Live and let dye: blondes on film

'Blondes make the best victims,' Alfred Hitchcock once said. 'They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints' Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Paramount/Allstar Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Paramount/Allstar/guardian.co.uk This was a man who knew of what he spoke. Tippi Hedrun, Kim Novak and Janet Leigh all featured as thin-lipped, light-locked beauties harassed by winged furies, gender-bending hoteliers, morbid boyfriends … Photograph: Scott Nelson/AFP Photograph: Scott Nelson/guardian.co.uk … and, worst of all, amateur psychologists who blackmailed them into marriage. Still, they didn't half look good Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive Photograph: guardian.co.uk His casting choices have influenced modern directors keen on blonde muses. See Quentin Tarantino's use of Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, the Coen's of Francis McDormand as the pregnant detective in Fargo Photograph: PR Photograph: guardian.co.uk Earlier this month as part of the BFI Southbank's Blonde Crazy strand of the Birds Eye View film festival, Professor Laura Mulvey recounted to a new generation her thoughts about Hitchcock's blonde-directed sadism; the subject of Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema , her seminal 70s essay Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Paramount/Allstar Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/PARAMOUNT/guardian.co.uk In that essay she argues that Hollywood narratives themselves, as well as the way they are shot, strip women of all but one thing: sexuality. Women on screen exist therefore only as objects of male desire. And, because the plots are so pervasive, their effects away from the cinema are dangerously far-reaching Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis Photograph: guardian.co.uk So iconic are Hitchcock's icy blondes – less flesh and blood than lipstick and bleach – that their imprint lingers on today. In Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman, Maria Onetto channels the blonde vacancy Kim Novak perfected in Vertigo Photograph: PR Photograph: guardian.co.uk While in Mad Men, endless references are made to Betty Draper being the spitting image of Grace Kelly Photograph: Cine Text / Allstar Photograph: guardian.co.uk In its first series, Betty has been imitating doll-like versions of ladylike behaviour for so long her body stops functioning (her hands seize up). It's only after psychoanalysis, where she is allowed to drop the act, that she questions her mother's mantra that poise and prettiness is all. Of course Betty, alternately seen in structured skirt suits, designer riding gear or cookie-cutter gingham, is a retro figure, as modern as Stirling Cooper's ad campaigns seem today Photograph: Frank Ockenfels/AMC Photograph: Frank Ockenfels/guardian.co.uk The situation hardly changed in the 90s. Brown-haired Janeane Garofalo begs blonde Uma Thurman to cover for her on her own blind date in The Truth about Cats and Dogs - after all, everyone knows gentlemen prefer blondes Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive Photograph: guardian.co.uk Alicia Silverstone swished her long blonde locks throughout Clueless, turning every guy’s head in high school. And one of the first things she did when reforming Tai (Brittany Murphy) was to wash the grungey red dye from her curls Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/PARAMOUNT/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/PARAMOUNT/guardian.co.uk Then there was Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors. Brown-haired Gwyneth is dour; the victim of a cheating toe-rag. Blonde Gwyneth is free spirited, confident enough to dump the cheat and trade him in for a new, improved model Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive Photograph: guardian.co.uk Reese Witherspoon's role as a law student brimming with sunshine in the Legally Blonde franchise reinforced Witherspoon's ability to both cash in on, and poke fun at, her trademark perkiness Photograph: Fox Photograph: guardian.co.uk Consider raven-haired Razzie winner Sandra Bullock. Like Reese, Sandra is a respected actor with an Oscar to her name. Unlike Reese, she stars in films generally deemed too lowly for her talent. Does her non-blonde look pigeonhole her somewhere that does not exist? And is it significant that it took a blonde dye job and an upscale wardrobe to propel her to Oscar glory in The Blind Side? Photograph: Warner Bros Photograph: guardian.co.uk It is interesting to see if the potency of blondeness will endure. Is it intrinsically tied to Mulvey's idea of women on screen as sex objects, and if so, will dye cease to matter if Mulvey's ideal of a cinema not seen through the prism of the male gaze comes to pass Photograph: PR Photograph: guardian.co.uk