My Favorite Color is Oklahoma! (1955)

by Aeven O'Donnell

For my twentieth birthday, my mother bought us tickets for Oklahoma! at the Kennedy Center, the Broadway revival directed by Daniel Fish which is now on tour. It’s unclear to me why she chose this as my birthday present, the most likely reason being that between the ages of seven and eight I saw the local middle school’s production of the musical, insisted on watching the movie, and, upon receiving a CD of the soundtrack for Christmas, listened to it persistently. The CD case was deep sky blue. I knew most of the soundtrack word for word.

As a child, my love of the musicals I knew originated with my admiration for the people onstage, not necessarily from my enjoyment of the music or plot. Most of the theater to which I was exposed was theater put on annually by the Upper School of the day school where I attended grades kindergarten through fourth. The denizens of my own school, made foreign and glamorous by the stage, became objects of my elementary schooler passion. The shining face of the eighth grader who played Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls is still emblazoned on my mind. Even now that I am much older than she was then, the young eyes through which the memory was captured see her as nearly an adult.

Distance from the stage can distort one’s perception of those on it. They are subject to the audience’s projections upon them. With theater it seems it’s always the people onto whom I project, and their characters, the plot in which they find themselves, are allowed to stand free.

This was certainly true when I saw Mineola Middle School put on Oklahoma! as a child. The dominant nature of masculinity, renegotiated in Curly McLain and critiqued in Jud Fry, is difficult to portray when their duet, a darkly comedic song about Jud’s funeral, must be transposed up for twelve year old voices. Laurey Williams’ fear of Jud is less charged with typical gendered violence when she is taller and broader of shoulder than him. This is not how I perceived the separation between the musical itself and the production onstage at the time; the loss of the plot, as well as the comedic timing, to poor micing and the stilted nature of children portraying adults, obscured the reality of any platonic ideal of the musical from my perception, the actors themselves taking up my field of interest.

When I watched the movie, this was not the case. While there are many stage productions of Oklahoma!, there is only one film adaptation, released in 1955, and so the fluid relationship between the role and any given actor who fills it is stabilized, made permanent forever on film. Furthermore, the physical realities of the actors are less prominent, as they are integrated into the world of the film, into the projection screen. As James Baldwin says about a theatrical actor in The Devil Finds Work, “he was not at the mercy of my imagination, as he would have been, on the screen: he was on the stage, in flesh and blood, and I was, therefore, at the mercy of his imagination.”

I loved the movie version of Oklahoma!, although I found parts of it very scary, namely the Dream Ballet and the final scene, where Jud lights the haystacks surrounding the newlywed Curly and Laurey on fire in an attempt to kill them. The scene is dark, lit by flickering tongues of orange. This, as well as the foggy, discordantly colorful Dream Ballet, is a departure from the light and color of the rest of the film, which is for the most part rosy pinks and airy blues. The characters are somewhat shallow, the portrayal thin enough to be rounded out by an eight year old’s yearning imagination.

Whatever effect my selfhood took on my perception of the movie of Oklahoma!, the effect the Oklahoma! took on me was no doubt equal. I watched the movie with a friend in my senior year of high school while she crocheted and I filled pages of a journal I was working on with colored pencil drawings. I was surprised how easily the themes, images, and colors of the movie meshed with the project. The concept of the cowboy shaped my ideas about masculinity, about loneliness, while the fabric of the film itself had taken hold in my oeuvre of symbols and instilled in me a love for rich reds, oranges, and purples against pale, hazy blue. Of course, I also still knew every song by heart.

In light of all this, it is perhaps unsurprising that my mom jumped at the chance for us to see the revival of Oklahoma! together. The revival, however, is distinct from the Oklahoma! of my childhood. Besides a conversion of the music from typical musical theater style to include steel guitar, banjo, and the exquisite whines, cracks, and occasional growls of a country vocal style, the musical has been modernized. While the book and lyrics are unchanged, the casting is colorblind, and the characters are played with much less rigidity than they were in 1955. Despite an increased fluidity, their lines often felt stilted, at odds with the blocking or even the actor’s affect. The set is barebones, made of light wood and sparkling tinsel bunting. Some scenes are played in complete darkness.

Most notably, as the scene leading into and including the duet between Jud and Curly starts, the stage and audience are pitched into darkness. Curly and Jud use hand held microphones, which up until this juncture have only been used during musical numbers. Their breath rattles the speakers. “Whatcha got there?” asks Curly. “A gun,” answers Jud. They discuss the gun briefly, and Curly begins to point out the ease with which Jud could kill himself with the materials at hand. This leads into a song, “Pore Jud,” wherein Curly describes Jud’s hypothetical funeral, envisioning a posthumous celebration of Jud which would erase the common dislike that the townspeople hold for Jud. In the traditional version, this number is a series of jokes on Jud, but despite the song being the same, this version was not funny. During the first verse, a person in cowboy costume carries a camera onstage, the feed of which is projected onto the back wall of the stage. Jud’s face is rendered much larger than life in black and white, and as the song continues, the frame shifts to include Curly, as well as glimpses of the audience.

The camera condenses the actor and the character into one unit, and by this condensation, as well as focus, makes Jud an object of empathy. He is portrayed as vulnerable in this number, and this vulnerability carries through into scenes where he threatens, violates, and screams at Curly or Laurey. In these moments, we cringe not just at the discomfort Laurey must feel at this man’s interest in her, but also for Jud’s sake.

In the final scene, Jud arrives unexpectedly at Curly and Laurey’s wedding. The anticipation has been built that Jud will kill them, but instead he kisses Laurey softly as she leans in, and presents Curly with a gun. Curly refuses to take it, but Jud puts it in his hand and cocks it. Although Curly doesn’t raise his arm, we hear a shot, and Jud walks to the front of the stage to lie down. The town judge is present, and Aunt Eller, the matriarch of the community, pushes him and Curly through an illegal trial in which the town colludes to declare Curly not guilty. The cast raises another round of the show’s titular song, as Laurey, spattered in blood, screams and thrashes to the music.

This scene casts a new light on the presence of the camera on stage; it calls into question the validity of the narratives which the narrow frame of our understanding allows. It brings up the allegory between camera and gun. While it doesn’t absolve Jud, it raises the possibility that the townspeople were as key in his creephood as he was.

It inspects the ways in which assumptions, stock narratives and their projection onto people harms us, how projection creates the distance it requires. In my experience, it is the camera which provides this distance.

Because of the presence of the camera, it is understandable that my relationship with movies has been driven by my projection onto the characters, and not onto the actors.

In the summer of 2019, The Farewell came out, directed by Lulu Wang. It follows Billi during a family trip to Changchun to visit her grandmother. Although her grandmother has weeks to live, the family has decided not to tell her. My grandmother died suddenly from late stage cancer in the spring of 2019. The Farewell was, for me and my parents, not just a tearjerker but a source of validation and comfort. The film is cooly color graded, with a few scenes lit by the blue neon of its urban landscape. I still think often of its final shot. Billi, walking down the street, because of advice given to her by her grandmother, lets out a loud “ha!” and the shot cuts from her face to a tree silhouetted against a blue sky, a flock of birds startling from its branches.

The following Christmas season, Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019) was released, based on the classic novel by Louisa May Alcott. The movie is structured with a distinct present plotline and past plotline, which are distinguished visually by color grading, the past graded warm and the present graded blue. While the portions of the movie in the past chronicle the life of four sisters growing up together in Civil War era New England, the present timeline details their lives as they scatter. Amy, the youngest sister, who is somewhat defined by her vanity, is in Paris pursuing a career in painting. She appears exclusively in blues and whites during this period of the movie, frocks with large skirts. In one scene, she asks the childhood family friend Laurie to take off her painter’s smock. He stands behind her in the cool light of the high-ceilinged painting studio. They are surrounded by white walls and tall windows. Laurie pulls the smock off her, revealing the broad expanse of her pale blue skirt. A few days after I saw the film, I wrote in my journal, “What’s wrong with self obsession? Vanity is in — Amy is the coolest March sister.”

One of my longstanding favorite movies is True Grit (2010), directed by the Coen Brothers. It’s a film that takes place in the Wild West, full of arcing pale blue skies, pale blue smoke, pale blue stone. Part of what I and my family love about True Grit is its endless quotability — I cannot pass a week without crying out, “Mr. LaBeouf, do you survive?!” I have a much stronger memory for sound than I do for visuals. While I can recall lines and imitate accents with skill and specificity, most films fade quickly into a haze of colors and rhythms punctuated by a few stark images. The same is probably true for my father; we can easily spend half an hour trading lines from any of the movies in our familial canon.

One of these oft quoted films is A Room with a View (1985), directed by James Ivory. The film is based on a novel of the same name, written by E. M. Forster. It follows Lucy Honeychurch and her chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett, during a vacation in Florence, where they meet several odd characters, including one George Emerson and his father. Lucy chafes under the guidance of her chaperone, and on her return home, the attentions of her family and fiance, eventually finding escape from the tedium of her life in George. I saw it for the first time during the pandemic, when I was spending day in day out in the company of no one but an older coworker, my family, and occasionally my girlfriend, with whom I was on the verge of breaking up. Lucy’s feeling of confinement rang in me. I remember much of this film as blue, the same hazy blue which colors my memory of all of these films.

However, when I recently rewatched it, it wasn’t blue at all. If anything, the scenes I had been thinking of were a choked sort of gold, tense and dreamy. Why, then, is this movie blue in my memory?

Most of my favorite movies, movies in which I see myself, are blue in my mind. Perhaps this is attributable to how Oklahoma! (1955) shaped my tastes, but I think that there is a relationship between the color blue and the movie screen as a site of projection.

The sky is blue because of Raleigh scattering, a phenomenon in which the wavelengths which appear blue scatter across the atmosphere on their way down to us from the sun. This is also the cause of atmospheric perspective, that effect of distance which makes the farthest mountains look bluest. Blue is the color of the space between us and that which we gaze upon.

When one uses a projector, there is by necessity a great deal of space between the projector and that which is projected upon.

Blue is the color of that which is far enough away that we can project upon it, make it in our own image. Blue is the color of the people on the movie screen, actors collapsed into characters, images distorted by the distance created by the camera, images which I have made personal, perfect, and blue.