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londes exert an inescapable pull over . . . I was going to say men, but will immediately expand that claim to include men or women of any sexual orientation. You don't even need to hunt down Pretty Poison (but for God's sake, do). Just think of your own life. Has there never been a blonde in it that didn't overwhelm your existence, demolish your complacency and leave you quaking with the various stages of blondieness: joy, obsession, fear, desolation and, finally, a fond memory simultaneously commingled with a powerful sense of "Man, am I glad I extricated myself from that."
All of this occurred to me as I read Ellen Tremper's glossy but never glib new book, I'm No Angel: The Blonde in Fiction and Film, released this month by University of Virginia Press. Tremper, a professor of English at Brooklyn College, may hide behind her academic bona fides (I'm definitely going to read her other book, Who Lived At Alfoxton?: Virginia Woolf and English Romanticism, as soon as I've run through the L Word episodes on my TiVO), but you can tell that, for all her talk about the blond archetype "restoring sexuality and personhood to the representation of all women," Tremper can hardly keep her subject at arm's length. When she's fully engaged with a
particular person, theme or scene, she draws you in close, as when she writes vividly of Marilyn Monroe's closeups in Niagara, "aware of her sexual power . . . The very quality that men and women, too, found exciting — her physical but, even more, her emotional accessibility — was in tension with the self-love of the femme fatale." Prof. Tremper, methinks, has a blonde or two in her closet, a suspicion that makes her book all the more alluring.
From my own moviegoing experience, the stereotype is fully in place and rather comforting. From Katharine Hepburn to Catherine Keener, the brunette is quick-witted and serious, even when fooling around. The blonde is the one who drives men ape, or turns apes into silly monkeys — Naomi Watts reduced Peter Jackson's Kong to a gibbering fool, while Fay Wray provoked him to finger her with curious deliberation. Melanie Griffith has achieved two career high points of blondeness: catching Gene Hackman's private eye in her debut as a skinny-dipping trollop in Night Moves, and, decades later in Working Girl, using her Farrah cut to addle Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver, that most sobersided of brunettes. Legally Blonde? Only the best showcase for Reese Witherspoon until she went dark in last year's Walk the Line, case closed.
I'd also lay odds that the porn industry is overwhelmingly dominated by blondes both natural and artificial. Porn-blonde pervasiveness confirms something about mainstream-blonde typecasting: the underlying promise that this woman will be wilder, more adverturous and unpredictable than
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There's an underlying promise that the blonde will be wilder, more adverturous and unpredictable than the brunette.
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the brunette. Gina Gershon, for example, who can turn kinky on a dime, but only when she's frowningly intent on it, or the redhead, Julianne Moore, whose sexiness commingles with intelligence and neurasthenia to create a whole different vibe.
Tremper structures her book in a neat chronology, tracing the increasing power and variety of blondes' roles in literature and film, from the Victorian era to the present day. Initially, the author observes, brunettes were the primary temptresses of poetry and popular fiction; their darkness was associated with the unknown, with danger and sin. But soon, the bright novelty of blondeness — its sunny deception exerting its own unique power — came to the fore. Tremper quotes Alexander Pope in The Rape of the Lock: "Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare," and from there it's but a short leap to platinum wiggler Mae West's "Why don'cha come up and see me sometime?"
Discussing '30s movie stars such as Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow, Tremper asserts that "the blonde's brash appearance was body language for 'Look at me! Enjoy my audacity, and love me for it!'" Blondes in pop culture could be dumb or just play dumb, but even when reduced to such mostly male-created roles, the bottom line was that they were also unknowable: if a woman could be patently stupid yet still reduce a feller to stuttering idiocy, Tremper's argument goes, how powerful and mysterious the blonde's
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Marilyn Monroe was willing to play the fool and cavort in slapstick while remaining in complete control of her destiny.
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magnetism must be.
Tremper builds her book to a long section on Marilyn Monroe, who, she argues, held all the complexities and contradictions of the blonde: she was a living, heaving cartoon of impossibly real sexual heat; willing to play the fool and cavort in slapstick while remaining in complete control of her destiny. Monroe proved that blondes, as the advertising jingle went, had more fun, but who also caused and endured more trouble.
Toward the end of I'm No Angel, you can tell Tremper has been spending more time in the library stacks and on Google than in the real world, blithely pigeonholing the magnificent Madonna as merely having "reprised Monroe in an aggressively sexual, dissonant register," and barely nodding to Sharon Stone's "lesbian-vampire in Basic Instinct." Has Tremper gotten a load of the uncut trailer for Basic Instinct 2 (a.k.a., The Movie Formerly Known As Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction)? She may have to add an addendum to the next edition of her book, grappling with blonde sado-surrealism. And professor, please do check out Pretty Poison. Talk about redefining "women through the anatomical/spiritual equation." n°
To buy I'm No Angel, click here.
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Ken Tucker is Editor-At-Large at Entertainment Weekly. His book, Kissing Bill O'Reilly, Roasting Miss Piggy: 100 Things to Love and Hate About TV has just been published in paperback. His reviews can also be heard on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
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©2006 Ken Tucker and hooksexup.com.
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, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
