• by Celia Farber , November 3, 2008

It is, of course, the color of blood. The color of the heart, of passion, conviction, and above all, action. But red is also the color of lunacy - the end of reason. The color of arrest, the STOP sign, as well as the color of anger, embarrassment, infatuation, sin, joy, celebration, rank (the velvet rope) and royalty (the red carpet).  

In Sweden, at the time of Strindberg's The Red Room, "Falun red" was a hue reserved for the privileged classes. You can still see it in the royal sash at Nobel Prize ceremonies.

"Red is the color that has been used to keep people in line for a very long time," says New York City writer and producer Robert Drescher. "It's power. You're completely under its spell. Fellini understood this. He used the pageantry, the Church, the cardinals, the wonderment of the kids, hypnotized by this color. Valentine's Day. Christmas. Everything deeply felt and precious. The promise of red, subliminally, is to make you yearn for things you don't need, against the suggestion that you will be connected through the heart."

The dream team defending O.J. Simpson in his criminal trial used red and blue ties to communicate subliminally with the jury: On days when blood evidence was shown, Johnnie Cochrane instructed the entire team not to wear red ties because "it could send a subliminal message that we had blood on us," wrote Mike Gilbert, O.J.'s ex-agent, in his 2008 tell-all, How I Helped O.J. Simpson Get Away With Murder. A red tie communicated power, whereas a blue tie communicated "docility," and was worn on days when evidence of domestic abuse was presented.

Somehow, red is used to connote everything from post-Reagan conservatism to Bono appeasement. Both sides can lay claim to the ultimate political color.

Red as the color of highly fashionable do-goodism  was revived and even brand-licensed in 2006 in an ill-conceived advertising juggernaut, known as Product Red, that emanated from Bono and the Bush White House. Huge corporations, such as Gap, American Express, Apple, Converse, Motorola, Armani, Hallmark, Microsoft and Dell, spat forth red product lines in hopes of persuading consumers to shop with the heart, to fight AIDS at a store near you. A percentage was earmarked for the Global Fund to "expand opportunities for the people of Africa."

It flopped spectacularly. One sensed that the public resented such a total co-opting of the sacred color red, with even the word itself bracketed infuriatingly.

In politics, oddly enough, we have reversed the meaning of red, going against the international standard that assigns red to the left wing and blue to the conservatives. Our whole consciousness, particularly today, is dominated by redefined allegiances to red or blue - red states and blue states. (In reality, of course, all states are purple.)

The association is so strong that Americans may forget that historically there's been no universally accepted color scheme for the two dominant political parties. In 1900, when the Chicago Tribune, then a Republican paper, announced plans to mark Republican wins on election nights with blue fireworks, Democrats with red. A Democratic newspaper threatened to do the same in reverse. Each party wanted to adopt blue, as red was inextricably tied to Communist revolutionaries, whereas blue was the color of the true. The fireworks were cancelled.

Since 1976 - after color television was well-established - the networks have used a system of alternating assignments of blue and red to each party, to avoid the perception of favoritism. Reagan's 1980 44-state landslide victory was described by NBC's David Brinkley as "a sea of blue." It was not until 2000 that red became the official Republican color and blue the Democratic, largely popularized by Tim Russert's electoral map and his question to Matt Lauer on NBC's Today Show: How could George W. Bush "get those remaining 61 electoral red states, if you will?" William Safire credited Russert with popularizing and cementing the "blue-Democrat, red-Republican assignment."

Now the branding was complete: Democrats were blue, ambivalent and delicate, while Republicans were filled with blood-red convictions. A branding for red, in fact.

It's the color that's said to cause bulls to charge - and perhaps, by raising patriotic fervor, causes humans to stampede in the same manner.

For marketers in the pharmaceutical industry, red is for diet pills, antidepressants, and painkillers - to signal rapid action and stimulation.

Or, as novelist Alice Meynell conceived of it, red is a deeply misunderstood color, a medium of all that is felt deeply but rarely released: "The true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood."

As far as mass media goes, it's the color that is held at bay, slightly suspect, used in moderation, maybe even mocked - the opposite color of mass media's unspoken and troubled faith: objectivity.