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Speaking of her role as the latest, and for many critics the most potent and memorable, femme fatale in John Dahl's The Last Seduction, Linda Fiorentino has this to say about her relationship to the character she creates on the screen: “I've never met a woman like Bridget, but almost every woman I know has met a man like Bridget” (Showbiz Today, November 18, 1994). On the face of it, I think we know what Fiorentino “means.” Although she probably does not mean to conjure the vision of transexuality or transvestism, nevertheless, meeting a man like Bridget is what many men both dread and desire, and this is The Last's Seduction's most effective seduction as well as the explanation, if you will, for the figure of the transexual who functions as the film's conscious secret.
Fiorentino's comment indicates that what has taken many years of feminist and queer theorizing to dredge from the depths of our cultural unconscious (otherwise known as the patriarchal imaginary) now lies on the surface of the most casual articulation. That is, the femme fatale, as the quintessence of “femininity,” is more “like a man” than a woman. If Fiorentino prepared for the part as a Method actress, we would have to suppose that she either drew on her own experiences with men, or sought her own “masculinity within.” Perhaps one of the reasons that the femme fatale has remained such an enduring representation is that it is in this figure that femininity is pushed to the breaking point, where it becomes, at once, the essence of women and absolute alterity. In other words, the femme fatale shows us that the quint(essence) of femininity is masculinity. As Lacan (1985) points out, because repression is inherent to the phallic mark of desire, there is the “strange consequence that, in the human being, virile display itself appears as feminine.”
If Fiorentino's role in The Last Seduction were to be viewed as a commentary on the progression of the femme fatale from the noir films of the 1940s through the