I just rewatched Bell, Book and Candle because I’m back on my witch shit, but also it’s a Christmas movie after all, and this viewing had the brunette fiancee stereotype nailed. There’s been a trend in recent years to flip the tropes of Hallmark movies and unimaginative rom-coms: watch the movie in reverse, and the woman escapes her small town to become a high-powered big-city career girl; if you are brunette and focused on your career, you will absolutely lose your boyfriend/fiancee/husband(?) to the blonde protagonist; be careful not to visit your small hometown over Christmas, or the Christmas tree farmer who never left town will trap you with his rugged good looks and folksy wisdom. Stuff like that.

So I’ve been paying extra mind to the non-other women in these movies, the ones whose perspective makes the protagonist’s behavior look selfish at the least, insane at the most. Carrie Bradshaw is our favorite anti-hero in this regard; the woman cannot stop fucking up. There’s a long, luxurious deep dive I want to do into the psyche of Big’s first wife, Barbara–a children’s publisher whose deceased ex-husband left his second wife a million dollars, his third wife with a lifetime’s worth of “I couldn’t help but wonder…” questions. What did he leave her? How has her career progressed? What was their marriage like? I have so many thoughts, fan fiction levels of ideas, and I do think she is the most interesting side character in the entire Sex and the City universe.

But, as usual, I got distracted talking about Sex and the City. Another perfect avatar of the brunette career-girl fiancee is Parker Posey in You’ve Got Mail, a movie I don’t care to rewatch (I am growing weary of the “we must save this beloved neighborhood bookstore none of us actually spend money in” attitude, but that’s a separate post as well). It doesn’t matter if I do the research because it’s Parker Posey, which is enough, but her character Patricia Eden works in publishing too. Perfect. No notes, mostly because I don’t want to rewatch the movie.

So, back to Merle. We learn of her through letters on Jimmy Stewart’s desk, which Queenie has leafed through, but when we first meet her, she is wearing this exquisite green dress I would argue rivals Kiera Knightley’s Atonement green dress, adjusting for inflation and, you know, 1958 morality standards.

Anyway, before I get too carried away looking at images of green dresses on Pinterest, the point is that Merle herself is actually an interesting character. She went to college with Gillian and was known as something of a “beau-snatcher”; she once wrote an anonymous letter to the dean complaining about a girl attending class barefoot. She is deathly afraid of thunderstorms. She agreed to accompany her fiancee to the Zodiac club, where the musicians torment her until she leaves (granted, she had just insulted one of them, the perfectly gay-coded and bitchy Jack Lemmon). I’m not sure what she does for a living, but she has a nice apartment to herself, though Jimmy Stewart rightly asserts that she needs to redecorate, and she paints in a skilled abstract style that is too confusing for him. After he jilts her on Christmas Day, she refuses to take him back. Yeah, she is kind of unpleasant, but she has a rich inner life. She was simply with the wrong man, and it took a bit of witchcraft to convince them both of that.