Somebody, I don’t remember who it was anymore, once made the observation that in US movies good girls & heroines are always fair haired, bad girls & villainesses (is that even a word?) are brunettes; V certainly confirms that cliché.
I know! We had V already, but I’m too enamoured with that show and it lends itself just too perfectly to make a further observation on genre conventions to let it pass.
The second picture stems from Brides of Dracula by the way.
On one side we have a self confident, sexy predator, a woman that enjoys sex and openly shows it, in the character of Visitor Diana and on the other we meet the beautiful, but plain looking leader of the resistance, Juliet, sex here goes never farther than a chaste kiss. A similar phenomenon is observable in Vampire movies: It needs the Count’s bite to free his ‘victims’ from the constraints a morally rigid society imposed on them, only after turning Vampire can they freely follow their hearts true desires … there’s a message hidden here, I’m sure of it; “Sexuality is a leech,” perhaps?
Being evil, so those movies insist further, also frees women from the burden of jealousy because neither Diana nor Dracula’s Bride show any concerns over sharing their lovers, nor are they any longer bound to bothersome gender (or race) preferences. It might be of interest to side note that men when they become evil tend to go in the opposite direction, becoming murderously jealous and almost paranoid homophobic.
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