Kiss Me Deadly

In part because of its pulp fiction, Mickey-Spillane provenance, Kiss Me Deadly (1955) has been widely interpreted as a key text of McCarthyism, yet it’s arguably better interpreted, via the film’s repeated recourse to the X figure, as an apocalyptic one with the proviso that in the 1950s the discourse about the “red menace” is frequently imbricated with the discourse about femininity--about, that is to say, the femme fatale and female sexuality. While censorship in the form of the Production Code Administration (PCA) played a significant part in the production of Kiss Me Deadly, there’s little doubt that Robert Aldrich’s picture is a film noir since it features a private detective who, knee-deep in sex and violence, is ultimately unable to prevent an atomic detonation that can itself be interpreted as both a death and orgasm, cataclysm and resurrection.