Re: RARA-AVIS: blonde vs. dark haired

From: Patrick King ( abrasax93@yahoo.com)
Date: 12 Jan 2008


But in Cooper, the dark haired sister was an adopted native American and Chingachgook recognizes this. In Cooper the hair color represents the talents of the two races, not good or evil. In most noir, blonds tend to be alluring and ultimately bad luck. Cora in Postman, Phyllis in Double Indemnity, Kathie Moffat in Out of the Past, Blanche Du Bois in Street Car Named Desire. Of course we can't generalize about ALL noir writers, but blond women tend to be the cause of the trouble in many of them. I think, in noir anyway, the very obvious blond=pure, dark=evil type of "symbolism" is reserved for poor examples of the genre. The better ones tend to be a little deeper in the process.

Patrick King
--- Ed Lynskey < e_lynskey@yahoo.com> wrote:

> --- DJ-Anonyme@webtv.net wrote:
> > Has anyone else paid more attention? Is this
> typical?
> >
> >
> IIRC, Cooper did this in LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Cora
> was the
> dark-haired sister and Alice the fair-haired. Maybe
> he was a
> prelude to what the noir writers did.
>
> I read Brewer's THE VENGEFUL VIRGIN recently but
> didn't pick
> up on the hair color code. Intriguing idea, though.
>
> Ed
>
>
>
>
>
>
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