The vamp's eyes have us
Fritz Leiber’s “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (1949) puts a full vampire spin on the femme fatale.
Irresistible, aren’t they, a dark set of eyes? Since the age of Medusa, we have warned against the corruptive power of the gaze. Whether the look comes from a snake-headed hybrid or a femme fatale, from Marlene Dietrich or Kim Novak, we instinctually know not to stare back. These myths and stars have the force of legend and Hollywood behind them.
Part of a crowd of powerless onlookers, we can only imagine what those eyes see in us. They must want something beyond our desire, but what? Riches? Blood? By the time we find out, it’s too late.
Fritz Leiber’s “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (1949)1 is about a struggling commercial photographer who begrudgingly gives a new girl a chance. When he shows her spec photos to his clients, they instantly see her allure. Suddenly, her image is everywhere. It’s no mystery to the photographer.
[…] I know we’ve had the Face and the Body and the Look and what not else, so why shouldn’t someone come along who sums it all up so completely, that we have to call her the Girl and blazon her on all the billboards from Times Square to Telegraph Hill?
In both the photographer’s mind and through his creepy surveillance, “the Girl” becomes a full-fledged vampire that feasts on her desirous onlookers. She doesn’t want sex or money, we’re told. She wants more.
She’s the eyes that lead you on and on, and then show you death. She’s the creature you give everything for and never really get. She’s the being that takes everything and gives you nothing in return.
What “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” does so vividly is criminalize female desire as something inherently deceptive and dishonest. And within the world of noir, Leiber’s photographer is just another classic sucker who’s nearly too smart for his own good. After all, he photographed her. He sent her images out into the world. And when she got too close and told him what she really wanted? He fled, shut up his studio, and burned every photograph.
By having his antihero run away from danger, is Leiber teasing out a story about the evils of the subconscious male gaze 23 years before the term was theorized, or was the author just dramatizing a lecherous photographer’s sour grapes for not successfully taming the temptress? Hard to tell. Maybe both but neither at the same time?
All I know for sure is that I’m disappointed the photographer got away. He’d have made a bloody good meal.
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Cover image: The Girl with the Hungry Eyes and Other Stories, Avon Books #184 (1949)
Republished in American Supernatural Tales, ed. S.T. Joshi, Penguin (2007).