Falling in (to) Color: 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 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 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...