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Gad, Sir! Comics!: Silken Scarlett:
Ah, well. We knew Miller had to screw it up somehow. And for all its noirishness here and there, The Spirit is overall comparatively ... noir-light, let's say. Kind of a medium gray, as opposed to full black, as noir goes. In other words, a really impressively bad fit with Miller's sensibilities.
I'm reasonably certain that Miller's Silken Floss will turn out to be an assassin in her own right, somewhere along the way. After all, you'd have a hard time sticking a prostitute into anything even vaguely pretending to be Eisner's Spirit. It's one thing to change a character from a physicist/surgeon into a secretary (and really, Johansson would have had a hard time selling that role; if nothing else, because she's far too young to have managed all that education -- but he could have left her with ONE advanced degree!), but sticking a whore into The Spirit would have been 97 kinds of wrong.
According to the Hollywood Reporter (link via Blog@Newsarama), Scarlett Johansson is being cast in Frank Miller’s film of The Spirit as Silken Floss, “a sexy and intelligent secretary with a vindictive instinct that makes her the perfect accomplice to the Octopus”.
Will Eisner had a character called Silken Floss too - Dr Silken Floss, who was both a nuclear physicist and a brilliant surgeon.
I’ve no wish to denigrate secretaries, but it is notable that Eisner was able to envisage women in prestigious non-traditional careers in 1947, whereas Miller, in 2007, isn’t able to do the same.
Still, it’s a change from the two professions into which Miller usually fits his female characters: whoredom and assassination. Those of Miller’s fans who resent this step may take comfort from the thought that, the last time he had to write about a secretary, Karen Page from Daredevil, he immediately turned her into a junkie porn performer instead.
Ah, well. We knew Miller had to screw it up somehow. And for all its noirishness here and there, The Spirit is overall comparatively ... noir-light, let's say. Kind of a medium gray, as opposed to full black, as noir goes. In other words, a really impressively bad fit with Miller's sensibilities.
I'm reasonably certain that Miller's Silken Floss will turn out to be an assassin in her own right, somewhere along the way. After all, you'd have a hard time sticking a prostitute into anything even vaguely pretending to be Eisner's Spirit. It's one thing to change a character from a physicist/surgeon into a secretary (and really, Johansson would have had a hard time selling that role; if nothing else, because she's far too young to have managed all that education -- but he could have left her with ONE advanced degree!), but sticking a whore into The Spirit would have been 97 kinds of wrong.