The Color Ages
Welcome to the Color Ages. It's a colorful life!
We used to be in what was known as "The Dark Ages."
Now we are in the Heart of Brightness.
"The Color Ages" as I call it.
This is not an allusion to race, or an illusion at all. We can’t hide or pretend to not see it. Color is everywhere. And color is control.
We have colors in music. Red Jump Suit Apparatus, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Yellow Card, Green Day, Black Sabbath, Black Eyed Peas, Indigo Girls, Purple Rain, and songs like Yellow Submarine, Blue Bayou, Blue Moon, Blue Skies, Blackbird, Black or White, Colors of the Wind, True Colors – the list goes on.
In television, we have had Orange is the New Black, The Blackbox, Orphan Black, Blue Bloods, White Collar, Grey’s Anatomy, The Blacklist, and Blues Clues. And Ari Gold in Entourage, Eli Gold in The Good Wife, and Ruby and Mr. Gold in Once Upon a Time.
In case that wasn’t enough: Blue Man Group, The Color Purple, Fifty Shades of Grey, Silver Linings Playbook, The Green Mile, The Blue Lagoon, the Red Cross, Blue Cross Blue Shield, blue tooth technology, red cameras, Reddit, green cards, going green, wearing pink, tasting the rainbow, rainbow pride, colored pills, viral dresses, and going and wearing all of the rest of the colors.
It’s a colorful life!
But what does all of this have to say about our generation? Are we trying to show that we are a people of many colors, of diversity, of brightness, of truth? That we wish to present our colorful spectrums, shades and complexions, and bring life and meaning into our world?
Colors associate with feelings and represent imagery in poetry, literature, music, entertainment and media. Maybe our artistic use of color comes down to our collective unconscious - an unconscious desire to be bright, brilliant, vivid, vibrant, rich, and dynamic. Surely the creators of today’s shows, movies, and media outlets use colors to appeal to us, no?
Think about all of the social media platforms and online dating sites we have today; We can color our lives the way we want. We can use our favorite colors to paint pretty pictures of ourselves, even though they may not fully represent us. It’s all about looks and presentation nowadays, anyway. How do we want to present ourselves, and how do we want others to perceive us?
It’s TRUE, that the colors we see every day are not the TRUE colors of their objects, but only the colors that those objects reflect or reject. An orange is every color but orange. A green bean is every color but green. A blueberry is every color but blue. And often, we are every color but our true ones.
Our favorite characters in TV shows, movies, books, and plays reveal the true colors we too often are afraid to show. We live vicariously through the colorful lives of fictional characters. They bring color to otherwise mundane aspects of life and we can relate to them. We come to know them better than ourselves because they are carefully formed. Like rainbows, they fall into foreseen patterns. On a side note, why are we obsessed with sorting everyone on the spectrum? Spectrum, right?
It all comes down to categorizing and marketing. Classifying and labeling.
Patterns and archetypes attract us to the point that we follow them wherever they go, and they may come in multiple degrees, varying situations, scenes and interactions.
Follow the yellow brick road, and it leads to Emerald City.
We keep wanting more and more of it, climbing these ladders in the sky, going higher and higher, and looking for the next best thing. The answers, the ultimate truth, the “something” over the rainbow. We constantly wonder what’s on the other side.
Of course, the other side has the GREENER grass.
Simply put, if we have Fifty Shades of Grey, we’re going to want Fifty Shades Darker.
Take the film Pleasantville, starring Reese Witherspoon and Tobey Maguire. The movie is about a group of townspeople who live in a world of black and white, or a dull and dreary world. Suddenly and one by one, people start seeing and ‘experiencing’ color. What they experience is inspiration – an awakening from the norms and restrictions of their society.
Like these fictional characters, we look for color and excitement all around us to escape. We often find it in our media and technologies.
Many of us struggle every day holding back parts of ourselves because we fall into comfortable routines.
We can rely on the patterns in our television shows, movies and books to explore those parts that we don’t or can’t express.
Although we are living in patterns within patterns within patterns, colors blind us from the darkness and from reality. They exaggerate the truth and intensify our experiences. They are the highlighters and drugs that keep pulling us into a way of living and feeling. It’s not an illusion that they are illusions. They are facades giving us a heightened sense of being.
Color is our liberation, our escapism.
Let’s face it, ROYGBIV manipulates us because it appeals to our emotions, and our emotions are the driving forces behind our actions, objectives, likes and dislikes. Roy can be quite the trouble maker.
There are bad color associations like black markets and white supremacy. There’s also been Agent Orange, Yellow Fever, and too many Code Reds, Oranges, Yellows, Silvers, Blacks, Pinks, and Purples. Oh right, and who can forget that annoying “orange you glad I didn’t say banana” joke.
The point is...colors are powerful, for good and for bad.
So do we live in color, or do we just live in a world where color is artificially created?
Either way, colors rule the world. If we want to be perceived a certain way, we wear a certain color. If we want to attract, we wear red, if we want to seem happy, we wear yellow, if we want to exude calmness and serenity, we wear blue. And finally, we use colors to create darn good TV shows.
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