Colour Theory: LOVE LIES BLEEDING

this posts necessarily contains major plot spoilers, because the colour theory ties together plot arcs and clarifies events it has hinted at — cool!

When Lou Senior (Ed Harris) comes and joins Lou (Kristen Stewart) at the Coke machine — readers, I gasped aloud in the theatre.

Nothing dramatic happens, their conversation is in fact quite muted, but the colouring in the scene — specifically, the red of the Coke machine thrown against the otherwise hospital-blue-tinged Lous — confirms something the film has suggested: that Lou not only ‘knows,’ but has witnessed and perhaps participated in, the crimes and murders of her father.

Let’s back up.

Early on, the film shows flashes of Lou Senior like so:

These flashes come as he is, for example, casually firing a gun at a paper target in broad daylight. They show him murdering a man, and throwing his body in a ravine, but there’s no broader context, and we never see him sharing a frame with other characters within the chronological story.

Then, shortly before the Coke machine, there’s a scene where Lou and Jackie dispose of a dead body: Lou leads the way, and the scene cuts between closeups of Lou looking at the road, medium POVs of the road which crossfade into red-soaked shots of the same road which are immediately reminiscent of the Lou Sr. images.

There’s a flash of Lou in red, then a wide of the ravine, then back to her in blue; it’s clear not only from her haircut and outfit and manner (acting!), but the wide shot showing no source of red light, that she’s remembering something.

The scene ends with another red-soaked shot of Lou Sr.

The film isn’t being subtle, and yet to this point we don’t know exactly what those shots mean about Lou and Lou Sr.’s relationship; most importantly, were they ever there together, or is Lou aware of it because of Lou Sr.’s reputation, and only visited it before the same way she is now, with a scheme and need of her own?

Allow me one more out-of-chronology jump — later again in the film is one of my favourite scenes: a phone call between the two Lous where both try to feel each other out, to suss what sort of risk and pros and cons each poses. Finally Lou Sr. asks “are you threatening me?”

Lou pauses, considers; you can read her face as she takes several eternity-feeling seconds to calculate what it means to commit before she finally answers: yep.

Yes she fucking is threatening him. She doesn’t just know of his crimes, she knows he knows, and she’s not backing down.

The essence of that scene is what this Coke machine scene shows with colour.

Let’s look again with all that context:

She knows everything. He knows she knows everything. She knows he knows she knows everything, etc etc. He could implicate her for what she did or what she didn’t do. She’s afraid, and he knows she is . . . but maybe not afraid enough.

It’s all there in the colour.

Takeaways

The cops ending this cozy conversation is the first of several in-world (as opposed to-the-audience) reveals of what Lou and Jackie did at the ravine, who they killed, and how they sent up literal smoke signals to Lou Sr.’s crime. But the essence of both past horrors and future conflict are written here in colour, motivated by a simple, effective vending machine.