If there is anything more dangerous than the Beautiful, it is the Cute: Since Delilah & Helen, we have grown wary of the impending atrocity associated w/ beauty: If not intentional beheading, the unintentional beginning of a war. But not grown weary, as it remains a concern constantly resuscitated if only to be stabbed at once again: Almost as if beauty itself were parting its luscious lips for the faintest of whispers: Kill me, but kill me softly—tenderly—w/ cuteness.

Such that actress Gene Tierney’s face—once an icon of beauty—becomes an icon of death, substituting for the skull in the sigil of crossbones. But it is not so much a substitute as a prosthesis: The face has been so embedded into the sigil that one can no longer say it’s a superimposed image upon another image. They are one & the same, their union hermetically sealed by the painting’s kitschy title, “Beware of the Look that Kills,” as if to evoke the vibe of early ‘90s B-movies w/ knife-wielding lookers for assassins—only to appropriate it for the 1944 film Laura, from whose poster the Tierney portrait is lifted.

But Tierney in Laura isn’t your archetypal woman-of-the-‘90s femme fatale. Despite being decades early, the film portrays a sinisterly advanced variation of the archetype—that of the semiurge as advertising director, manipulator of signs & the production of meaning, propagator of the Image in lieu of what images stand for. Better yet stood for, given now the primacy of signifier over signified, when once upon a time it was the signifier that was believed to be secondary, merely the vehicle for & instrument of meaning: Where the image of the dead (skull) can no longer signify death, why not use an image of life instead? The sharpness of this reversal is made blunt by the title—blunt in the sense that it has become at once dull (i.e., the blunt side of a knife) & more overt (i.e., one giving his/her comments bluntly). But blunt is not necessarily less fatal; in its kitschy-cute reference to the accidental comedy of B-movies, the word “kill” brings back a notion of violence into the crossbones, but a sugarcoated violence: a clump of cotton candy, at whose core is a knife—     Continued...