because Emmet refused to “give him” Madeleine (Ellroy 2005: 376). Since the confession is leaked to the newspaper, Bucky is fired from the police department “on grounds of moral turpitude and conduct unbecoming an officer” (2005: 377). The fatal woman plays an artfully cunning game, killing one of the detectives and destroying the life of the other one.
There is something mysterious about Madeleine – an aura of menace and thrill, which lure Bucky. She unquestionably fulfils Doane’s definition of a fatal woman: “she never really is what seems to be. She harbors a threat which is not entirely legible, predictable, manageable. In thus transforming the threat into a secret, something which must be aggressively revealed, unmasked, discovered”
(1991: 1). When Madeleine’s agenda is finally revealed, she is no longer interested in Bucky, yet it is not clearly stated that she was purely deceitful all the time.
The reader/viewer is left with a question whether she has ever been in love with Dwight, or whether it was all a game for her. Ellroy gives the reader freedom of interpretation with regard to this matter. The author one again modifies the figure of a female character.
The Victim
Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia is based on a true story of a young girl who was mu-tilated and murdered on January 15, 1947. Elizabeth Short, an extraordinarily beautiful twenty-two-year-old woman, was “tortured, murdered, exsanguinated, bisected at the waist, and dissected” (Hoffman 2003: 386). The crime raised public attention as everyone wanted to solve the mystery of the Black Dahlia’s murder.
In 1943, Elizabeth Short left Massachusetts in pursuit of work; however, sooner than later, she decided that she did not really want to work. Elizabeth was living hand-to-mouth and leading a frivolous life, wandering through a few US states. Being a habitué of different nightclubs, she learnt how to seduce men and used her charm to achieve what she needed, but she seldom exchanged sex for shelter. Elizabeth dreamed about an acting career, yet she rarely auditioned.
She had an imaginary life and often made up stories about her past. One of such fantasies was that she lost her heroic husband who was a pilot during the war, hence she wore black attires. After her death, the newspapers quickly dubbed her “the Black Dahlia,” the name which a bar tender gave her, referring
to The Blue Dahlia film launched a year before her demise. Even though her case became well-known to the public and the police interviewed hundreds of her acquaintances, Elizabeth Short’s murderer remains unidentified3. In his novel, James Ellroy describes his own version of the events, being very truthful to the real story. However, he does create a few fictional characters and, most importantly, provides the readers with a murderer and a murderess.
As far as the story of the Dahlia’s life is concerned, Ellroy embellishes a few facts, but other than that, he heavily relies on the true events. What he does add to the story are the characters influenced by Elizabeth’s death, such as the detectives working on her case and the perpetrators involved in the murder. It has already been mentioned that the Dahlia’s case has a great impact on Lee’s life, as her murder reminds him about his sister’s violent death. In this regard, his character may be associated with the author himself, who suffered greatly after his mother had been murdered, thus he creates a fictional character of Elizabeth Short to deal with the loss. However, Ellroy identifies with the other detective rather than with Lee:
Bucky Bleichert is a fictional cop and a doppelganger/writer [...]. He’s the man writing out the great adventure of his life and the voyeur viewing sex with a cam-era. Bleichert is me [...]. He’s standing outside momentous events. He’s lost in scrutiny. He wants to control. He wants to capitulate. His inner life is near chaotic.
He needs to impose external order to countermand his mental state (2006: 393).
The word “doppelganger” appears once again, yet this time its meaning changes. In this sense, Bucky serves as Ellroy’s doppelganger psychologically rather than physically. He is, to a certain extent, a reflection of the author’s dilemmas and emotions towards Elizabeth.
Bleichert feels a strong connection with Elizabeth and needs to solve the case at all costs. He loses his beloved wife, as he is involved in the affair with Elizabeth’s doppelganger. In the book, he has frequent sex dreams involving the Dahlia:
It was always the same dream. I was at the warehouse with Fritz Vogel, beating Cecil Durkin to death. She watched, screaming that none of the drool cases killed
3 The information about Elizabeth Short’s life was sourced from Carl Hoffman’s article,
“Return to the Primal Noir: Two Modern Authors on the Black Dahlia.”
her, promising to love me if I made Fritzie quit hitting Charlie Issler. I stopped, wanting the sex. Fritzie continued his carnage, and Betty wept for Charlie while I had her (Ellroy 2005: 236).
Dwight is haunted by the dead in his dreams and feels he owes her some-thing. When he finds a piece of her skin at the murder scene, he feels apologetic and believes he violated her privacy: “I closed my eyes and shook head to toe;
I wrapped my arms around myself and tried to tell her I was sorry I’d seen that special part of her, that I didn’t mean to pry so far, that I was just trying to help.
I tried to say it and say it and say it” (Ellroy 2005: 353).
Elizabeth Short seems to have an enormous power over Bucky, as even when the case is closed and he travels to Boston to take care of Kay and their baby, he prays to Betty for a blessing: “I reached for Betty then; a wish, almost a prayer.
The clouds broke up and the plane descended a big bright city at twilight below.
I asked Betty to grant me safe passage in return for my love” (2005: 383). Even though she is not alive anymore, Bucky does appear to be enamored of the Black Dahlia. One could say that although she does not have her own agenda and has no impact on the events, her influence on male characters in the narrative as well as on the author himself is so extensive that one could call her the femme fatale of the story. She is the eponymous character and the focal point of the investigation.
There is an aura of mysticism around her. Elizabeth is not devious like the classic femme fatales, but she unintentionally makes the men her subordinates.
In De Palma’s film adaptation, the Black Dahlia’s portrayal is more erotic than in the novel: “the visual and narrative representation of Short and the investigation of her death turn her into erotic spectacle” (Farrimond 2013: 38).
Whereas in the novel the descriptions of her mutilated body are very detailed, in the film her body is almost never shown. The detectives and forensic pathologists discuss her mutilations, yet given the visual character of the medium, one could expect to see the body itself. Instead, Short is introduced to the viewers through the recordings of her few auditions. She is there depicted as wily, lively and fluctuating between extreme emotions. Katherine Farrimond claims:
When Short actually is presented fully on screen, it is frequently in flashback, so that she looks pristine, glamorous, and alive, despite the fact that she is dead for the majority of the film [...].When the corpse is shown, the images are brief, never dwelled on for more than a second or two, and the damaged body appears
at the borders of the screen, often in extreme close up so that the damage done to her appears abstract and vague (2013: 39).
Her cinematic depiction is closer to the image of a coquette rather than a femme fatale, yet her impact on man is as strong as in the novel.
The Murderess
As opposed to the authentic Black Dahlia case where no murderers were found, Ellroy reveals the identities of the fictional killers. In compliance with the French phrase “cherchez la femme,” it is the woman who is responsible for the Black Dahlia’s murder. Ramona Linscott, Madeleine’s mother, murders Elizabeth Short out of jealousy. When Madeleine introduces Bucky to his parents, Dwight’s opin-ion about her mother is not flattering: “She possessed a pushing-fifty versopin-ion of Madeleine’s lustrous dark hair and pale skin, but there was nothing else attractive about her. She was fat, her face was flaccid, her rouge and lipstick were applied slightly off center, so that her face was weirdly askew” (Ellroy 2005: 157). She is neither portrayed as a femme fatale, nor does she play a major role throughout the story since her character is rather marginal. The revelation that it is Ramona who is Elizabeth’s killer is a rather sophisticated plot-twist, as nothing really indicates her engagement.
It finally turns out that Madeleine is not Emmet’s daughter as Ramona has had an affair with Emmet’s associate, Georgie. Emmet discovered it only when Madeleine started to strikingly resemble her biological father. He mutilated Georgie’s face. Since then, Georgie has behaved rather odd and had a penchant for dead things. He stayed at Linscott’s as a gardener. Once he saw Elizabeth in one of the porn films that she was persuaded to make for money, he developed a liking for her and asked if he could have a date with her. Emmet promised the girl money in return for a favor. However, Ramona did not like the idea and encouraged Georgie to kill the girl. As the man had an inclination to kill animals and was interested in the dead, he followed Ramona’s instructions. In her journal, one can read:
I decided to cut [her little titties] off slowly [...]. I poked [the bat] at her little hole and she almost swallowed her gag [...]. I held the bat in front of her, then I opened up a cigarette burn on her left tittie with my knife. She bit on her gag and [...] her
teeth came out due to her biting so hard. I stuck the knife down to a little bone I felt, then I twisted it. She tried to scream and the gag slipped deeper into her throat. I pulled it out for one second and she yelled for her mother. I put it back in hard and cut her again on the right tittie (Ellroy 2005: 352–353).
Ramona strikes the reader as an exceptionally cruel woman. Not only does she kill Elizabeth, but she does it in such an atrocious manner. In De Palma’s film, she commits suicide, having confessed what she has done. Nevertheless, in Ellroy’s original story, she avoids punishment. Bucky decides the consequences of her being caught would be too profound for other people and Lee’s reputation
Ramona strikes the reader as an exceptionally cruel woman. Not only does she kill Elizabeth, but she does it in such an atrocious manner. In De Palma’s film, she commits suicide, having confessed what she has done. Nevertheless, in Ellroy’s original story, she avoids punishment. Bucky decides the consequences of her being caught would be too profound for other people and Lee’s reputation