Unsettling Blue

Like settling in for an audiobook, I set aside time in my evening to watch- or rather listen to- BLUE, a film by Derek Jarman. I chose a time late in the evening, when I could be certain I wouldn’t be disturbed, and sat down to watch a blue screen for over an hour, and listen. I began to think that perhaps it was a mistake to watch in the dead of the night, in the darkness when nothing, not even birds would invade the world I was to be absorbed in.

It was deeply unsettling, a world of unending, rarely changing blue, watching as the blue became a kind of static, varying specks of lighter and darker blues, hypnotizing enough that I forgot what words were being spoken, until one called me back for whatever reason, bringing me back from Jarman’s Cerulean world, back into the ponderings of death and dying, of medical trials and waiting rooms, and the constant awareness that everyone the narrator knew was rapidly approaching their deaths. Contemplating how his friends and loved ones would pay the ferryman to cross the river Styx when the time came.

The film was an astonishing auditory experience. The reason I found myself regretting watching it late in the evening was because it was deeping unsettling. The voices and sounds were often distressingly distorted, to a degree that tempted me to turn it off and rid myself of the dissonance and tension. Even in the moments of prolonged silence, the tension grew. At one point, after an extended silence, likely around 30 seconds though I didn’t choose to measure the gap, the narrator simply whispered the word “China,” and I jumped. Without visual jump scares or horrors, the film managed to frighten me, over and over, getting jumpier as it continued. Moments of auditory calmness can be punctuated with horrifying thoughts, like soothing music playing as the narrator whispers that perhaps “a bullet to the back of the head would be easier,” a dark, morbid thought that was juxtaposed by the lighthearted spirit of the music. 

The film was, to be honest, an auditory roller coaster that, frankly, reminded me that sounds and keeping a person tense and on high alert can be forms of torture. However, I do think that that’s incredibly important to the spirit of the film. 

This film was created by a man who only ever sees blue anymore. With the loss of individual senses, the others become stronger, trying to compensate for the loss of an important function. One of the most common senses to strengthen with the loss of sight is a person’s sense of hearing. Sound, however, can be a double edged sword, because there’s so much noise. It is incredibly easy to become overstimulated based upon sound alone, as there’s always something underneath. The film brought sound to such an extreme that I felt the same way I do when I’m overstimulated, when I can’t process sounds and additional stimuli become painful.

This film puts the audience in the place of the creator in a very literal way. As we lose the ability to see anything but blue, we become desensitized to the words that are spoken, but the pain and the tension, that ever present discomfort, sticks with us through to the end.