Falling in (to) Color

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The Moving Image, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2015, pp. 62-84 (Article)

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For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mov/summary/v015/15.1.thompson.html

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Falling in (to) ColoR KIRSTEN

MOANA

THOMPSON

Chromophilia and Tom Ford’s A Single Man (2009)

Tom Ford’s A Single Man (2009) suggests that falling in (to) color is

a falling into embodiment, sensuality, and the pain of a lover’s loss.

Unfolding on November 30, 1962, the day George Falconer (Colin Firth)

plans to commit suicide, the film shows the last twenty-four hours of his life as a gradual

reawakening or attunement to the surfaces of the world. The film’s fetishistic attention to

texture, detail, and color suggests that cinema’s capacity to isolate, focalize, and reframe

enables a phenomenal openness to the world that is not unlike the experience of falling

in love, while its celebration of color aesthetics—its chromophilia—stages three different

modalities in the history of color.1 First, its production design, technological capacities,

and selective color saturation and desaturation exemplify the contemporary era’s digital

capacity to manipulate color, while simultaneously signaling a reflexive anxiety about the

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problem of color stability for analog film, with implications for the digital era. Second, the intermedial color design of the film’s period setting in the early 1960s nostalgically mourns the passing of an earlier technological regime in which Technicolor was marked as fantastic, at the very historical moment when cinema and television shifted from black and white to Eastman Color as normative register. Third, in its pop art–inflected attention to chromatic surface and its textual allusions to Aldous Huxley’s novels and to psychedelic vision, it explores new cultural concerns with perception and the expansion of consciousness. A Single Man aestheticizes a contemporary shift in the moving image from actuality to potentiality as one in which color acts as a signifier of appearance and disappearance, reflexively foregrounding the materiality of surface. By extension, through its progressive saturation and desaturation (or color “blooming”), it draws attention to the fragile and fugitive nature of analog color processes, yet also promises through its digital capacities that all might be retroactively restored. For at this historical moment marked by the “death of cinema” and the shift to digital production, distribution, and exhibition, color not only digitally alters but also can figuratively renew.

CHROMOPHILIA From the opening moments of the film, the graphic relationships of black, white, and color are at stake in the three words “Fade to Black,” which first appear on screen as white graphemes on a white background, increasing in visibility only as they dissolve into a black field and fade out again. Recalling René Magritte’s famous painting La Trahison des Images (Ceci N’est Pas une Pipe) (1928–29), the film’s first image is cognitively dissonant—that is, the word “black” produces a powerful semantic effect that John Ridley Stroop2 identified as one which distracts us from its formal appearance as white color. The first time “Fade to Black” appears, the words act as a commentary on the story, as we hear strange, distorted sounds that the narrative will go on to suggest are linked to the death of George’s lover, Jim (Matthew Goode), in a car accident. After “The Weinstein Company presents,” the text “Fade to Black” returns as Abel Korzeniowski’s score begins, this time the words appearing in a different white font on a dark blue background, as prelude to a sequence of what turns out to be dreamlike shots of George naked underwater. “Fade to Black” now functions more conventionally as the extradiegetic start of the credit sequence by naming Tom Ford’s production company (“in association with Depth of Field”). The graphic reiteration (yet chromatic transformation) of the credits from white on white, to white on black, to white on blue, in conjunction with the mysterious images and sounds, alerts the viewer in what follows to the important and seductive role that

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chromatic surface and its fugitive form will play, and also underscores the questions of visibility and invisibility with which the film thematically engages.

NOW ISN’T SIMPLY NOW Snapping awake from a dream sequence in which he kisses his dead lover farewell, George tells us, “Waking up begins with saying ‘am’ and ‘now.’” We cut from George’s face to his hand. Feeling for where his lover once lay, he finds only a leaking fountain pen, the shared bed now only wet with the black ink George brings to his lips. “For the past eight months, waking up has actually hurt. Cold realization that I’m still here” accompanies a close-up of George’s bare feet, addressing several different sensorial registers—the flesh of his exposed feet, the carpet’s texture, the wetness of the ink on cotton sheets—and the words “cold,” “still,” and “hurt” mobilize visual, auditory, and tactile signifiers of emotional and physical pain. Despite the voice-over’s apparent affirmation, this scene of inky awakening underscores the traumatic loss of the lover, for in the social context of gay invisibility in 1962, this loss can only be registered chromatically. Because of his physical absence from the scene of Jim’s death and subsequent social exclusion from the funeral,3 it is only in a dream that George can kiss his lover farewell. In its stark composition and chromatic restriction to blue, gray-black, and white, dream imagery shows us a high-angle shot of the car accident (whose sounds asynchronously accompanied the first “Fade to Black” that opens the film). We see two parallel lines of tire tracks on a snowy white ground that lead the eye upward like arrows to an overturned car, next to which a man and dog lie dead. In slow motion we see George enter the shot, walk over, and lie down facing the man. As the camera tracks, cutting in to a close-up of the two men’s faces, the image rotates clockwise, punctuated by several jump cuts, taking us closer and closer to Jim’s dead eyes. Now a new color is introduced into the predominantly blue scene: red. It is red all over Jim’s face that tells us he is dead, red that is echoed on the body of the dog that lies beside him, and red that shines in the illuminated brake lights on the vehicle. The red stands out against the cold blue tones of the snowy image, contrasting with the cloudy opacity of Jim’s open eyes, indicating that life has gone from his body. Despite red’s affective and semantic significance in this scene, we might recall Peter Wollen’s words that remind us of color film’s reprographic artificiality, that “the color is not in the Bazinian sense, a direct indexical registration of color in the natural world, it is a dye.”4 Acting in conjunction with other cinematic techniques (absence of diegetic sound, use of slow motion, jump cuts, cool blue filters), this scene’s stylized color marks George’s

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repression of the abrupt harshness, the determinate intensity of death, the rend, the wound. In other words, color is a painterly marker in George’s unconscious (not blood, but red, if we recall Godard’s famous dictum) but also registered through red’s chromatic relationship with blue, black, and white.5 For George, the shadow of his own mortality is like an affective cloud: “now isn’t simply now: it’s a cold reminder. One day later than yesterday, one year later than last year, and that sooner or later it will come.” And indeed, death does come in the ironic form of a heart attack, on the very morning when George has decided not to kill himself after all (“and just like that, it came”). The voice-over’s repetition (“now isn’t simply now”) alerts us, as do the jump cuts that interrupt and periodically stutter the smooth surface of the image in both narrative present and flashback, that the status of the image is in question. Like George’s reflection, it is “not so much a face, as an expression of a predicament.” “Now isn’t simply now” also describes the three different temporal modalities the film stages in its technological capacities, design aesthetics, and phenomenological perception of color.

COLOR BLOOMS, COLOR POTENTIALITY David Batchelor has suggested that one aesthetic consequence of the historical shift from analog to digital color in the postwar era was the shift from color as a continuum to color as a discrete element, such as the pixel. Whereas earlier regimes of color were defined by the color wheel and by the painter’s easel, the contemporary era is one marked by digital databases like the Pantone color system (created in 1963), in which thousands of swatches of premixed colors are assigned numerical values in a nonhierarchical system.6 Building on this account, Carolyn Kane has named the digital cinema of the last decade Photoshop Cinema, as one characterized by a “material thickness” in which the digital pixel is constituted by three layers of color values (R, G, B), together with an alpha channel.7 Yet I want to suggest here that although the colored pixel might have a structural “thickness,” in A Single Man it enacts a process, a potentiality, a soaking-in, or a bodily transformation. In this regard, Catherine Fowler’s recent examination of contemporary installation art describes an aesthetic shift in the moving image from “actuality” to a “potentiality” marked by the digital era. Joining others like Mark Hansen and Boris Groys, Fowler observes that some recent digital media explore movement that is on the very threshold of perception and “which test[s] our perceptual capacity.”8 Examining a series of films by Anri Sala, Tacita Dean, and David Claerbout, whose techniques build on the work of earlier filmmakers from Paul Sharits to Bill Viola and James Benning, Fowler offers potentiality as a way of designating shifts in the image, as

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constituted in various ways: by making us look for something where it might seem there is nothing; by looking for that which cannot easily be perceived and for what is not entirely present; by foregrounding imperceptible natural time rather than human (or cinematic) time; by using composition to obscure what we might expect to see and to mix what we think we see with what we can actually see and what we could see if we looked harder; by filming images in a state of becoming; and by creating visual conundrums and filming disappearance in progress.9 Fowler’s nuanced definition of actuality as “something that is real, as opposed to what is expected, intended or feared,” points to the ways in which the actual is defined through its differentiation from conditional or provisional alternatives (that which is not real), which potentiality makes explicit. Taking up Agamben’s reading of Aristotle, Fowler points out how a notion of privation is also embedded in potentiality: “essentially to say I ‘can’ requires a recognition of the possibility that I ‘cannot.’” Potentiality’s usefulness as a term offers not only a sense of possibility (that something may happen in the future) but may also mean a “proven capacity,” or what Aristotle calls an “existing potentiality.”10 If potentiality is a useful term for describing a specific series of moving image practices in the avant-garde, I suggest it might also be extended to include the color grading practices of A Single Man. Here I want to draw attention to Fowler’s last two categories of potentiality, where she suggests that David Claerbout’s animation of part of the image in films like Boom (1996) exemplifies “images in a state of becoming” and that Anri Sala’s lens distortion and increasing shadows in Time after Time (2003) are likewise “disappearance in progress,” and where both are engaged in minute, almost subthreshold shifts in movement that challenge perception. Although A Single Man is not engaged in this level of experimentation at the threshold of perception, nonetheless its gradual shifts into full color saturation still challenge the viewer’s perceptual awareness of when, and, indeed, if, the image is changing, while subtly shaping mood and atmosphere. Beginning with the selection of film stock, A Single Man stages the image as a compellingly beautiful surface and, through its color timing software and graduated color manipulations, reflexively foregrounds its potentiality or temporal capacity to change that surface repeatedly. Director of photography Eduard Grau proposed Kodak 5279, which has a rich saturation, particularly in the red range: “It has very beautiful grain, and in a way, is timeless. . . . We tested it along with other stocks, and Tom and I both decided this would be the one.”11 Under the direction of leading digital intermediate

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colorist Stephen Nakamura (Syriana [Stephen Gaghan, 2005], Kill Bill [Quentin Tarantino, 2003], The Hurt Locker [Kathryn Bigelow, 2008], The Aviator [Martin Scorsese, 2004]), Stefan Sonnenfeld’s Company 3, a boutique house specializing in color correction and other postproduction effects, used Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve for the color grading, which, along with Quantel’s Pablo, Synthetic Aperture’s Color Finesse, or Filmlight’s Baselight, among others, has become an industry standard.12 Together with the 120 visual effects shots created by Engine Room, Company 3’s color grading exemplifies digital cinema’s contemporary capacity to manipulate color saturation in the image, initiated by films like Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998) and O Brother Where Art Thou? (Joel Coen, 2000).13 To a much greater degree than was previously possible by analog methods like bleach bypass, silver retention, or flashing, this new digital capacity has transformed the surface of the image today (albeit often imitating and remediating those very techniques in digital form). Diverging profoundly from Technicolor consultant Natalie Kalmus’s stern admonitions in her famous manifestos that color should harmonize while remaining unobtrusive and sensitive to cultural norms of color,14 films like Sin City (Robert Rodriguez/Frank Miller, 2005) or Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé, 2009) illustrate one dimension of contemporary digital capacities that are engaged in purposeful estrangement and overt stylization. Yet if these films might exemplify Scott Higgins’s demonstrative color, A Single Man is a more subtle manipulation of color surface, working within a paradigm of restraint.15 The film’s chromatic resaturations and desaturations were principally achieved through DaVinci’s Custom Curves tool, which Nakamura first discovered when working with Newton Thomas Sigel, director of photography on Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (George Clooney, 2002). Nakamura explained that Custom Curves enables the color grader to “reshape the character of the image so that the highlights would bloom, the shadows become darker with more contrast, and the mids become more ‘creamy.’” He observed, I’m only directly affecting the luminance of the image but when you do that, the colors all change too. The colors in the highlights pop while the mids, where the actors’ skin tone usually is, gets an almost waxen look to it. Achieving the look was almost entirely about using the Custom Curves to create the overall look and then refining the curves scene by scene. Once the palette for each scene was set, I would go through and make some subtle shot-by-shot corrections but I’d always do that “through” the palette we’d created—essentially constraining any refinements so they would happen within the world of the overall look we’d set with the curves.16

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Through Custom Curves’s manipulation of luminance, color infusion marks George’s heightened awareness of the beauty in others and what Kyle Stevens suggests is a concomitant emotional shift where George is “learning to care about others.”17 The university campus, interiors of the English Department, and George’s home all appear in a desaturated, largely brown, gray, and olive-green color palette that periodically resaturates into warm colors in isolated parts of the frame. As George goes about his day on campus, color “blooms” indicate the shifts in his perceptual attention and aesthetic appreciation, as we see close-ups of eyes, lips, and torsos, including those of students Kenny Potter (Nicholas Hoult) and Lois (Aline Weber); a Spanish hustler, Carlos (Jon Kortajarena); and two men playing tennis. As George looks at her, color manipulation heightens the chromatic intensity of the green eyes of the English Department secretary (Keri Lynn Pratt) and is subtly echoed by the isolated green of a lamp behind her, prompting him to say, “You always look so beautiful, really fresh and you have such a lovely smile. Arpège?” The color saturation is subtle and graduated, unfolding as we watch. In Fowler’s terms, it expresses “images in a state of becoming” but also invites us to consider George’s changing emotional and perceptual points of view as “what we could see if we looked harder.”18 Color also suggests affective exchange between mutually perceiving bodies, with George and Kenny “blooming” into color in response to each other, through shot–reverse shot continuity editing. Starting as one object, color is intersubjective flux beneath form: as green eye, red flower, or pink lips, color intensifies, moving between and progressively animating bodies.19 This “blooming” of color is a device that recalls Pleasantville, where “coloreds” were people experiencing strong emotion who, under the effects of jazz or sexual passion, turn into color in a black-and-white world of 1950s cultural repression. Like Pleasantville, A Single Man’s mise-en-scène aligns color with the human, the sexual and the embodied, and monochromatic or subdued color with the dematerialized, socially conservative, or cerebral. Indeed, as Richard Misek reminds us, this opposition between a chromatic and monochrome world in cinema is by no means new, given the dyadic worlds of waking–dreaming, sanity–insanity, heaven–earth, life–art, and past–present in films from A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946) to Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller, 1963) and Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987).20 As with the earliest periods of applied color, from hand painting to tinting and toning, A Single Man constructs a hybrid chromatic image, but unlike these earlier processes, the color effects are not applied to the emulsion of the film but rather embedded in the digital intermediate. The manipulation of luminosity also draws attention to the structural relationship of light and color as both translucent and

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temporal, for as Batchelor describes, “luminous colors are the most transitory,” and through them, “the presence of color is experienced as an event.”21 Although the digital capacity to isolate with precision and extensively manipulate the frame in a painterly fashion is by no means new, following on from stenciling, rotoscoping, and animation in the frame-by-frame manipulation of the image, the ease and speed in altering part of the color image (both static elements and those temporally unfolding within the frame), together with this experiential quality, opens up new potentialities, or the “proven capacities” of the digital medium to retroactively transform the image. A Single Man uses color “blooming”—or a subtle, sometimes barely perceptible shift in saturation, contrast, and luminosity—that unfurls these capacities as we watch certain images like close-ups of the face. In contrast to painting, Béla Balázs insisted on color cinema’s potentiality, its capacity to stage subtle transformation: “For a painter may paint a flushed face but never a pale face slowly being warmed to rose-red by a blush; he can paint a pale face but never the dramatic phenomenon of blanching.”22 However, instead of color cinema recording a profilmic performance of an actor’s fugitive blush, color grading now can digitally perform that blush.23 Color grading also plays a key role in the chromatic alteration or saturation of objects or characters that do not change within the shot. With Nakamura’s assistance, and enabled by DaVinci’s control interface, Ford played an extensive role in manipulating the saturation or altering the hue of parts of the image, from his repeated chromatic adjustments of a woman holding a dog (“I recolored this woman’s lipstick, I recolored the inside of her car”) to the carpet in the bank scene and the feathers of the Indian headdress worn by George’s annoying neighbor Christopher (Paul Butler). Ford acknowledges, “I became so obsessive with the coloring of this film. I spent so much time recoloring it.” Interestingly, color manipulation could also backfire. The actor Nicholas Hoult’s eyes were already so startlingly blue that saturating the color made them seem fake, so Ford and Nakamura had to reduce the manipulation of the eyes, in contrast to other elements in the shot that remained heightened.24 As one training manual for color timers points out, graders must work within certain plausible psychological limit points such as memory colors, which are not the “actual” color of blue sky or green grass but a more saturated version of “what the audience is expecting to see.”25 Here color’s potentiality becomes a phantasmatic capacity, in Fowler’s terms, “for what is not entirely present”; it is digitally actualized as what we think we see.26 A Single Man’s reiterated use of the chromatically enhanced close-up also underscores how contemporary digital effects are reshaping the aesthetics and economics of the face. As Susan Stamberg recently noted, “in fact some stars now have digital

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coloring written into their contracts,” emphasizing the role that both colorists and visual effects artists play in making stars look as good as possible, especially in close-ups.27 But more than the traditional role of the cinematographer in glamorizing the beauty and appeal of the star, the color grader’s digital capacity to manipulate saturation, luminosity, and contrast can also defamiliarize the face, making skin waxen or eyes too blue. Indeed, the frequency with which eyes and lips are the subject of the close-up in A Single Man goes beyond operating as a mere signifier of George’s attention and instead suggests the inhuman and alien capacities of the close-up to present itself as sheer surface.28 For example, this hyperbolic capacity to estrange appears in a distorted close-up of Charley’s (Julianne Moore) eye reflected in her makeup mirror. In the scene where this close-up appears, Charley is talking to George on the phone. When he asks her what she has been doing, she claims she has been “finishing up a book,” but in reality she is engaged with “putting her face on.” The scene concludes with a shot that shows the two sides of her face, with one eye in full eyeliner and mascara juxtaposed with one eye nude of makeup. Charley’s observation to herself (“beautiful”) encapsulates the film’s larger attention to surfaces as one that thematically insists upon the artifice of social identities. This self-consciousness about the construction of self parallels the film’s opening scenes where George dresses, his voice-over observing, “It takes time in the morning for me to become George.” The film’s reiterated close-ups of female eyes and lips wearing mascara and lipstick chromatically “blooming” into saturated greens, blacks, and reds draw attention to the historical role of color in cinematic cosmetics and the gendered aesthetics of beauty.29

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME A Single Man’s period setting in 1962 stages a second historical modality of color in which formal experimentation and meticulous art design reflexively acknowledge important historical shifts in color cinematography. By the early 1960s, Hollywood was accelerating its shift from black-and-white film stock to color as a normative mode, along with its replacement of Technicolor by Eastman Color. By 1965, optical color films (as opposed to earlier applied processes of the silent era) would outnumber black-and-white for the first time, with color no longer solely signifying fantasy, animation, musical, or exotic costume-drama genres but an increasing realism. Scholars have debated some of the factors in Hollywood’s shift to color, and I do not mean to reexamine them here, except to point out that there is some agreement on the ideological pressure for realism and the influential role of television.30 The shift to color happened not only in Hollywood

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but in television as well, with color network programming and color TV manufacturing finally making inroads in the market.31 A declining classical Hollywood studio system overlapped with an emerging modernist European art cinema whose formalism used color reflexively in new ways, such as in Godard’s Le Mépris (1963) and Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964). In this shifting landscape, A Single Man meticulously re-creates mid-twentiethcentury color aesthetics through two very different referents: LIFE magazine covers and the saturated hues of Technicolor movies. The film’s stylistic remediation of period media sets up a relationship between 1962 and the digital capacities of digital cinema that illustrate George’s words that “now isn’t simply now.” As colorist Nakamura observed to me, Tom Ford had a specific feel in mind: sort of like LIFE magazine covers of the early 1960s. I don’t know if it was the printing process or the photographs themselves but a lot of those covers had a kind of look that’s halfway between real photography as we think of it today and [the] unreal feel of drawing or painting.32 For example, the desaturated color palette of a January 12, 1962, cover of LIFE that featured the story “The Drive for Mass Shelters,” while motivating the meticulous yellowish oranges, olive greens, and browns of George’s academic world, also served as specific inspiration for a comedic shot in which George imagines his colleague Grant (Lee Pace) and his family in a bomb shelter.33 In contrast to this drab America consumed with the fear of nuclear war and the Cuban Missile Crisis, A Single Man’s recourse to saturated hues summons a nostalgic pleasure and refuge in the vanishing world of three-strip (type IV) Technicolor. This process had dominated color cinematography for thirty years since its introduction in Disney’s animated cartoon Flowers and Trees (1932), in La Cucaracha (Lloyd Corrigan, 1934), and in Becky Sharp (Rouben Mamoulian, 1935). Although the introduction of Kodak Eastman Color type 5248 in 1953 did not initially seem to sound the death knell of the “glorious Technicolor” that Fred Astaire and Janis Paige sing about in Silk Stockings (Rouben Mamoulian, 1957), by the early 1960s, its demise was inevitable, and in 1974 the last dye-transfer Technicolor laboratory had closed in the United States.34 While modernist cinema experimented with color, Hollywood moved ever closer to verisimilar color with the release of Kodak 5251 in 1962, marking a new standard in registering profilmic color and consolidating Eastman Color’s replacement of Technicolor that had begun with the antitrust ruling of 1948.

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The artificial and stylized hues of one of the most famous Technicolor films, The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), were a key influence in one particular scene. Through similarities of hairstyle and costume between Dorothy (Judy Garland) and Jennifer Strunk (Ryan Simpkins), George’s neighbor appears to him at the bank as a kind of ecstatic vision in teal (Plate 8). First glimpsed as a reflected pool in the polished floor, she taps her feet like Dorothy, and her shoes “bloom” into color. As the camera pans up with George’s gaze at her dress, hair, and eyes, the color soaks into his face in response. Wearing a bright red dress and lipstick, Jennifer’s mother Susan Strunk (Ginnifer Goodwin) joins them. Ford has described the film’s narrative arc as a chromatic progression from George’s initial depression, where “everything is flat. Color is flat,” to the saturated reds, greens, and teals that begin to appear, until “he’s living in Technicolor, very vivid.”35 Like Martin Scorsese’s re-creation of two- and three-strip Technicolor in The Aviator, the scene’s chromatic cinephilia is as much about nostalgic homage as about any accurate re-creation of the imbibition process,36 simultaneously mourning the loss of the past while re-creating it technologically. Simulated Technicolor offers a degree of visual warmth and intensity that also suggests the affective valence to “home,” a concern that is at the center of Dorothy’s quest (“there’s no place like home”) and that also reflects George’s own losses. Not insignificantly, his architect lover’s death leaves him alone in an empty modernist glass house in cool brown tones, which will only become tonally warm when Kenny stays the night.37 Although the simulated Technicolor teal (a variant of cyan) of Jennifer’s dress and shoes creates a heightened warmth encouraged by the score’s swelling strings, it is nonetheless marked as artificial and stylized, the teals counterpointed by the waxen whiteness of Jennifer’s skin, in contrast to the cooler tones of the monochromatic background.38 Similarly, in a later scene, where George and Carlos look out at the sunset, the sky’s intense magenta pink is also reminiscent of Technicolor’s hues, with Carlos’s remark “You know, it’s the smog that makes it that color” acknowledging the manmade and unnatural processes that produce the effect. George’s reply, “I’ve never seen a sky like this before,” only underscores the scene’s embrace of stylization and artificiality as dye-transfer surface39 (Plate 9). At the same time that the film digitally re-creates the stylized aesthetics of LIFE magazine color photography yet also mourns a lost world of Technicolor that could only be cinephilic, the juxtaposition of saturated and desaturated parts of the frame and the foregrounding of color surfaces blooming through temporal shifts might remind us of our own era’s Eastman Color process and its particular chemical susceptibility to fading, a susceptibility that also extends to digital storage devices.40 In contrast to the relative stability of Technicolor’s photochemical process under light,

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Eastman Color’s cyan or blue skies tended to fade to white, eventually turning the image pinky red. In Plate 9, the scene with Carlos and George is dominated by a huge blue poster for Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), with its close-up of Janet Leigh’s eye a striking visual signifier of the Cold War climate of fear in 1962. But its purple-blue color merging into the (digitally simulated) Technicolor magenta of a smoggy Los Angeles sunset also offers a composite diachronic diagram of the historical relationships of Eastman Color, Technicolor, and our own digital era.

COLOR VISION Exemplified by Janet Leigh’s bold blue eye, A Single Man’s heightened aesthetics of surface is our third modality, drawing our attention to the key role color design has played in the history of mass production and consumer advertising. The blue eye that advertises a black-and-white film also points to the shifting relationships between blackand-white and color processes. For example, the black-and-white photo of a naked Jim, which George takes out of his safe deposit box at the bank, triggers his black-and-white memories of the time when the couple lay talking in the desert. Similarly to Pleasantville, this sequence was originally shot in color and then digitally transformed into black and white, suggesting the ways in which black-and-white no longer refers to a different film stock but is now a palette option in a digital database. Although Ford argued that the flashback’s achromatic aesthetics remediated George’s photographic media (in contrast to all other flashbacks in the film, which are in warm golden colors) because “he was thinking in light and dark, in shadow and light, and so his memory of this sequence is in black and white,”41 the sequence also reproduces a televisual and print advertising aesthetic exemplified by Calvin Klein’s 1980s underwear ads with Marky Mark, in which the partially clothed male body was a key signifier for both heterosexual and gay consumers. The film’s stylized black-and-white sequence also prompted critical mockery for its uncanny resemblance to television and print ads for perfumes like Eternity and Obsession of the 1980s and early 1990s. In this way, black-and-white no longer invokes a socially conservative past in the way it did in Pleasantville but inevitably reproduces the aesthetics of fashion photography and commercial design. Indeed, much of the initial critical reception of the film dismissed the film’s style as shallow aestheticism, as “Gucci Goo” by a first-time director better known for his fashion career. This reception was typified by Scott Foundas’s derisive: Too much is never enough for fashion designer turned filmmaker Tom Ford, whose debut feature flaunts its capital-A Artiness the way some Napoleonic gym

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rats flaunt their overdeveloped musculature. . . . he does, however, share their affection for art direction over actual direction, and for extravagant surfaces over the lower depths of meaning and emotion.42 As both Kyle Stevens and I have separately observed, this dismissal of surface style— and color’s place in it—is one that David Batchelor has located in a long tradition of chromophobia, in which color is either “the property of some foreign body—usually the feminine, oriental, primitive, infantile, vulgar, queer or pathological”—or associated with “the superficial, supplementary, inessential or cosmetic.”43 As Stevens notes, A Single Man’s heightened color aesthetics and the critical derision they engendered certainly exemplify Rosalind Galt’s theorization of “pretty” aesthetics (themselves developed from Batchelor) as that which are “too decorative, too sensorially pleasurable to be high art, and yet too composed and ‘arty’ to be efficient entertainment.”44 Yet I would also argue that the film has it both ways, both remediating the material surfaces of fashion and yet self-consciously critiquing the role that advertising plays in producing consumer desires for those surfaces. It does this through the figure of George, himself an artfully constructed series of beautiful surfaces, from his immaculately tailored bespoke suits and shirts to his glistening shoes and glasses. Nonetheless, it is George who tells his students that “Madison Avenue sells us things that we don’t need,” because of the “fear that bad breath will ruin our friendships,” and who rants to his colleague Grant that most of his students “aspire to nothing more than a corporate job and the desire to raise Coke-drinking, TV-watching children, who as soon as they can speak, chant TV jingles and smash things with hammers.” Like the historical changes in cinematic color discussed earlier, the film’s postwar period setting was also a time of important shifts in the use of color in both mass culture and high art, from the abstract expressionism of Mark Rothko to the saturated colors of pop art. Andy Warhol’s screen printing and paintings reflexively showed how industrially mass-produced color was central to an object’s design and surplus value. Paralleling a similar postwar surge of consumer color in the 1920s, and shaped by color consultants like Faber Birren and Howard Ketcham, color was everywhere in the 1960s; from kitchens to cars, and from acrylic paints to men’s shirts, color was key to consumer desire.45 This is what makes the pencil sharpener that Kenny offers to buy George so irresistible: indeed, Kenny and George’s discussion is about the semantic significance of consuming a color, not the object itself. Kenny says, “I thought you’d probably pick blue . . . isn’t blue supposed to be spiritual?” while George suggests that red can mean “a lot of things—rage, lust.” Charley is also a consumer of the chromatically designed object, favoring pink cigarettes and Tanqueray gin, because, as she says, “I love the color

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of the bottle.” She listens to Serge Gainsbourg and dances to Booker T and the MGs’s hit instrumental from 1962 “Green Onions” (a melody that Ford suggests anticipates the psychedelic sound of the late 1960s), and she decorates her house with orange trees and bright modern art. As she is modeled after socialite icons like Babe Paley and Pauline de Rothschild, and dressed in a black-and-white Rudi Gernreich dress, Ford insists that Charley’s tastes in fashion, music, and interior design mark her as “ahead of the curve.”46 Charley, George, and Kenny’s aesthetic preferences for chromatic surfaces are precisely why advertisers and product designers carefully select color hue, saturation, and value to create branded objects. William Leach’s seminal study Land of Desire showed how color, along with glass and light, was one of the “visual materials of desire” that transformed the American public sphere in the formation of a new consumer culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.47 Following the invention of aniline coal-tar dyes in the first half of the nineteenth century, synthetic color increasingly transformed the public sphere, shaping manufacturing and media through cinema, newspaper advertising, book illustrations, comics, billboards, photographs, and posters. From the 1890s to the 1960s, synthetic color played a key role in American design and industrial mass-production and consumption practices, accelerating particularly after the Second World War. Writing in the 1950s, Aldous Huxley’s description of synthetic color could also read as a description of pop art subjects: today the chemical industry turns out paints, inks and dyes in endless variety and enormous quantities. In our modern world there is enough bright color to guarantee the production of billions of flags and comic strips, millions of stop signs and tail-lights, fire engines and Coca-Cola containers by the hundred thousand, carpets, wallpapers and non-representational art by the square mile. Huxley decried color’s ubiquity for “familiarity breeds indifference. We have seen too much pure, bright color at Woolworth’s to find it intrinsically transporting.”48 But Huxley’s interest in color extended beyond color’s commodity function in mass culture to include its role in psychedelic vision. Partly because Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley were friends and creative collaborators, Isherwood’s source novel A Single Man singled out the famous author from other thinkers of the period, such as Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, and John C. Lilly, who also wrote about the transformed visions that drug taking could enable.49 Huxley is also an important intertext in the film. In class one day, George begins a lecture on Huxley’s satiric novel After Many a Summer (1939), a novel about an aging American millionaire who, fearing his own death, hires a

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scientist to conduct research that might forestall this. George begins his lecture on the novel with the question, “how does the title relate to our story?”50 As the nondiegetic score rises in volume, drowning out a student’s response that “it doesn’t,” we cut to a flashback of the underwater image of George that began the film. George’s question is the film’s invitation to us to consider the relationship between the themes of mortality and transformed perception in Huxley’s work and our protagonist’s life. Allusions to Huxley work in two principal ways in A Single Man, connecting the issues of mortality in After Many a Summer and the mind-expanding vision in The Doors of Perception to the physical and perceptual transformations that George undergoes in the narrative. Ostensibly departing from his lecture on Huxley, George begins to talk about fear, reflecting on the ways in which it is triggered by a majority’s “real or imagined beliefs about a minority who is invisible.” In a series of extreme close-ups that suggest his distracted state of mind, George’s point of view shows us the eyes of his listening students Kenny and Lois, which bloom into color again. As George invites the class to “think of another minority—one that can go unnoticed if it needs to,” we see Kenny turn to look, and we cut to two men sitting together, as one man in a gray cardigan looks downward. As George says, “And if that minority is somehow invisible,” we return again to the two men, the man looking away again. For a third time we cut back to the man as George says, “Minorities are just people—people like us.” This sequence’s editing makes clear that the invisible minority under discussion is the homosexual, and its color blooms make visible those moments of emotive connection between Kenny, George, and the unnamed third man as members of that invisible community.51 The sequence also returns us to the film’s chromatic distinctions between being seen and being socially visible, for George is a man who lives in a glass house of muted browns and olive greens, and yet his identities as a gay man and Jim’s partner (shown in warm orange-yellow flashbacks) cannot be acknowledged. George’s impromptu talk on fear compels Kenny to seek him out after the lecture, and a conversation about fear between them then leads to a discussion about drugs. Kenny asks George whether he has ever taken mescaline, to which he wryly responds, “I shaved off my eyebrows once on mescaline. It wasn’t a good look for me.” Mescaline continues as a running joke between the two men throughout the narrative,52 for to discuss drugs in this time period inevitably led back to Huxley. After taking mescaline in Humphry Osmond’s research studies in 1953, Huxley wrote down his experiences in The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956), observing that luminosity, intense color, and a heightened sense of meaning were three key characteristics of psychedelic experience:

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Like the flowers [my books] glowed, when I looked at them, with brighter colors, a profounder significance. Red books, like rubies; emerald books; books bound in white jade; books of agate; of aquamarine, of yellow topaz; lapis lazuli books whose color was so intense, so intrinsically meaningful, that they seemed to be on the point of leaving the shelves to thrust themselves more insistently on my attention.53 For Huxley, mescaline “raises all colors to a higher power and makes the percipient aware of innumerable fine shades of difference.” He shifted cultural understandings of psychotropic drugs from regarding them as “psychotomimetic,” or psychotic inducing, to considering them a productive mechanism for the expansion of consciousness, against which ordinary vision is considered to be “muddy” and restrictive.54 Although I do not mean to suggest that A Single Man utilizes psychedelic aesthetics, I do propose that the key role that color plays in signaling George Falconer’s perceptual awakening and sense of transcendent social connection is part of a broader cultural concern with chromatic vision with which psychedelic culture would engage. Hallucinogenic films like The Trip (Roger Corman, 1967) and mixed media events like Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966) were at the interface of a cultural shift from photographic and cinematic regimes of vision to emergent digital and cybernetic regimes, which shared new conceptions of the body and its sense organs as a network across which sensory data are exchanged. And as Andrew Syder’s recent study has compellingly suggested, the psychedelic movement believed that political revolution “could only occur after a revolution had taken place in how people use their sense organs, and central to this project were radical reconfigurations of both the eye and the central nervous system as loci of perception.”55 A Single Man’s graduated color shifts, animated visual effects, and point-ofview editing enact the dilatory intensity of the perception of color (such as the flower that opens to George’s gaze), staging Huxley’s suggestion that the intense saturation of meaning, light, and color under the effects of mescaline is physically palpable as a movement or vibration toward the perceiver—as he describes it, “like a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged.”56 If the intensification of color perception is one part of the project of A Single Man, a second is demonstrating how this attunement produces an affective exchange between diegetic bodies. Kenny fears that “we’re born alone, we die alone. And while we’re here we’re absolutely, completely sealed in our own bodies.”57 The film challenges Kenny’s fear, demonstrating through its formal

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strategies that individuals aren’t sealed in their separate bodies, indeed showing that color is transformative, eruptive, destabilizing. The formal visibility of color blooming and its relational effects also enact a social legibility of the queer man who is no longer alone in his glass house: he has been warmed and enlivened by others. Moments before he dies, George’s feeling that “it’s as though it had all just come into existence” has a radical temporal dimension in his sense of connection with others (as we see flashbacks of dancing with Charley, of swimming with Kenny), a sense of becoming at the very moment of his unbecoming. He is most alive at the moment he dies, most richly in color as the life bleeds from him. In voice-over we hear, “A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity, when, for a few brief seconds, the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp, and the world seems so fresh. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade.” “Freshness,” a word George repeatedly uses to express his aesthetic delight in others, would seem to suggest the natural, the emotional, the real. But A Single Man’s embrace of chromatic stylization situates it most strongly in the digital age as a refusal of the natural, or rather reimagines the natural as expanded vision, incarnated in the perceptual transformations that George has undergone and that digital color has shown us. To illustrate this, I want to conclude with a famous story about color that abstract expressionist Frank Stella once told: “I knew a wise guy who used to make fun of my painting, but he didn’t like the Abstract Expressionists either. He said they would be good painters if they could only keep the paint as good as it is in the can. And that’s what I tried to do, I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can.”58 Stella’s embrace of this impossible desire “to keep the paint as good as it was in the can” celebrates a “freshness” that is as much about the flat, shiny, artificial, and deeply saturated hues of contemporary digital aesthetics as it is about the new postwar medium of acrylic paint. A Single Man’s nostalgic remediation of the material surfaces of lost color processes and its play with appearance and disappearance are engaged in a movement that reflexively mimes its own narrative themes of mourning and loss—of the lover, of social recognition of that love, and ultimately of the protagonist’s life; in George’s words, “death is the future—it’s what we all share.” After George has died, his image slowly desaturates back to gray before it fades out to a black field. This formal strategy returns us to the words “Fade to Black” with which the film began, reflexively drawing attention to the impermanence of all media, indeed, of life itself. The film’s potentiality recognizes the fugitive nature of cinematic color processes from Technicolor to Eastman Color, which “like everything . . . fade” and yet, in the digital era, might also be

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restored. For the capacity to vanish is always carried within the restorative gesture: to bloom and flush with color simultaneously suggests that it can also fade, and so, in George’s words, “now is never simply now.” The ultimate impossibility of George’s desire “to make these moments last” is recognized by his temporal metaphor that “like everything, they fade.” Perhaps in cinema—if only for a while—can these intensities be remembered, indeed, felt.

Kirsten Moana Thompson is professor of film studies and director of the Film Programme at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. She is author of Apocalyptic Dread: American Cinema at the Turn of the Millennium (2007) and Crime Films: Investigating the Scene (2007).

Notes 1. I take this term from David Batchelor, who traces lengthy traditions of both chromophilia and chromophobia in art history and philosophy. See Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2000), 97–113. 2. John R. Stroop’s research in the 1930s (now known as the Stroop test) asked readers to name the colors in which a series of words were printed, many of which contradicted the meaning of the text; for example, the word “green” was printed in blue. Stroop discovered that participants had great difficulty inhibiting the automatic meaning effect of the word “green” (semantic interference) to correctly name the color of the text and that directed attention was necessary to overcome the cognitive dissonance prompted by the graphic and visual contradiction. John De Young, “Using the Stroop Effect to Test Our Capacity to Direct Attention: A Tool for Navigating Urgent Transitions,” February 8, 2014, http://www.snre.umich.edu/eplab/demos/st0/ stroopdesc.html. 3. Unlike Christopher Isherwood’s source novel, in which Jim’s uncle Ackerley calls to invite George to the funeral (which he declines), Ford’s script chooses to emphasize exclusion: “the service is just for family.” 4. Peter Wollen, “Cinema and Technology: A Historical Overview,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (London: Macmillan, 1980), 24. 5. Jean-Luc Godard’s interviewer observed, “There is a great deal of blood in Pierrot Le Fou (1965),” to which he replied, “Not blood, red.” See Jean Narboni and Tom Milne, eds., Godard on Godard (New York: Viking, 1972), 217. 6. Batchelor, Chromophobia, 105. 7. Carolyn Kane, Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 243–44. 8. See Mark B. N. Hansen, Feed Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First Century Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Boris Groys, Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Catherine Fowler, “Obscurity and Stillness: Potentiality in the Moving Image,” Art Journal 72, no. 1 (2013): 64–79.

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9. Fowler, “Obscurity and Stillness,” 78. 10. Ibid., 65. 11. Peter Caranicas, “27-Year-Old D.P. behind A Single Man,” Variety, December 29, 2009, http://variety.com/2009/film/news/27-year-old-d-p-behinda-single-man-1118013158/. Contributors to the design of the film included production designer Dan Bishop (designer for AMC’s Mad Men, a show much praised for its attention to historically specific production design), cinematographer Eduard Grau, colorist Stephen Nakamura, and Ford himself. 12. Color grading platforms fall into two principal types: dedicated color systems with specific hardware and hardware storage systems, or do-it-yourself software-based color systems (such as DaVinci Resolve). Assimilate Scratch, Autodesk Lustre, and Adobe SpeedGrade use third-party color correction surfaces from J. L. Cooper, Tangent Devices, and Euphonix. See Alexis Van Hurkman, The Color Correction Handbook: Professional Techniques for Video and Cinema (Berkeley, Calif.: Peachpit, 2014), 76, 79. 13. As is standard with digital grading today, Engine Room largely worked in cosmetic cleanups of the actors, windows, and removal of unwanted elements, as well as creating the smoggy Los Angeles sky and animating a rose that George sniffs. Dan Schmit, Senior VFX Supervisor/Creative Director/DP of Engine Room Production House, e-mail correspondence with the author, May 2014. O Brother Where Art Thou? was the first feature film with color grading and a fully digital intermediate (DI). To evoke the faded colors of old photographs in its Depression-period setting in the Deep South, director of photography Roger Deakins desaturated the colors, a technique he had initially attempted through analog means (using bleach bypass and combining hybrid interpositives of color and black and white) but had failed to achieve. See Richard Misek, Chromatic Cinema (London: Blackwell, 2010), 163, and Bob Fisher, “Escaping from Chains,” American Cinematographer, October 2000, 36–49. 14. Natalie Kalmus, “Color Consciousness,” Journal for the Society for Motion Picture Engineers, August 1935, 141–47, and “Color,” in Behind the Screen: How Films Are Made, ed. Stephen Watts, 116–27 (London: Barker, 1938). 15. Scott Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 1–21, for a summary of his demonstrative and restrained categories. 16. Nakamura, correspondence with the author, May 2014. 17. Kyle Stevens, “Dying to Love: Gay Identity, Suicide and Aesthetics in A Single Man,” Cinema Journal 52, no. 4 (2013): 102. 18. Fowler, “Obscurity and Stillness,” 4. 19. It also echoes the imagery of Isherwood’s novel: “Her gladness flashes its instantaneous way to him, even faster than her words across the zigzag of the wires. And at once George and Charley are linked. If any of the clerks were watching, they would see his face inside the glass box brighten, flush with joy like a lover’s.” Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories: A Single Man. A Meeting by the River (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1992), 114. 20. Misek, Chromatic Cinema, 32–34. 21. David Batchelor, The Luminous and the Grey (London: Reaktion, 2014), 52.

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22. Béla Balázs, Theory of Film (London: Dobson, 1952), 242. 23. Ibid., 243. 24. Tom Ford, dir., “Director’s Commentary,” A Single Man (United States: Sony Pictures, 2009), DVD.

25. Memory colors are more saturated than their indexical referents, with grass remembered as more blue green than yellow green, sky as more cyan, and human skin as more yellow than in reality. Van Hurkman, Color Correction Handbook, 393–97. 26. Fowler, “Obscurity and Stillness,” 78. 27. Susan Stamberg, “Hollywood Makeovers, Frame by Frame,” NPR, March 18, 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88444570. 28. See Mary Ann Doane, “The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema,” differences 14, no. 3 (2003): 89–111, for a survey of theoretical approaches to this subject. 29. See Sarah Berry, “Hollywood Exoticism: Cosmetics and Color in the 1930s,” in Hollywood Goes Shopping, ed. David Desser and Garth Jowett, 108–38 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), and Fred Basten, Robert Salvatore, and Paul A. Kaufman, Max Factor’s Hollywood: Glamour, Movies, Make-up (Santa Monica, Calif.: General, 1995). 30. See Brad Chisholm, “Red Blue and Lots of Green: The Impact of Color Television on Feature Film Production,” in Hollywood and the Age of Television, ed. Tino Balio, 213–34 (Boston: Unwin, 1990); Edward Buscombe, “Sound and Color,” in The Film Cultures Reader, ed. Graeme Turner, 77–84 (New York: Routledge, 2002); Gorham Kindem, “Hollywood’s Conversion to Color: The Technological, Economic, and Aesthetic Factors,” Journal of the University Film Association 31, no. 2 (1979): 29–36. For a summary of these factors, see Misek, Chromatic Cinema, 43–49. 31. In 1963, there were 1.2 million sets in color, a small number in comparison to the 60 million black-and-white sets but a significant increase since its introduction in 1951. Early leader RCA was joined in the manufacturing field by Zenith, General Electric, Philco, and Sylvania. By 1969, color TV was in 33 percent of all households. Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 332–33. See also National Survey of Television Sets in United States Households (New York: Advertising Research Foundation, 1969). 32. Nakamura, correspondence with the author, May 2014. 33. As Grant tells George about the bomb shelter he is building for his family, we see them in a concrete shelter with a cow, a goat, and several chickens. The colors re-create not only the LIFE cover design but also the olive hues of another contemporary text, Chuck West’s The Fallout Shelter Handbook (New York: Fawcett, 1962). Ford, “Director’s Commentary.” 34. Misek, Chromatic Cinema, 38–41; see also Fred E. Basten, Glorious Technicolor: The Movies’ Magic Rainbow (Westport, Conn.: Easton, 2005). 35. Steve Weintraub, “Director Tom Ford: Interview: A Single Man,” Collider, December 7, 2009, http://collider.com/director-tom-ford-interview-asingle-man, and Ford, “Director’s Commentary.” 36. For the imbibition (dye-transfer printing process) in Technicolor, see Richard W. Haines, Technicolor Movies: The History of Dye Transfer Printing

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(New York: McFarland, 2003). For the Technicolor simulation process in The Aviator, see Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow, 218–24. 37. Built in 1949, John Lautner’s Whiting Woods, Glendale, house is the fictitious home of George and Jim. Lautner (1911–94) was the architect of several other famous structures used as film and television locations, including the Elrod Residence (Diamonds Are Forever [Guy Hamilton, 1971]), Chemosphere (Body Double [Brian De Palma, 1984], The Outer Limits series), and the Sheats Goldstein Residence (The Big Lebowski [Joel Coen, 1998]). 38. Unlike the prevalence of orange and teal in digital timing aesthetics of contemporary Hollywood, I point out that A Single Man juxtaposes teal with waxen skin tones rather than the warmer “orange” tones referenced in articles like Todd Miro’s “Teal and Orange-Hollywood, Please Stop the Madness,” Into the Abyss [blog], March 14, 2010, http://theabyssgazes.blogspot .co.nz/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html. 39. The giant blue poster also points forward to noted colorist Pedro Almodóvar’s citation of Hitchcock in All about My Mother (1999), with its parallel giant billboard of Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes). 40. The archival problems presented by digital hardware and software in storage devices such as CD-R and DVD-R media are complicated by the different dyes embedded within them. For example, discs containing phthalocyanine are more stable than those with azo dye. See Robert Hirsch, Exploring Color Photography (New York: Focal, 2011), 308. 41. Ford, “Director’s Commentary.” Dennis Petrie and Joseph Boggs point out that “television has become so saturated with color that advertisers are using black and white commercials to catch the viewer’s attention” in Watching Films (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011), 248. 42. David Ansen, “Gucci Goo,” Newsweek, December 7, 2009, 23, 68; Scott Foundas, “Better to Look Good Than Be Good for Tom Ford’s A Single Man,” Village Voice, December 8, 2009, http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-12-08/ film/better-to-look-good-than-be-good-for-tom-ford-s-a-single-man/full/. 43. Batchelor, Chromophobia, 22–23. 44. Kirsten M. Thompson, “A Single Man and Chromophilia,” unpublished paper, 2012, 1; Rosalind Galt, cited in Stevens, “Dying to Love,” 103–5. For a nuanced examination of gay style, see Lee Wallace, “Tom Ford and His Kind,” Criticism 56, no. 1 (2014): 21–44. 45. See Regina Lee Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012), 241–85. 46. Designer of the monokini, and later the thong, Gernreich lived in LA in 1962 and was purportedly the first designer to use vinyl and plastic in clothes. A homosexual, Gernreich was cofounder of the Mattachine Society and lovers with another cofounder, Harry Hay. See Peggy Moffitt and William Claxton, The Rudi Gernreich Book (New York: Taschen, 1999). 47. William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 9. 48. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception. Includes Heaven and Hell (New York: Harper, 2008), 115. 49. See Katherine Bucknell, “Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood: Writing the Script for Gay Liberation,” Los Angeles Review of Books,

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February 28, 2014, https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/aldous-huxleychristopher-isherwood-writing-script-gay-liberation/. 50. After Many a Summer is given repeated attention in the film. We see George reading it on the toilet and packing it in his bag as he goes to the bank. The fourth line of Arthur Tennyson’s poem “Tithonus” provides the title of Huxley’s novel. Tithonus, gifted with eternal life by Eos, but not with eternal youth or beauty, longs for death. He says to Eos, “Let me go: take back thy gift / Why should a man desire in any way / To vary from the kindly race of men / Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance / Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?” Arthur Lord Tennyson, “Tithonus,” http://www .poetryfoundation.org/poem/174656. 51. The unnamed man in the film is clearly based on the homosexual character Wally Bryant in the source novel, where “George looks at Wally Bryant with a deep shining look that says, I am with you, little minority-sister.” Isherwood, A Single Man, 70. Although George thinks he is socially invisible, he is still seen, not only when he sits on the toilet and (awkwardly) is spotted by his neighbor Susan Strunk, but also by Jennifer, who reports her father’s observations that George is “light in his loafers.” 52. Kenny later jokes, “Don’t take any mescaline,” and after they go swimming, he places a Band-Aid on George’s head wound: “Well, sir, I’m afraid this time you don’t have the excuse of mescaline to explain your Band-Aid.” George and Kenny’s discussion of Huxley and mescaline eventually leads them to a conversation on color (discussed earlier) as Kenny buys George a colored pencil sharpener as a gift. 53. Huxley, Doors of Perception, 19. Marcia Pointon’s Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009) is a useful further exploration of the relationship of surfaces, color, and value. 54. Huxley, Doors of Perception, 27. Coined by Osmond in a written exchange with Huxley, the neologism psychedelic (from the Greek psyche and deloun, meaning “to show” or “to make manifest or visible,” from delos, meaning “evident,” akin to Sanskrit’s dideti, or “it shines”) emphasizes this revelatory capacity; Huxley wrote a rhyme in 1957 to Osmond: “to make this trivial world sublime / Take half a Gramme of phanerothyme,” to which Osmond responded, “to fathom hell or soar angelic / Just take a pinch of psychedelic.” Cited in Andrew Syder, “‘Shaken out of the Ruts of Ordinary Perception’: Vision, Culture and Technology in the Psychedelic Sixties,” PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2009, 6, 40. 55. Syder, “Shaken out of the Ruts of Ordinary Perception,” 5–6, 269. 56. Huxley, Doors of Perception, 17–18. 57. We might recall that The Doors of Perception’s title alludes to William Blake’s poem “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” which advises, “if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” 58. Cited in Batchelor, Chromophobia, 98.

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The Moving Image, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2015, pp. 131-146 (Article)

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For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mov/summary/v015/15.1.article.html

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Plate 8. A vision in teal. A Single Man, The Weinstein Company, 2009. Courtesy of Photofest.

Plate 9. “You know it’s the smog that makes it that color.” A Single Man, The Weinstein Company, 2009. Courtesy of Photofest.