COLOUR IN CINEMA

thoughts, images of imagined infidelity, are bathed in blue. Furthering this, red is sexualised most overtly by the red bed, a nude woman on the red sofa, and by the prostitute Domino’s (Vinessa Shaw) apartment. Returning then, to my opening line of inquiry, perhaps ‘Where the rainbow ends’, and the purple theme, is simply a reconciliation between ideas of masculine and feminine sexuality – a mixture of two halves in a heterosexual relationship. Cut to the end of the movie, you can’t help but see purple imagery of ‘settling down’: purple babies’ prams are placed within the frame, uniting red, blue, and the end of romance in childbirth.

So, what’s with purple in Eyes Wide Shut (1999)?

Very early in the movie Tom Cruise’s character Bill asks a question, which I like to think is on behalf of the audience: “Where are we going?”. The response: “Where the rainbow ends”. Now call me naïve, but isn’t that violet? That’s the colour that defines most of the artwork and advertising around the movie and so we may expect it in some sense to be representative of the film’s content – Kubrick after all is known for his rigorous detail.

Despite this, it’s not obvious where purple factors into this psycho-sexual drama. A quick search for colour and Eyes Wide Shut leads to a few reddit threads and independent articles, analysing the function of red and blue. Here, much like Punch Drunk Love’s (2002) use of colour, colour is gendered with both Cruise’s Bill and Adam Sandler’s character Barry attached to blue. Furthermore, Nicole Kidman’s character Alice is introduced to us alongside red and Emilia Watson’s character, Lena, wears red. However, my interest in this comparison is to underline differences in how these gendered colours interact.

Punch Drunk Love is undoubtedly more simplistically gendered. For instance, in Barry and Lena’s relationship, colour theory represents the progression of their feelings for one another; the closer Barry comes to accepting his love for Lena, the closer his outfit comes to embrace her: his tie, shifting from blue, to yellow, and eventually to red. In Eyes Wide Shut, the boundaries are hazy. It appears Alice is characterised by red and Bill by blue. However, these notions are complicated throughout the film.

Most theories I have encountered on Eyes Wide Shut maintain colour as explicitly gendered, with blue as representative of male sexual jealousy. Bill’s jealous

Unfortunately for Bill and Alice, as well as the argument for purely gendered colour in Eyes Wide Shut, the rainbow’s end is notoriously difficult to reach. This is something explored with the addition of the costume shop, ‘Rainbow’, where Bill creates a disguise, which to him, is a convincing alternative to his jealous life and sexual frustration. Here, Kubrick shows the end of the rainbow as an elusive location beyond identity. Indeed, purple becomes a complex stage, where illusion and tangible reality meet, there is a conflict between truth and fiction that begins to attach to selfhood more generally, not just gender. Take for instance, Bill’s return home to find Alice asleep on the now purple bed, next to his costume’s mask. It’s a crucial moment where Bill witnesses a cross between the life he took as fabricated and his life with Alice. Rather than a purple bed signifying a mixture between the two halves of this relationship, it shows a split in Bill. The subversion of this typical narrative of colour is pulled into the final act as previously discussed, where purple imagery, signifying childbirth, is nevertheless complicated by both Alice and Bill’s disillusionment with marriage and the future roles of their relationship.

Ultimately, colour in Eyes Wide Shut subverts the conventions of gendered colour to push toward a more complex conception of identity. The colour purple becomes central to the film in probing questions regarding gendered conceptions of the self and the boundaries that are crossed through disguise and the manipulation of identity. Ultimately, I’ve suggested that colour theory does not simply act on individual films, but that there can be a shared discourse between movies through colour. Indeed, whilst colour acts silently, it can thematically portray intentional continuity, adding to interpretative discussion and fostering more complex stories and visions of the world.

[Harry Pollock - he/him]