105
and Ellen, he’s working on the third sister, Marion (he thinks to himself,
“Faith, Hope .. . and Charity”), when Kingship pere comers him high on
a catwalk above a vat of smoking copper from which he falls to his
death:
The scream, which had knifed through the sudden
stillness of the smelter, ended in a viscous splash. From
the other side of the vat, a sheet of green leaped up.
Arcing, it sheared down to the flbor where it splattered
into a million pools of droplets. They hissed softly on
the cement and slowly dawned from green to copper.
(Levin 241)
Bud’s spectacular “dive” recollects Dorrie’s fall to her death from the top
of the Municipal Building; it also comments on his obsession with
wealth in the form of copper, the color of the penny, the color of money.
In both the novel and the film. Bud Corliss is a young man on
the make and waspy women are his prey. In fact, in his own perverse
fashion, he’s the optimistic, Franklinian embodiment of the Protestant
work ethic, using his boyish, Prince-Valiant good looks and the Puritans’
whipping boy, sex, to push back against his lower-class station in life,
what the professor in the American “lit” class calls the “pain” of
predestination. With his relentless social climbing, he’s reminiscent of
the multi-talented, super-self-composed protagonist of Patricia
Highsmith’s 1955 novel. The Talented Mr. Ripley.
But whereas Tom Ripley is a genuinely queer character,
ambivalent about both men and women (“I can’t make up my mind
whether I like men or women, so I’m thinking of giving both up”
(Highsmith 81)), Bud is catnip for the opposite sex: a double or mirrorimage of the black widow, he’s that rare noir type, a homme fatal. Like
the reborn Ripley (Matt Damon) in Anthony Minghella’s 1999
adaptation of Highsmith’s novel, he’s also something of a clothes
horse.^’ In A Kiss Before Dying, clothes make the man. Bud’s clothing
— dark in the first part of the film, lighter after he kills Dorrie and begins
to court Ellen — is a kind of mask.
Woe to the woman who becomes the object of Bud’s heart’s
desire — unless, of course, she’s that equally rare type in 50s noir, not a
femme fatale but a woman with a real nose for detection. Pink has
traditionally been associated with femininity — with the accent on the
word “femme” — but it’s also a mixture of red and white, “danger” and
“purity.” Ellen’s “pink cotton dress” therefore codes her not simply as a
potential victim but, since it marks the moment when she becomes a
“private eye,” an agent in her own right.^’ In Levin’s novel, Ellen