color me possessed: colorblindness, cones, and christmas

Last month, when my wife was editing my review of Hansol Jung’s Merry Me, which ran at New York Theatre Workshop, she questioned my calling a particular costume red; she insisted it was pink. I was upset not only that, at least to me, it was clearly red but also that if it were pink, it would ruin my assertion that two of the outfits together evoked the red, white, and blue of the American flag, a stark contrast to the military fatigues other characters were wearing.

This was far from the first time that we had disagreed on color, so my wife asked me to take an online colorblindness test. The first one was from EnChroma, which involves identifying numbers inside various circles of contrasting colors. It determined that I have deutan colorblindness, scoring 100% on blue, 62% on green, and 87% on red.

According to the FAQs, “Scoring less than 100% on more than one cone does not mean that you have more than one defective cone. Your defective cone is the one that you score lowest on. Sometimes, people also score below 100% on their nondefective cones. This is related to how the brain processes color by combining the signals from different cones, which in some cases can make it more difficult to see images targeting a nondefective cone as well. Additionally, the blue cone can lose sensitivity as we age, leading to lowered scores.”

I was devastated. Am I not seeing the world the way it really is?

I immediately sought out other tests. According to Color Max, which claims that “1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women are affected by colorblindness,” I’m even worse. Per Pilestone, my colorblindness is mild. But they all showed I have deutan, which the National Eye Institute explains is either genetic or can result from retinal detachment, lasers, brain tumors, or radiation treatments.

As Swiss-German artist Paul Klee said, “Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.”

Oy vey; suddenly I felt like Mickey Sachs, the hypochondriac played by Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters who thinks he might have a brain tumor after going to the doctor with a possible hearing problem in one of his ears. (He’s not sure which one.)

The week between Christmas and New Year’s is one of my favorite times because I take off from my day job in children’s book publishing and go with my wife to a bevy of movies and museums, often beginning with a matinee near our apartment, then heading out to Museum Mile or downtown; our current film possibilities include Poor Things, The Boy and the Heron, Salaar: Part 1 — Ceasefire, American Fiction, and Fallen Leaves, followed by visits to  “Manet/Degas” at the Met, “Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick” at Frick Madison, “Ed Ruscha / Now Then” at MoMA, “Henry Taylor: B Side” and “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith” at the Whitney, or “Spirit and Invention: Drawings by Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo” at the Morgan, among others.

But now I’m not so sure.

What if I’ve never actually seen the true genius behind great works of art, whether paintings, photographs, sculptures, theater, or film? Am I qualified to review these creations if I can’t experience them as they were meant to be experienced? Are my opinions valid if I can’t tell red from green, the two colors that are most prevalent at Christmas? And what happens if, as EnChroma points out, my blue cone starts losing sensitivity as I get older? Will I get even more cantankerous than I already am?

Do I have to reevaluate my fondness for the 1980s Tucson band Green on Red, who on the 1985 song “Time Ain’t Nothing,” from the album No Free Lunch, declared, “Time ain’t nothing / When you’re young at heart / And your soul still burns / I’ve seen rainy days / Sunshine that never fades / All through the night.”

Perhaps this year’s Christmas Day movie — yes, before Chinese food — should be Mostafa Keshvari’s Colorblind, about a Black colorblind artist, Magdalene (Chantel Riley), her son, Monet (Trae Maridadi), and their racist landlord, Walton (Garry Chalk). In the film, Monet says, “Mom, look at the sun.” Magdalene tells him, “Wait, you’re going to go blind if you stare too long.” Monet answers, “I’m already blind,” to which Magdalene replies, “Monet, you’re not blind.” Monet shoots back, “Says the blind.” Magdalene then explains, “Monet, we’re colorblind.”

The film is one big metaphor about racism; genetically, colorblindness affects nearly 8% of Caucasian males but only 1.4% of Black males.

I’m currently reading Miranda July’s 2015 novel, The First Bad Man, in which, on the first page, the protagonist, Cheryl Glickman, visits a chromotherapist; the NIH identifies chromotherapy as “a method of treatment that uses the visible spectrum (colors) of electromagnetic radiation to cure diseases.” Cheryl has globus hystericus and rosacea; my mother, whose maiden name was Glicksman, also had rosacea, a skin condition that causes redness and bumps on the face. I’m now wondering whether I ever saw it clearly on my mother’s lovely punim.

As part of the 2024 Under the Radar festival, next month I will be going to Pan Pan’s The First Bad Man, an immersive theatrical presentation at Lincoln Center in which a book club meets to discuss the novel, the cover of which is all black except for the title, which is in white, and a blurb and reading line in red.

There are worse health issues than colorblindness to have, of course, and I have a few of them, some of which I’ve written about before. But as Henry David Thoreau noted in his first book, 1849’s self-published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, “This world is but a canvas to our imagination.”

Klee once proclaimed, “Color possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it.”

The tag line for Colorblind is “Look beyond the colors.”

Well, color me possessed, ready to see the world anew.

[You can follow Mark Rifkin and This Week in New York every day here.]