The Last Seduction
The victory of city slickers over bumpkins. Of cunning woman over strong man. Of the haves over the have nots. Film Noir has never been so anarchic and fun.
Our anti-hero is very much a psychopath, willing to mess with many people to have her way. She thinks the rules don’t apply to her, as long as she can get away with it. This is played for laughs, though. It’s not even like other film noir plot where the protagonist is a anti-hero on the outside, but an actual wholesome emotional human. She is indeed a “self-serving bitch”. This is a classic American film, with plenty of situations that could only happen there.
The plot is complex, in a good way:
Our protagonist gets introduced in her job, verbally dominating a cadre of (male) phone jockeys, pushing commemorative coins to the unwashed masses. She also brainwashed her husband into turning his medical licence into a million bucks, by selling medical dope to some street dealers.
This deal is nominally to pay off some loan shark, but mostly to get out of the rat race and access the upper echelons of society, the stability and peace of mind that only big bucks will bring.
She has such charisma that her husband just leaves the money unguarded, letting her execute a plan brewing for a while: getting the hell out of Dodge. She drives to Chicago, but gets tired half way there and jumps into a dive bar for some R&R.
In Ray’s she encounters small town pleasantries, big-city-people hatred, and the perfect fall guy to be able to legally keep all those dollar bills she possesses now.
The emotional abuse and gaslighting starts right away and will never stop. A relentless barrage of quips, insults, teases, and dares. He is treated as a Automated Tumescent Machine, a sentient penis ready to do her bidding. Sloppy coitus ensues, in a large variety of situations.
Her lawyer frenemy advises her to lay low, so she settles for this random small town, it’s as good as any. She moves into a motel and gets a job, accidentally turning into the boss of the fall guy, something she tries to leverage into other harebrained scheme of murdering cheating husbands for cuts of the life insurance.
Her husband has the loan shark to attend to, so he wants to recover the money bad. Since she has an alias, the services of a private dick are required, who does track her down. After some dick-based banter, he is killed in a car crash, not an accident.
After that she moves for the kill. Another local PI is hired by the husband, but he is easily duped, allowing her to dig dirt on the fall guy: he is married to a trans girl in a local city. She then concocts a scheme where she pretends to go to Miami kill the cheating husband to steal the money, and she did it for them.
Since she did it, why shouldn’t the fall guy do it too? She can only trust him in that case. Of course, they guy he will kill is her own husband, killing several birds in one stone, so to speak.
The fall guy goes through the whole thing, but fails at the last moment. He doesn’t have the guts. So she goes up and finishes the job herself, by macing his mouth for a good while. She then reveals the big secret she learned from the fall guy and he gets enraged and horny, which combined with a strategic 911 calls, lets her get away with the money, while the fall guy gets room and board at Attica for many years.
The cosmopolitrometer is off the charts! This is up there with Straw Dogs in contempt for the rural folk.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.