My laptop burns a dim blue flame into a darkened room. The lateness of the night is creeping up my body as it sinks lower and lower into the mattress, never moving. After a few moments, my mind begins to wander. Is my computer glitching out? Maybe I should reload my browser. So I do. The plainness of the loading screen leers back at me- bright headache white. I squint my eyes, waiting. In the temporary blurriness of my vision, white dissipates lazily into blue. I pause, surprised. Then I commit.
My favourite colour: blue. Colour of my father before me. Colour of my face- a reflection of the screen. I’m curious of my gaze, which decides to leave me in order to trek its own journey. I am seeing nothing. And yet my eyes seem to be seeing everything.
It doesn’t start immediately. It takes about twenty minutes before it begins. The rustling of my family dies out, leaving a blue lake stillness about the air. The bruised blue-black world beyond my opened window retreats into petty silence. I begin to feel a haunting sense of stuck-ness. And then I begin to see.
The screen will flash every now and then. I know it does. Ink black warts and bright white grains of rice will tease me with their jarring entrance. They are here and gone so fast that I begin to wonder if I really saw them at all. So I look harder. Into the blue. Into murky planes of azure, which seem to be both a projection and a curtain. Am I trying to peek behind the curtain, or am I picking out sharpened pixels in the projection? I cannot hear the answer over the sudden assault of sound over my ears.
Fate is the strongest
Fate
Fated
Fatal.
The sound crackles and growls against the base of my skull. It is rippling. I straighten, spooked. What is this distortion? Are my headphones acting up again? I take them off as if they are cursed, fingers light and hesitant. I play the audio directly from my laptop, seated on my legs before me. The sound rumbles against my thighs. Not a glitch. My stomach sinks. I look around briefly. There is a damp blue glow, eaten away at the edges by a dull black vignette. The closed door in the corner suddenly feels locked. I swallow the lump in my throat. I wonder, almost automatically- is it blue? My nails tap against the keyboard as I press play again- painted blue, I realize with an unreasonable sense of dread.
I feel as if I am on a slow-motion roller coaster. The movie is so dreadfully slow. It challenges me at times- I want to look away. To lose interest. On the parts where our cart inches up the tracks, it feels neverending. Every now and then we jolt a bit, but for the most part the climb feels like a bored fright.
A bored fright? I puzzle with myself. Apparently, I am become oxymoron. Moron, more like.
And then I awake at the top of the arch between up and down. The sudden realization is ice cubes shoved in the back of a shirt by a loved one. I tense and shiver and squirm, but still we hang. The suspension before free-fall. Then the violent jolt of sudden high, mechanical whining pitches me forward.
Mad Vincent sits in his yellow chair clasping his knees to his chest. Bananas. The sunflowers wilt in the empty pot, bone dry, skeletal, the black seeds picked into the staring face of a Halloween pumpkin.
The voice work is hissing, striking, slashing. Like a sort of cobra spitting venom at your jugular- only just missing every time. I’ve never heard someone sound like this before. And the whine. It drills at me, like a sudden onset of tinnitus. I want to get off the roller coaster now. But I don’t. It makes me nauseous but I cling to the bars of my seat. Keeping myself secure or trapping myself to the ride?
Blue fights diseased Yellowbelly whose fetid breath scorches the trees yellow with ague. Betrayal is the oxygen of his devilry. He’ll stab you in the back.
I jump. My body is iron. The whispering spitting of words, like wasp bites, jolts and electrifies my skin. I dare not breathe. Yellow suddenly feels like an agent of death, and sickens me. Yet, I feel green- sickened, as if my blue-reflective face has suddenly become a colour pallet for the two to mingle. To spar. Sting.
Though this part finally resolves, it informs the rest of the film for me. I do not look away again. I do not zone out again. The blue screen has me. It’s got me by my chest, like hooks under the bottom of my ribcage tugging forwards. It hurts me but I cannot stop. It hurts me because the end is near. It looms, staring back through an empty blue screen like someone looking through a one-way mirror. I see it all the time, though the film continues on for thirty more minutes. I listen, of course. I see the stipples in the film. The shadows that jerk on and off screen in milliseconds. But it feels like I’ve been let in on the secret now. Like Lombardo says, I close my eyes. “Still blue, gleaming blue, in my brain, in my heart, in my stomach.”
I sit in the dark long after the credits roll. It is far past 2 in the morning. Blue is redefined. Suddenly, things are hiding there, in the blueness. In the black-blue night sky, and in the pale, pan blue of day. It’s in green. It’s in yellow. Once you see it you cannot go back to the blue before Blue. Maybe I’m a dramatic little queer, but things feel different. I know something new about my community that no book or documentary or interview or research piece could have given me. I feel… directly educated. Guilty, somehow, for a time period in which I was not alive. I feel love. Might I haughtily claim from the comfort of my privilege and health, in my pitch black room, that I see? The blue glow still emanates from the screen, swathing over my face and eyes.
Blue is still my favourite colour.
Maddie's Film, Gender, and Sexuality Blog 