This scene from The Woman Next Door (1981) is a lot of what my first book Beauty Talk & Monsters is about.

Also see Anne Rower’s great If You’re A Girl about dark haired beauty in early cinema, which I write about in “A Note On Why Gentlemmen Prefer Blondes” (Beauty Talk).

And then, of course, there is the way that Hitchcock’s Vertigo is in part about the pathological construction—to the point of psychosis—of the blonde as beauty archetype. The dark-haired Judy is literally ridiculed/erased and replaced by the stereotype and figment of blondeness, Madeline. One woman carries/performs the split of the two inside her.

Crossposted with Love Dog.