PRETTY IN PINK: THE POWER OF A COLOR IN CINEMA
Colors have a special form of power. It’s a fact, and not subjective. Different colors are able to evoke different emotions in us as humans, influencing branding decisions, interior design choices, and, of course, art. In literature, the writer (and your schoolteachers) might say the drapes in a scene are blue and that might have an intended meaning, but the reader is free to neglect that fact and picture the drapes as green or red if it suits the way they imagined the story. So it goes without saying that color is most crucial when it comes to the visual arts. It’s not surprising to realize the power of colors in art and paintings, but the same still holds true through the screen.
Like art, the way color is used in a film, in a good film at least, is very intentional. It’s a choice involving most of the creatives working on the production of a film, from production designers figuring out which colors best represent the aesthetics of the film, costume designers suiting the colors to the characters and the actors, and the cinematographers, directors, and the lighting department planning out how to shoot a scene. And unlike the paintings you’d sen in a gallery, when you’re watching a film at the cinema your field of vision is dominated by the images projected in front of you as you’re sitting in your chair for hours - you can’t run away from the images or the feelings the visuals and colors evoke in you.
It’s easy to list off associations between certain feelings and colors, mainly due to the abundance of expressions and metaphors in the English language. Red is passion, anger, romance - the character was seeing red! Or he was blue with sadness, or green with envy! They’re bold, striking colors with powerful feelings to match… but there’s another color that packs more of a punch than you’d expect it to: pink.
Traditionally in society, pink is used to symbolize femininity and girlhood. (So very a color for our gender that those with a toxic view on masculinity reject it on all accounts… but that’s not what we’re discussing here….)
Yes, traditionally, pink is associated with femininity - in our everyday life, in art, and in literature, and it’s mostly the same in cinema as well, representing femininity overall as well as its “traditional components”: beauty, love, care, and a sweet, playful energy…. (We must note that obviously femininity can take on a million different forms today, but pink is still mostly associated with the traditional or stereotypical image of it). We’d see the color used to make a female character stand out purely for her gender or to highlight her femininity, such as Marilyn Monroe’s iconic pink dress in How To Marry a Millionaire and even Hermione’s pink dress and jacket in Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban….
But I’d argue that in cinema, pink - no matter the shade - is mostly used to specifically symbolize the innocence that comes with girlhood. Herein lies a very specific, subconscious power to the color, that’s truly able to toy with viewers’ perceptions and feelings, while still remaining true to the traditional image the color is associated with.
Take, for instance, the epitome of a “pretty in pink” character - Elle Woods in Legally Blonde. At first glance, it might seem like the typical “pink is being used to highlight her femininity / ‘girliness’” model, but looking at it within the context and production of the film allows us to see beyond Elle just being extremely feminine and loving the color pink, and the actual, vital role the color plays in the film.
When Elle first arrives at Harvard, clad in pink from head to toe, she’s immediately dismissed. She receives stares and comments that insinuate she doesn’t belong in such a prestigious, academic environment…. due to her fashionable, pink outfit and bubbly personality alone - her possible academic or legal capabilities are never at all considered. In other words, they’re dismissing her for purely embracing her femininity, symbolized through her love for the color pink and her fashion choices. She looks as out of place as the students make her feel, an intentional choice from the costume department, as no one else in Harvard is dressed in pink and the rest of the bright colors that make up Elle’s wardrobe, with the university and courtrooms having similar dull colors…. But that doesn’t mean she actually doesn’t belong there, as she proves over the course of the film.
Here, the color pink is used to call out the internal misogyny within society that causes the students and teachers to immediately dismiss a feminine woman in a serious and thus “more masculine” environment. The women that are accepted and taken seriously, such as Vivian, are only those that abandon hyper-femininity and conform to men’s “acceptable” ideas for “serious women”…. (It’s also worth noting that we see Vivian wear blue on numerous occasions, almost highlighting her ‘acceptability from men’). This behavior doesn’t stop until the very end of the film when she’s dismissed in court and laughed at for her behavior and looks, and it hasn’t stopped to this day in our world.
Luckily, films like Legally Blonde exist to wake people up…At the end of the day, her femininity that they so easily dismissed is what causes them to win the case, as no one other lawyer in that courtroom would have known the one cardinal rule of perm care maintenance…. And through it all, Elle never loses her femininity when she decides to truly prove her merit and herself as a lawyer - she not only stays true to who she is, and I’d argue that she further embraces her femininity as the film goes on, with it acting as a part of her motivation to defy those who underestimated her, standing up both for herself and for her femininity.
In addition to the color playing a key role in the film’s narrative as well as its costume design, the color’s presence and power trickle into the film’s production design and cinematography as well - as mentioned, color encompasses most aspects of a film’s production departments, with Elle’s Barbie-pink room, the presence of pink and other warm colors in backgrounds and set dressings, and the film being shot in warm lighting.
“Whoever said orange was the new pink was seriously disturbed.”
- Elle Woods, Legally Blonde
But, Elle is our protagonist…. The color pink has a more sinister subconscious effect when dealing with more villainous, antagonistic characters…
It’s an entirely different story when pink is associated with more “villainous” characters. When you combine the innocence of pink with evil, that wickedness grows and becomes even more sinister - to our subconscious mind, it’s as though the innocence (of the color pink) is being corrupted. It’s one of the reasons why Professor Umbridge from the Harry Potter films was such a memorable and horrifying villain.
Here, the Legally Blonde use of the color pink to stand out and highlight femininity is being reversed. The intention is the same, to make the character stand out in a dreary academic environment, but the emotion and reaction it illicits is the entire opposite. We feel there’s something wrong when we see her.
While her actions toward the students at Hogwarts and her general character were enough to solidify her as a villain, that wickedness and cruelty were disguised by her demeanor and appearance. Specifically talking about the film’s portrayal, Professor Umbridge was relatively quiet, with a high-pitched voice, and had the overall exterior demeanor of a sweet, elderly lady wearing blush and pastel pink, with a renovated pink office to match…. Yet, she’s unsettling, which is why she doesn’t surprise us that much as the toxicity behind the sweet disguise leaks through with her choice of words and later, her obvious actions. While it may be just her nature to act such a way and the character might have a true fondness for the color pink - rather than her intentionally manufacturing this disguise, the creative, behind-the-scenes choice of her being so is what makes her so unsettling and creates this unforgettable character. I doubt many of us would have been as creeped out by Umbridge if she was a plainly wicked witch dressed in cartoonish dark robes and scary makeup or resembled other dark witches in the Harry Potter universe like Bellatrix Lestrange. But a creepy grandmother type of character capable of evil? Bone-chilling…..
A character that is pretty similar to Umbridge in terms of the color pink being used as a disguise to hide evil, is Lotso from Toy Story 3. We meet Lotso - full name: Lots-o’Huggin Bear - when he introduces Andy’s toys to the Sunnyside Daycare. A large, cuddly, pink, strawberry-scented teddy bear with a Southern accent, that uses a wooden toy mallet as a walking cane…. His appearance gives off the same cuddly, pink grandparent vibes that Umbridge does, and like her, it conceals his evilness… As the film goes on, we discover Lotso to be a sadistic tyrant, running the daycare like a prison. Unlike the Harry Potter franchise, a trademark of Pixar films is that many of them feature a surprise villain, and as Lotso being a cuddly, pink, teddy bear - another quintessential symbol for innocence and childhood - further aid in the surprise and his memorability and evilness as a villain, outshining most of studios’ other villains….
Lotso and Umbridge are two characters whose true natures are concealed by the color pink, making the color a primary part of their visual identity - the impact of the color pink adds to their characters but the choice of the color purely stems from the behind the scenes creative choices that went into constructing those characters. However, there exists a group of antagonistic or morally questionable characters that use the color for almost the same reasons, yet an additional creative choice is that the characters themselves almost understand the power of the color and use it to its advantage: The Plastics from the iconic teen comedy, Mean Girls.
The Plastics - made up of Regina George, Gretchen Weiners, Karen Smith, and later our main character Cady Heron - have a rule: “On Wednesdays We Wear Pink”. The inclusion of color pink here is definitely a crreative, behind ths scenes choice too - it’s not uncommon for the mean girl archetype to don the color - the Elle Woords antithesis when it comes to popular blonde characters - but having the Plastics mention it directly adds another layer to them, as mentioned, they understand its power.
You see, the Plastics are known for being mean and supporting the social hierarchy system within the high school that they sit atop of, yet they still make the effort to put up a facade that people choose to believe instead and Regina is still beloved. The color pink plays a role in that facade - and Regina knows it. Now you might say its a reach, but anyone who has seen Mean Girls knows Regina’s manipulative ways. Are you telling me it worked on you too? Exactly. As Janis says, Regina is “so much more” than she seems….
Despite being under the same character archetype umbrella, the Plastics are unlike High School Musical’s Sharpay Evans, for instance, the Elle Woods antithesis type mentioned. Since the color is primarily associated with the era of girlhood, with Sharpay, the color pink is used to highlight her immaturity and the fact that she acts like a child and a spoiled brat. Similarly, The Pink Ladies from Grease serve as another example of the ‘corruption’ of the color pink, reminding us of the underage nature of the young girls, juxtaposed against their behavior.
It’s another instance where the innocence is corrupted, or viewed in a negative light, but that innocence that comes with the color pink can be effectively utilized in a positive light as well.
In Disney’s Tangled, throughout the movie Rapunzel wears a dress that is both pink and purple. While Rapunzel isn’t particularly highlighted by her femininity and traditional girliness, the colors of her dress perfectly encapsulate her and where she’s at during the film. After journeying outside her castle and captivity for a day, Rapunzel interacts with the outside world for the first time. In doing so, she becomes a very child-like princess exploring the world with a sense of wonder and amazement at the simplest things that make up the world around her. The color pink emphasizes that innocence and inner child that Rapunzel is connecting with, and reminding us of the childhood that she lost. At the very end, when Rapunzel is reunited with her parents amidst the celebrations, her dress is entirely pink - again, the girlhood she lost is emphasized even more in this scene, as we see her in the vein of a daughter, a role always symbolized by the color pink. Another example of this would be Dirty Dancing’s Baby - her iconic pastel pink dress at the end of the film, as well as nickname, “Baby” - further emphasize how this is a young girl’s ‘coming-of-age story.
Pink has the power to add layers upon layers to characters in film, yet the factors it represents - girlhood, warmth, love, innocence - also remain true when the color is used primarily in backgrounds, sets, visuals, and lighting. An article about the color pink in cinema cannot be written without mentioning, perhaps the first film most cinephiles would think of when thinking of the color: The Grand Budapest Hotel. In the film, the hotel itself is represented through shades of pastel pink, as well as the box of the fictional bakery, Mendl’s. Here, the impact of the color stems from the components that make up “traditional femininity” such as beauty, love, sweetness, and innocence. The sweetness and Mendl’s do not need any explanation, but the hotel itself is constantly thought of in a warm, nostalgic light, and the essence of the color pink and the warmth it radiates are a big component in achieving that effect.
If there’s one color to keep an eye out for the next time you watch a film, let it be pink….. As we have seen, the color pink packs a very powerful punch. If Elle Woods didn’t teach you already, here’s to hoping no one ever underestimates femininity or the power of pink.
