yellow

A pure American tone? The yellow of the kitchen-stool vinyl on which James Stewart climbs to test his acrophobia in Vertigo. It's the yellow of postwar American prosperity that Richard Nixon bragged about to Nikita Khrushchev. Aggressive cheer, boastful self-confidence, strident belief in work and getting ahead: Vertigo's yellow is blazon for these values. The same values that were toyed with, mocked, and exploited to great commercial success by certain Pop artists of the 1960s, who took over the dandy yellow that gleams like chrome but looks saturated with creamy yellow papaya pulp.

-- W.S. Di Piero Shooting the Works